In 1976, soldiers seized Argentina’s presidential palace. Army chief Jorge Rafael Videla took over the country as part of a military junta.
Amid the kidnapping and torture of suspected leftist political opponents, one of the military’s most diabolical acts involved the abduction of hundreds of pregnant women. After giving birth in captivity, the women were disappeared, and their babies were secretly given to other families.
This would have gone largely undocumented if not for the mothers and mothers-in-law of the missing women, who spoke out despite enormous personal risk.
It’s the topic of the new book, “A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Childen,” by Haley Cohen Gilliland.
Gilliland joined Texas Standard for a discussion on the book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: What drew you to this story? Why did you decide to report on this story for a book?
Haley Cohen Gilliland: I moved down to Argentina in 2011, shortly after graduating college. I was familiar with the Argentine dictatorship, but it really wasn’t until I moved to the country full-time that I learned the extent of the brutality that had taken place.
And the most diabolical thing that the military did was to kidnap newborn babies and disappear their mothers. And I became absolutely obsessed with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the subject of my book. They are this incredibly intrepid group of grandmothers that banded together when people were still disappearing in droves in Argentina in order to find their stolen grandchildren.
And they did this through boldly protesting in front of the presidential palace at a time when that definitely could have gotten them killed, through gum shoe detective work, donning disguises to get close to children they thought might be their relatives, and even pioneering new forms of genetics testing.
Your book follows the Roisinblit family. How did you find them and can you tell us a little bit more about their story?
I should say, I could have written a book about any of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. They’re all incredible, and it was really through working together that they were as successful as they were.
From early on in my research, I found myself drawn to Rosa Roisinblit. Rosa has always been a maverick. She was born in 1919. She’s a first-generation Argentine. Her parents escaped Eastern Europe during the pogroms at the turn of the 20th century, and then they became successful ranchers.
Rosa always had great ambitions and wanted to live in a big city and have a large career. And so she took an opportunity when she was just 15 to train to become an obstetrician, which was really unheard of at that time. And she ended up in Buenos Aires where she got married to her husband Benjamin, and they ended up having one child, Patricia.
And Patricia became the absolute center of their universe. They poured everything into her. And then in 1978, when Patricia was eight months pregnant with her second child, Patricia was abducted by the military along with her partner.
Why was she abducted? What seemed to have precipitated her abduction?
The military took power in 1976 after political violence had roiled the country for several years. There were right-wing death squads that had sprung up that were actually tacitly supported by the government, and those death squads were trying to purge the country of anyone remotely left-leaning. And in response, there were left-wing revolutionary groups that also ratcheted up their resistance and their violence.
Patricia was training to become a doctor, and Jose had left law school and had opened a toy store. Both Patricia and Jose had been members of the Montoneros, which is a leftist revolutionary group.
By 1978, by all accounts, they had really stepped back from this organization and that type of activism. Most leftist revolutionary groups had really been crushed by that point.
Tell me a little bit more about the strategies used by the Abuelas. What exactly did they do and how were they able to protest openly without getting killed or getting abducted or taken into custody?
The Abuelas were grandmothers – it’s in their name – and they were extremely conscious of the fact that, as grandmothers, as women in their 50s and 60s, they were going to be underestimated and overlooked by everyone, including the military and police. And that cultural camouflage was part of what allowed them to be as successful and effective as they were. And they really leaned into that camouflage.
They would sometimes, in their early days, hold surreptitious meetings in cafes. This was before they had a headquarters. And so they would tie up boxes with ribbons, empty boxes, to make it look as though they were celebrating a birthday. And then they would go to a cafe and set knitting needles next to their coffee cups and little chocolate cakes. And as soon as the waiter would walk away, they would pass each other papers under the table to sign and strategize about what their next moves would be.
We often look at the Texas connection here, being the Texas Standard. There certainly is a Texas connection here with anthropologist Clyde Snow, who was born in Fort Worth. What was Clyde’s role in helping the Abuelas?
In 1983, democracy was restored to Argentina, and the president who took power immediately formed an investigative body to probe what had happened during the dictatorship period. And as part of this probe, exhumations of mass graves were ordered.
Unfortunately, not much thought was given to how the graves should be exhumed. And so bulldozers rolled into mass graves and untrained cemetery workers were mixing all of the remains together and ruining the chances that these bodies would ever be identified.
The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo watched this with absolute horror because those bones held clues, not only about what had happened to their disappeared sons and daughters and sons and daughter in law, but also about whether their grandchildren had been born. Because when women give birth, that can cause indelible marks on her pelvis. And by examining the bones in these mass graves, they might be able to determine whether their grandchildren were still alive or not. And so they lobbied the government very aggressively to bring down a team of forensic experts.
One of the members of this team who was brought down was Clyde Snow. This was a politically sensitive operation and there was a lot of anti-American sentiment at this time.
Given all that, Clyde Snow was a really interesting person to choose to bring down because he was almost a caricature of an American person. He wore cowboy boots everywhere. He constantly had a Camel cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He had a very heavy Texas drawl, and by all accounts he was just larger than life.
