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Manuel Gonçalves Granada only found out about his origins when he was 20 - today he is looking for other kidnapped children
Photo: private
Manuel Gonçalves Granada was five months old when the soldiers arrived.
At six in the morning, dozens of soldiers and police surrounded the house in the Argentine city of San Nicolás.
They shot at the building with machine guns and grenades, blew up the doors and shattered windows.
Manuel's mother Ana María was just able to hide her son in a closet before she was murdered.
"You shot my mother fourteen times," says the now 45-year-old.
"I was in the same room as her." He, the only survivor of the operation later known as the "San Nicolás Massacre", was taken to the hospital by the military.
Like a felon, they guarded the baby while it recovered from smoke inhalation - then put it up for adoption.
That was in November 1976.
The babies from the torture centers
Around 30,000 students, regime critics and resistance fighters were abducted and murdered during the military dictatorship in Argentina from 1976 to 1983. They were tortured to death, shot and buried in mass graves - or thrown from airplanes, drugged and handcuffed, into the Río de la Plata. Many women disappeared shortly after giving birth to their children. The babies born in the torture centers and kidnapped small children were raised by the military themselves or given to families loyal to the regime or politically inconspicuous families.
"
Children were used by the military as a means to defeat their parents," says historian Isabella Cosse.
The systematic kidnapping was part of the struggle against left movements: "These political forces and ideas should be completely eliminated in the new generation."
Accomplices in hospitals or the judiciary supported the plan.
In the case of Manuel Gonçalves Granada, the juvenile judge responsible did nothing to find his relatives: "He stole me to give to another family," says Gonçalves Granada.
He grew up under a different name with relatives of one of the judge's cousins.
Grandmothers and other relatives who have joined forces in the "Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo" organization began meticulous detective work during the dictatorship to determine the fate of their children and grandchildren.
They questioned witnesses and collected documents and other clues - the state has supported their search since the transition to democracy.
Around 350 children are still missing
They have tracked 130 children so far, Manuel Gonçalves Granada was identified in 1997 as a 20-year-old.
Today he is looking for other disappearances himself: He is involved with the grandmothers and works for the "National Commission for the Right to Identity".
Around 350 children, who must be around 40 years old today, are still missing.
With a new campaign, the government is currently also trying to reach kidnapped children in the rest of the world: The social media initiative #Argentinatebusca (Argentina is looking for you) encourages Argentines born during their military service to contact the embassies or consulates abroad. if you have any doubts about your identity. Employees from 127 Argentine missions abroad have been specially trained so that they can look after such people professionally. They take blood samples - and send them to Argentina for genetic analysis.
“We assume that some grandchildren went abroad with their appropriators as children, or that they decided to emigrate at some point, for example during the 2001 economic crisis,” says a spokesman for the “Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo”: “Some of the Recently found children live in the Netherlands, the USA or Spain and have moved there in the past 20 years. "
The 44-year-old Marcela Solsona Síntora, for example, now lives in Valencia.
At the age of 24 she went to Spain to work.
It wasn't until April 2019, more than four decades after her abduction, that her real identity was revealed - she had long struggled against the truth.
Solsona Síntora describes her childhood in Buenos Aires as "normal", she loves her adoptive family and has "nothing to reproach her with".
When her supposed father died, she was 20 years old.
At that time, her mother told her that she had been adopted.
"I knew there was a possibility of being a disappeared child, but I didn't want to find out," she says.
Her father's death was a severe blow: "Looking for another family would have seemed like treason against him."
DNA samples prove kidnapping
In 2013, she received the call from Argentina that she had "somehow always expected": A man on the team looking for kidnapped children asked her to have a DNA test. There were anonymous references; In addition, a doctor from the Argentine Federal Police had signed her birth certificate. The alleged home birth also aroused suspicion. But Solsona Síntora feared that her adoptive mother could run into legal problems if the DNA hit - she did not get tested. "The price for the truth seemed too high to me," she says.
Manuel Gonçalves Granada knows a few cases in which kidnapped children got into such conflicts of conscience.
But in Argentina there is not only the right to identity, but also the duty to have it checked: If there are clues to child robbery, those affected can be forced to surrender a DNA sample against their will.
"If parents steal a baby, it is a crime against humanity," explains Gonçalves Granada.
In addition, child robbery is often related to the kidnapping and murder of the children's biological parents.
He himself was relieved to learn that his mother had not left him voluntarily - those responsible for the massacre have now been punished.
The process of coming to terms with the military dictatorship in Argentina is more advanced than in any other Latin American country with a similar history: around 1000 military and other people involved have been investigated, including high-ranking officers, but also families who knowingly appropriated children illegally. Dozens of perpetrators were sentenced to long prison terms and the trials are still ongoing.
The techniques that were developed there to solve human rights crimes serve as a model for many countries today: The Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropologists (EAAF) has developed special methods to identify human remains from mass graves; it also hid the body of the mother of Gonçalves Granada. The grandparenthood index, a mathematical formula, can also prove the possible relationship between grandchildren and grandparents. DNA samples from relatives of the disappeared are now stored in the national gene database.
Nevertheless, in cases like Marcela Solsona Síntora from Valencia, the investigators sometimes passed out for years - the Spanish judiciary rejected a request for legal assistance.
It was not until 2019 that she voluntarily traveled to Buenos Aires for a test to have her DNA compared with samples from the gene database.
She had previously researched missing babies on a website and discovered a photo of her mother: "I saw her and saw myself."
Penalties for the perpetrator
After two weeks, the suspicion was confirmed: Marcela was the daughter of Norma Síntora, who was eight months pregnant when she disappeared in 1977.
"I couldn't stop crying," she says.
Her mother was probably taken to the infamous Campo de Mayo military base, where there was a secret maternity ward.
Her father, who was abroad at the time, and her grandparents had been desperately looking for mother and child for decades.
Finally finding out his origins, his name, only marks the beginning of a long search for identity: rediscovered stolen children suddenly have two families, two names.
They have to rearrange their history and the relationship to their adoptive parents, but also to the new relatives, to catch up on a lot.
The grandmothers from Plaza de Mayo have created a file for each child containing photos, documents and interviews with family members - Solsona Síntora listened to audio interviews with her deceased grandparents.
She also got to know her father and the brothers - she is in contact with one of them almost every day.
And it also came out: There is no evidence that her adoptive mother knew of her origin.
That was a great relief
In Manuel Gonçalves Granada's life, his grandmother and big brother are now also present.
He broke off contact with his godfather, the judge's cousin, who must have known about the kidnapping.
Today he uses the name his mother gave him - it took a while for all of his friends to get used to it.
Duplicate identities
Marcela Solsona Síntora only changed her last name.
For them, both worlds are part of their identity today, the old and the newly discovered.
"For me, identity is everything you identify with, and I also identify with my childhood, my adoptive father," she says.
Today she wears the scarf, the symbol of grandmothers, as a chain around her neck - and as a tattoo on her back.
There are also the initials of the family she found again: those of her brothers, her father and her mother.
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