The other Argentines in search of identity

Collective mural in the city of Córdoba, Argentina, to promote the search for the identity of stolen babies.Marcela Fernández

Juan Manuel Ceroni was born in Córdoba on January 26, 1978. He did not doubt his origin until in 2015 he received a call from the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.

The NGO investigated a network that deceived and stripped hundreds of women in labor in the 1970s to sell them.

He fit the victims' profile and agreed to a DNA test, but his data did not coincide with those of relatives of victims of the dictatorship (1976-1983) kept by the National Genetic Data Bank (BNDG).

Since then, he lives with a question mark on his back and looks for his family, alone.

He toured maternity wards, state offices, and social media.

He also sent his genetic sample to one of the American companies that make family trees and cross search engines around the world.

“It's looking for a grain of sand.

The only way to find something would be for my mother to look for me, ”he says.

Your case illustrates a huge problem.

The BNDG, which served to find 130 of some 400 grandchildren sought by the Abuelas, has already accumulated some 10,000 negative results, according to its director, Mariana Herrera, to the newspaper

Página / 12

.

The figure is shocking.

These are cases that do not fit the profile of victims of the dictatorship because they are not children of the disappeared, but rather children stolen, sold or given in any form of illegal adoption.

The prosecutor Pablo Parenti, from the unit specialized in the appropriation of children in State terrorism, said in a recent letter: “The more we go deeper into the investigations to locate the children of the disappeared, the more we come across a very different phenomenon, but contemporary: the tens of thousands of irregular registrations that occurred in our country over many years.

A phenomenon that, as is known and we can verify, was much more massive ”.

But the issue does not receive state attention.

When their link to crimes against humanity is ruled out, the cases are left adrift.

There are no teams to guide them and no formal setting that brings them together.

The searches are thus scattered in NGOs, offices and courts, and in Facebook groups where thousands of members eagerly share photos, data and birth certificates.

For our identity, Sons united in search, Born and appropriated in 1974, Twinned by the search, Sisters and mothers of the soul-Mafalda Journade midwife, Towards the origin, Completing my story, Where are you?

and Mom is looking for you are some.

“Our stories are full of silences.

It's about that.

And identity is an uncomfortable issue ”, says the plastic artist Darío Coronda, promoter of the collective mural

Mamá, Buscame

en Córdoba.

Coronda was born there on December 14, 1976, he was separated from his family and his artisan investigation after giving negative in the query of data on victims of the dictatorship did not bear fruit yet.

Outside of those motorized by Abuelas, there are no official campaigns to raise awareness about an issue crossed by family secrets, the guilt that can be attached to mothers who have been separated from their children due to different circumstances, and historical complicity with the trafficking of babies.

The same violated right

The long militancy of the search engines managed to get the Government of Mauricio Macri (2015-2019) to collect the work of the Network (a protocol for family reunions and a manual

to give a respectful vocabulary to a sensitive topic) and create the

national program on the right to biological identity, to deal with cases detached from the dictatorship at the Human Rights Secretariat.

But everything remained in the text of a resolution.

“There is no will to make our searches official in a massive way.

Perhaps they are afraid that, as there are so many of us, the offices will collapse.

But time passes for all of us and we mothers are dying.

So it would be great news if the offices collapsed, ”says Clara Lis.

Lis was born in March 1978 and was sold.

In 2012, supported by the Office of Disappeared Persons of the Ministry of Security of the province of Buenos Aires (the only one in the country focused on searches for identity of origin), she sued her own midwife, Nilda Civale, in the first criminal trial of the country for identity theft outside the field of crimes against humanity.

But a conviction does not guarantee information and, like thousands, he continues to search for his family.

Two bills - one in Congress and the other in the Buenos Aires Legislature - ask for state protection for the sector: resources for searches, dissemination, a single registry of cases and a space for them in the BNDG, whose work today is limited to the dictatorship (the search for the grandchildren).

Although it recently added as a novelty that mothers looking for their children can give blood (from cases between 1974 and 1983), the search engines demand that the bank, a public structure, be opened to everyone.

They also want the cases with no results in that registry to be compared.

The experience of two women searching for their parents and discovering that they are sisters thanks to Facebook, randomly and a private company illustrates this potential.

Victoria Tedesco, a kindergarten teacher who lives in Neuquén, looked similar in some photos published by the Buenos Aires doctor Oriana Moscheni and contacted her.

Now, a cross made in the US confirmed by email his hunch: "

Full sister

."

They share mother and father, whom they will now look for together.

They were born in 1979 and 1980 and a midwife gave them to different families.

If the BNDG, to which they had gone separately, crossed the negatives, they would have been twinned earlier.

“There is a total inequity: those of us who can pay for a DNA abroad may be able to find someone.

Those who do not keep posting photos, ”laments Moscheni.

A swab is enough to try your luck on those foreign banks.

But you have to buy a

kit

for about $ 70 and pay a subscription also in dollars.

It is not available, for example, to humble citizens of the interior of the country.

Argentine search engines have already requested a thematic hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights [IACHR].

There are many and they feel discriminated against with respect to the children of the disappeared.

Clara Lis says: “The issue is very serious and deep, it crosses me, even more so now that I was a mother.

The State must guarantee equal access to the tools, but our searches do not end up being recognized.

There is a notorious exclusion and certain hypocrisy, because we are a world example in identity ”.

The manual

The origin identity seekers managed to get the Government to officially publish the Manual of good communicational practices in biological identity (2019), which they prepared to promote a respectful and specific vocabulary to deal with the subject.

"Just as you no longer say 'crime of passion', you should not say 'abandoned baby' because it stigmatizes that child before knowing what is behind that story," exemplifies Clara Lis.