Every Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada, the main government building in Buenos Aries, march mothers wearing white scarves. By now the mothers are in their 70s and 80s. Some of them are discovering they are grandmothers.
Their children disappeared during the military dictatorship in the 1970s. The military arrested those suspected of leftist sympathies, or whose property they wanted, or high school students protesting bus fare rises, or children of arrestees, and they were never seen again. Thousands disappeared. They were murdered, some by being handcuffed and pushed out of helicopters over the Rio de la Plata.
When an arrestee was a woman and pregnant, the military let her deliver her baby, and then killed her. A military family then adopted the baby.
After they lost the Falkland War in 1982, the military destroyed almost all the records of these murders.
With DNA testing, hundreds of people in their 30s are learning that their parents, who raised them and loved them, were also the murderers of their mothers.
Some of the adoptees do not want to know. Others want to know the truth, no matter what the emotional cost.
No one has been brought to justice for the murders, although prosecutions have begun.
Human rights activists are trying to identify the victims and the criminals. Most documents have been destroyed but some remain. One website has some documents, under the heading Nunca Mas – Never Again- “Learn what happened. Only by knowing what took place, can we prevent it from happening again.”