The Children of the Disappeared

As we learned in the previous unit, transitions to democracy in Latin America were anything but simple, and they left many questions open regarding how to deal with the difficult and often violent past. In this unit we discuss a particularly complex set of cases that came up after the transition to democracy: how should we deal with the children of the disappeared?

During the military regime, thousands of persons were taken by the State, never to be seen again. Some parents were taken with their young children. Many women were pregnant when they disappeared, and their babies were born in captivity. Many of these children were given to families that had close ties to the repressive regimes. After the transition to democracy, the families of the disappeared started looking not only for their sons and daughters, but also for those babies born in captivity. The search was very difficult, and even when the babies were found, years had passed and they had been raised in their new illegitimate families.

The Official Story is about one of these cases, and it helps us understand how complex these situations were and are. Oren's reading provides an account of how argentine justice has dealt with these cases, attempting to distinguish the key factors that determine the solution given to each case.