Argentine rights activists find woman taken by (U.S.-supported) dictatorship as baby

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Deutsche Presse-Agentur

Argentine rights activists find woman taken by dictatorship as baby
Posted : Wed, 28 May 2008 17:40:05 GMT
Author : DPA


Buenos Aires - Argentine human rights activists have informed a woman of her true indentity after she was illegally taken from her parents at birth by officials of Argentina's 1976-83 dictatorship, the organization Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo confirmed Wednesday. Laura Diaz, whose parents were among the 30,000 opponents of the regime who rights groups say went missing during the dictatorship, was the 90th person taken from parents discovered by the group.

Organization president Estela de Carlotto told Argentine state news agency Telam that Diaz is the daughter of Silvia Dameri and Orlando Ruiz. The couple was kidnapped along with their children, Marcelo and Maria de las Victorias, in 1980 as they returned to Argentina after a three-year exile in Switzerland.

Dameri was then five months pregnant and gave birth in the maternity ward at the clandestine detention centre of the Navy's School of Mechanics (ESMA) in Buenos Aires. The baby was taken by former navy official Antonio Azic, who is currently under arrest in connection with the investigation of the theft of babies during the dictatorship.

In 1990, the disappeared couple's oldest son, Marcelo, was found in the central Argentine province of Cordoba, where he had lived since he was four with a family who did not know where he came from.

In 2000, the Grandmothers found his sister Maria de las Victorias, who had been adopted by a family with no connections to the regime.




Read more: http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/208590,argentine-rights-activists-find-woman-taken-by-dictatorship-as-baby.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. Ah, me! I'm so glad about the work of this group, the Grandmothers, and feel

joy and vindication for every late-coming victory of the victims of the Argentine dictatorship. It must surely be difficult to learn the fate of your parents, and the circumstances of your birth, in that horrid regime. But it's better to know that not to know. For one thing, you then have the opportunity to do work that may save others from similar fates. And it is every person's basic right to know who their parents were, and who their family is--their blood relatives. I'm sure the Grandmothers handle these disclosures with great care. What wonderful people they are--so courageous, so undauntable!

And it is neverending sorrow to know the part played by our own government in those horrors--and that at least part of the wealth that we enjoy here in the U.S. was built on horrors like this inflicted on others. If we have benefited in any way, from our oil-based economy, from imported food such as fruit and beef, or from any of the other trade relationships, or U.S. government expenditures, in South America, during that dark era of U.S.-instigated, funded and supported dictatorships--and who of us can say that we have not benefited?-- we, too, are guilty--at the least of our ignorance or our silence. How dare we be ignorant of what our government does in our name! It is our DUTY not to be ignorant. It is our duty to speak out.