In a society that denies their existence, the children of the disappeared must face the challenges of adolescence and the legacy of the cruel repression of the "dirty war." paula Logares was a month away from her second birthday when she and her parents, Clau- dio Logares and Monica Grinspon, were snatched off the street by security agents in Montevideo. It was May 18, 1978. The family had been living in Uruguay since fleeing the repression of the military dictatorship in Argentina a year earlier. In July, Mni- ca's mother, Elsa Pavn de Aguilar, made the trip from Buenos Aires to Montev- Aires home. ideo to start the long search for her family. "I had never heard of dis- appearances," she recalls. "I just thought that they could kill them. At one point someone had told me that they might detain them. To me, that meant a normal detention, that you could go asking for them from one police station to another, but at some point you would find them. When the kids disappeared, my only thought was: 'We've lost Paula." The names of Monica and Clau- dio remain in the lists of the 30,000 people murdered and disap- peared by the military dictatorship that controlled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Paula belongs to the next generation, the adolescent and adult children of these victims. These children are struggling against their own "disappearance" in a culture that has chosen to for- get its recent past. Thousands of children lost one or both parents to the repression. Paula is one of approximately 480 children who were themselves kidnapped and later adopted, many by military personnel, others by couples acting in good faith. Of these, only 28 have been restored to their natural families. The 1984 Argentine film The Official Story shocked the world with its account of these children. (Elsa is the model for the grand- mother in the film.) But since then, the military leaders responsible for these abuses have been pardoned and the gov- ernment of President Carlos Saul Mnem has inaugurated drastic neoliberal economic reforms. Argentina has now turned away from human rights and toward a culture of frantic con- sumption. The children of the disappeared stand as uncomfortable reminders of the unre- solved issues left over from the dictatorship. In a society that denies their existence, these chil- dren must face the challenges of adolescence and the legacy of the cruel repression of the "dirty war." Their ability to cope has had a lot to do with family. With the 40 years that sep- arate their ages, Paula, now 17, and her wid- owed grandmother Elsa are not a conventional family. But as they tell us their story across the dining room table jumbled with coffee cups and sewing supplies, the two women give an impression of com- fortable intimacy with each other. Paula is notably casual for a teen- age girl in this city, known for its Paula Logares and her grandmother Elsa outside their Buenos 0 0 C z 2 Karen Robert is a doctoral student in Latin American history at the University of Michigan. Rodrigo Gutirrez Hermelo is a journalist from Buenos Aires. VOL XXVII, No 5 MAR/APRIL 1994 11JOURNAL / ARGENTINA formalities. She greets us in a striped turtleneck and faded jeans, her long, light-brown hair still wet from the shower. Elsa is the picture of an Argentine grandmother, a large woman with sad eyes set in a heavy, round face. She does most of the talking, telling about her search for Paula in the flat, even rhythm of a story that has been told many times. Paula slouches and doodles, but her occasional ques- tions and her frank, open gaze attest to her attentive presence at the table. Elsa tells us that after making inquiries with military and police officials, and representatives of the Catholic Church in Uruguay and Argentina, she soon realized that she would get nowhere asking about her three family members at once. She began to concentrate on Paula, and focused her search on day cares and orphanages. "I only asked for the little girl, whom no one could accuse of being a sub- versive." Along the way, she met up with members of the Grand- mothers ("Abuelas") of the Plaza de Mayo, women who shared her situation and were working collec- tively to find their grandchildren. Paula was already four years old when Elsa got her first lead, in 1980. The president of Abuelas, Maria Isabel ("Chicha") Mariani, appeared at her home with photos that had been passed to her through the Brazilian human rights organi- zation CLAMOR. "She shows me the photos and says, 'Look, who do you think this little girl is?' 'I don't know,' I say. 'Look hard.' 'I don't know.' 'It's Paula.' 'No, it's not Paula.' She spent about three hours trying to explain to me that it was Paula. And then I took the photos to my family and they recognized her immediately. I tell you this in detail because later on this would happen with all the families. Because the fact of finding a grandchild far away from where you lost him or her is an indication that...that your own child is gone. That this little girl is all alone is the physical proof that your son or daughter is disappeared." The photos came with a report that gave Paula's address, and an approximation of her name and the names of her "parents." The confi- dential information came from a neighbor who had overheard a fight between the couple, in which the woman said clearly, "The prob- lem is that you killed this little girl's parents and now you've dumped her on me to take care of." Years later, the Abuelas identified the couple as Ruben Lavalln and Raquel Teresa Leiro. Lavalln was a former deputy police chief in the county of San Justo, outside Buenos Aires, and director of the concentration camp where Paula's parents were taken when they were brought back into Argentina. It is almost certain that he was person- ally involved in the kidnapping in Montevideo. E lsa was able to get one brief glimpse of her granddaugh- ter, but the next time she tried to go by the apartment the Lavallns had moved. Paula had disappeared again, and there was no possibility of tracing her until the end of the dictatorship. With the political opening in 1983, the Abuelas papered Buenos Aires with poster-size photographs of the disappeared children, and another tip from a neighbor brought Paula closer once again. Elsa began to meticulously recon- struct Paula's life from the moment of the disappearance in order to prepare her legal case. "It was very difficult, imagine," she says. "To rebuild Paula's history I had to work with all the people who asso- ciated with [Lavalleni and who didn't know me. And politically, at that moment, I was one of those crazy women from the Plaza de Mayo. But bit by bit we put it together." On December 13, 1983, the first working day after the restoration of democracy, the lawyers for the Abuelas filed the legal papers for Paula's restitution. At this point, Elsa takes the time to tell one special memory of that day. Early