Argentina lost a great activist and moral leader on September 6 when Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit died at the age of 106. The daughter of Eastern European Jewish refugees and a professional obstetrician, “Rosita” is best known as a founding member of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, one of Argentina’s most important human rights organizations. These women and their supporters have worked for nearly half a century to recover the identities of their grandchildren, who were either abducted or born in captivity to political prisoners during Argentina’s last military dictatorship. Along the way, they have made globally significant contributions to human rights activism, law, genetics research, and forensic science.
Few in the English-speaking world know about Roisinblit—or about the achievements of the Abuelas—but they have a new opportunity to learn about them thanks to Haley Cohen Gilliland’s wonderful new book A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children. This sensitive and meticulously researched narrative account traces the organization’s campaigns over the decades. Journalist Cohen Gilliland has a gifted eye for detail and character, and her compelling short chapters carry the reader through the many tragedies and victories that have defined the story of the Abuelas. Rosa Roisinblit and Guillermo—the grandson she recovered in 2000—are her central protagonists.
The book’s opening chapters describe the circumstances that forced women like Roisinblit to become political activists. From 1976 to 1983, Argentina was governed by a military dictatorship that turned to covert terror to wipe out a generation of young activists associated with unions, student groups, and left-wing guerrilla movements. The main tactic used was mass disappearance rather than public arrest or execution. According to estimates, some 30,000 people were abducted by unidentified men driving unmarked cars.
These women and their supporters have worked for nearly half a century to recover the identities of their grandchildren, who were either abducted or born in captivity to political prisoners during Argentina’s last military dictatorship.
Victims were detained in a national network of secret detention centers, where they were tortured and usually killed in secret. Some were dumped in mass graves, though many were drugged and thrown out of airplanes into the South Atlantic. As the Abuelas would eventually prove, the dictatorship also developed a systematic plan to appropriate babies born to pregnant detainees and deliver them to new families, most of whom had direct ties to military institutions. Roughly 500 such illegal adoptions took place.
Founded in 1978, the Abuelas began as an offshoot of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo: women who encountered each other as they desperately sought information about their missing adult children. Rosa Roisinblit’s daughter, Patricia, and son-in-law, José, were abducted on October 7, 1978, along with their 15-month-old daughter, Mariana. Though their assailants dropped Mariana off with relatives, Patricia was eight months pregnant at the time of her detention—she and José were never seen again, and their bodies were never recovered.
As Roisinblit frantically sought to locate Patricia and José, she encountered other mothers of pregnant detainees. Together, they decided to focus their energies on locating the babies that had been born in captivity, reasoning that even in the polarized climate of 1970s Argentina, no one could justify the abduction of an infant. They chose to identify themselves collectively as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the central plaza that functions as the political heart of Argentina. Alongside the Madres, they became the first people to openly challenge the dictatorship and led demands for human rights investigations and prosecutions after the return to democracy.
Cohen Gilliland conveys the urgency and creativity of the Abuelas’ work through her mastery of detail and pacing. The women first taught themselves detective skills to piece together information relating to their children and grandchildren, and they risked their lives to share their stories with foreign journalists and dignitaries. As the military’s grip on power loosened, they used creative publicity stunts to appeal to the public for information about children who might be living under false identities.
The Abuelas also anticipated the challenges they would face in proving those children’s true identities after the return to democracy in late 1983. They reached out to scientists in Argentina and abroad to develop the sophisticated forensic expertise needed to identify cadavers found in mass graves and to prove biological links between children and grandparents. They played a key role in the creation of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team, which developed world-class techniques that they have since applied in countries such as Bosnia, South Africa, and El Salvador.
Cohen Gilliland’s book is especially timely now, as right-wing libertarian president Javier Milei attacks Argentina’s human rights organizations and openly celebrates the military dictatorship.
Cohen Gilliland dedicates a significant portion of the book to the organization’s contributions to genetics research. She paints a rich portrait of the American geneticist Mary-Claire King, who became one of their most important collaborators. In her account, we learn not just about King’s research innovations at Berkeley but about the personal experiences that prompted her to dedicate her time to the cause. King was particularly moved by her own feelings of helplessness after spending a few months teaching at the Universidad de Chile during the first year of the Pinochet dictatorship, when she could do little to protect her colleagues and students.
King developed a groundbreaking DNA test to prove ‘grandpaternity’ and helped the Abuelas establish Argentina’s National Genetic Data Bank in 1987, the first of its kind in the world. By collecting and analyzing DNA samples donated by family members of the disappeared, the Bank has contributed to many human rights investigations and has helped 140 grandchildren recover their biological identities.
Cohen Gilliland delicately communicates the agonizing pain and ambivalence many of those children have suffered in coming to terms with the truth of their own origins. The story of Rosa Roisinblit’s grandson, Guillermo, is particularly poignant. Though he eventually committed himself to working with the Abuelas, that decision came years after his original reunion with his grandmother in 2000. In the meantime, he was torn by continuing loyalties to the parents who had raised him, and he struggled to connect with his birth sister, Mariana, who had been looking for him her whole life. In juxtaposing Guillermo’s crippling doubts with the dogged certainties that motivated both Mariana and Rosa Roisinblit, the author carries us much deeper into the messy lived experiences that underpin modern human rights activism.
Cohen Gilliland’s book is especially timely now, as right-wing libertarian president Javier Milei attacks Argentina’s human rights organizations and openly celebrates the military dictatorship. The Milei government has slashed funding for federal human rights agencies and civil society groups like the Abuelas. It has also moved to dismantle their institutional legacy, most recently by restructuring the National Bank of Genetic Data. Still, Argentine civil society continues to resist, drawing on the lessons taught by an earlier generation like the Abuelas. This deeply moving and human account promises to share that wisdom far beyond Argentina’s borders.
Karen Robert is a professor of Latin American and world history at St. Thomas University in New Brunswick, Canada. She is the author of Driving Terror: Labor, Violence, and Justice in Cold War Argentina (University of New Mexico Press, 2025). She also translated Memories of Buenos Aires: Signs of State Terrorism in Argentina (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), a comprehensive guide to memory sites in Argentina’s capital.