Grandchildren whose identities haven been recovered thanks to the work and struggle of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo spoke to Somos Télam about the way they experienced each March 24 before and after knowing who they really are, what their “first march” was like and the “excitement in that collective embrace”, days away from the 48th anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état.
“The first 25 years of my life, when I was María Sol, March 24 was just another ordinary day for me. When I lived that life, I was convinced that it wasn’t true that people had disappeared. When I recovered my true identity, and several years later I could accept it, I went to a March 24 demonstration for the first time and I found it absolutely incredible”, said recovered grandchild and current Buenos Aires City Legislator Victoria Montenegro.
Montenegro remembered that first march together with “thousands of people who joined us, carrying the flag with the faces of the Disappeared” and said that in that moment she understood “the struggle and collective dream of our parents and the 30,000, and also our claims as a people”.
A few days after being born, Victoria and her parents Hilda Ramona Argentina Torres and Roque Orlando Montenegro were kidnapped, in February 1976. Victoria was later appropriated by Herman Antonio Tetzlaff, chief of a task force of clandestine detention center “El Vesubio”. It wasn’t until July 5 2000 that she got to know her true identity.
Guillermo and his new point of view
Marcela Esther Molfino and Guillermo Amarilla had three children and a fourth on the way when they were both kidnapped on October 17 1979. Their baby was born in a detention center on June 27 1980 and it would take 29 years for him to get to know his true identity.
The youngest of the Amarilla Molfinos recovered his identity on October 30 2009 and he reunited with his three siblings and the rest of his biological family, which “brought profound changes in me” and would mark a “before and after” each March 24.
“My parents began to be present, because I wore shirts with their faces. The first time I walked around Plaza de Mayo with that shirt on, with the faces of my parents and my grandmother, all victims of State terrorism, it was very moving”, he said.
Amarilla Molfino would never again feel that he was “marching alone”, but surrounded by “a large group” and “with a new point of view” because “I could feel firsthand the suffering that State terrorism had caused”, which had been “hidden to me for so long”.
“The word Memory, the word Truth and the word Justice became my own flesh. That’s all I can say. That was for me the before and after of recovering my identity”, he concluded.
“I never again missed a march”
Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit, grandson of Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit, honorary president of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, said that, before knowing his story and that he was the son of disappeared people, March 24 was a day that passed unnoticed to him, explaining that that was related to the fact that nobody spoke about this issue at school and the date was not formally recognized, as it has been since 2002, when a law was passed to declare March 24 National Day of Memory, for Truth and Justice.
Guillermo said that, even after recovering his identity, it took him years to go to Plaza de Mayo on March 24, but once he did it, he “never again” missed a march. “The truth is that we got there and I saw thousands of people at Plaza de Mayo, I felt that my story was not just my own, it was something that happened to all of us as a society”.
Donda: recovering a daily contact with Human Rights
Recovered granddaughter Victoria Donda’s approach to the March 24 demonstrations was different. She was a political activist before knowing she was the daughter of María Hilda Pérez and José María Laureano Donda and that her own uncle, former naval officer Adolfo Donda Tigel, was responsible for appropriating her and hiding her identity, crimes for which he was sentenced to 15 years of prison last March 4.
“I was very young when I became a political activist. I remember that one of the first activities in which I took part was making March 24 posters to promote the demonstration at the University of Buenos Aires’ Faculty of Law.
On October 8 2004, when she was 27 years old, Victoria recovered her identity and since then, she experiences each March 24 “with a new sense of responsibility”. She believes that this year is particularly “essential that, as a people, we recover a daily contact with Human Rights and we reflect on that”.
Victoria Montenegro agreed that this year is “unique” in the sense that “for the first time, we are facing a democratically elected government that stands by the dictatorship’s actions and that has the objective of cutting off every right and social achievements of the last 40 years of democracy”.
“That is why it is so important to go to Plaza de Mayo on March 24, so we are hundreds of thousands embracing Madres and Abuelas, carrying the flag of the 30,000 to demand the government to respect democracy, our social achievements, the trials against genocides, the spaces of Memory and their workers and, above all, to respect Argentina”, she said.
“In the name of the 30,000 detained and disappeared and their dreams, we must go to Plaza de Mayo on March 24”, Montenegro concluded.
*If you have any doubts regarding your origins, you can contribute with information or you wish to collaborate with the work of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo in their search for the stolen grandchildren we are still looking for, write to abuelas@abuelas.org.ar.