in the morning, she was stationed across from the Lavalln home, watching in case the couple should try to escape with Paula when summoned by the judge. Her companion from the Abuelas offered to buy her an ice-cream cone, and left her in the shade of a tree. Suddenly, a small boy approached and asked her, "Would you give me that leaf there?" To Elsa, it was a sign from her daugh- ter. Monica had been an agronomy student, and had taught Paula as a baby to touch the leaves on the trees without damaging them. "That's why I always say that going to eat an ice cream is like making a toast to life," she says. "Because while Mirta went to buy that ice cream, my daughter sent me the message that I shouldn't worry because she was next to me." Still, nothing came of the vigil that day either. Lavalln had unex- pectedly produced identification papers for Paula, dated two years after her actual birth. The onus was on Elsa to prove the informa- tion was false, and to convince a judge that this little six-year-old first-grader was really eight years old. Paula's body and mental maturity seemed to confirm what the papers claimed, and pho- tographs and x-rays did not give conclusive proof of her real age. Elsa cited research on children who have endured war-related stress to argue that the violent sep- aration from her parents could have stunted Paula's development. Her hypothesis was borne out fol- lowing Paula's return to the fami- ly. In one year, Paula recovered one of the two years of school she had missed, and shot up to the standard height for children her age. 12 NACIA REPORTON THE AMERICASJOURNAL I ARGENTINA In August of 1984, the courts forced the Lavallns to submit Paula to a genetic test, a method that would later be used to prove the identities of other disappeared children. Though the test indicat- ed Paula's biological relationship to the Logares family with 99.98% certainty, the courts delayed her restitution until the last day of school, December 13, 1984, exactly one year after the original papers had been filed with the court. p aula has been listening dur- ing most of Elsa's descrip- tion of the search, and has even asked questions about some details that were new to her. In her more tentative way, she tells us about the day when she was abruptly told that she would be going to live with the "crazy woman" who claimed to be her grandmother. "1 don't remember if I started to cry right away, but I do remember that I started yelling," she says. "We were in a big room in the court house, at a really big table. And my grandmother was on one side, and I was on the other. And I remember that she wanted to get close to me and I kept running around the table." Elsa and her family, along with a team of psychologists, had been preparing for Paula's return, trying to foresee what might help her remember those first two years of her life. Elsa took enlarged copies of Paula's baby pictures to the courthouse, which precipitated her first encounter with her grand- daughter's quick, inquisitive mind. Paula brushed the photos aside, saying, "These pictures are too new to be mine." At the house, she demanded to see the originals, and at first only one of them seemed plausible to her. "This one might be me," she said, "because we have one like it at home." The photo of her sitting in the Plaza Ca- gancha in Montevideowas the last picture her real parents had taken of her. In the following weeks, Paula demanded other pieces of evi- dence, like the baby clothes that appeared in the photos. She carefully interrogated her aunts and uncles for proof of her former life. For the T he other unanswered ques- tions relate to those six years that Paula spent with the Lavallns. The effort to reincorpo- rate Paula into her lower middle- class Jewish family meant undoing the influences of a very different environment: the wealthy neigh- borhood, private Catholic school, and strict conservative values. When asked about her relationship to the Lavalldns, she answers flat- ly, "I don't know what it was like." But she has a startling memory of her decision to leave behind the people she had known as her par- ents: "No. I never wanted to go back with them. No, never. Not with them, no." Yet the conversa- tion quickly moves away from this topic, which is clearly still too painful to confront. Continuing Elsa's earlier fight, Paula has strug- gled hard over the years to recover her legal identity from the Laval- lens. Although the court recog- nized in 1984 that her identifica- tion papers were false, it did not issue her new copies. Legally, she remained Paula Lavalldn. It took almost four years of bureaucratic wrangling before she received her National Identity Document with her real name on April 20, 1988. The effects of the disappearance continue to emerge in surprising ways. "I have three more children, one son and two daughters," Elsa says. "And you know, as long as Paula was gone there were no more children. My daughters got married and all, but there were no children. And one of them came and told me that she was going through treat- ment, but she couldn't understand how she was going to be able to have a child if her sister's daughter was missing. And that was so strong that when [Paulal appeared, right behind her came all of them." Now there are four more grand- children, ranging between one and seven years of age. "And that shows you that the wound left by all this is much deeper than you can see." The ordeal also brought about huge changes in Elsa. After 15 years of psychoanalysis and her own involvement in helping Paula to reconstruct her identity, Elsa went back to school and is now a trained social psychologist. Recently, she seems to have with- drawn into the more personal responsibilities of caring for her grandchildren. But she is always open to new suggestions, and is now thinking about traveling abroad to offer workshops on the psychological effects of political violence. Paula is beginning to make the more natural break from her family that is part of being a secure 17-year-old, anxious for new experiences. Her time is dominated by studies at a public high school that also offers artistic training (her specialty is metal work). On the weekends, she joins other ado- lescent children of disappeared parents in a creativity workshop run by the Mental Health Solidari- ty Movement, where she partici- pates in radio and theater produc- tions. She is going to spend six weeks of her summer vacation on an Israeli kibbutz. Elsa shudders at the thought of the separation, but she tries to keep quiet. "The important thing is that she lives, develops, that she learns to move around," Elsa says. "And I sleep peacefully because she knows how to defend herself. Within the limits of her age, she knows what's right and wrong. She knows what she wants and what she doesn't want.... But you know, we get along well and here we are. Saturday afternoon, sitting at the table..."
