How quickly we forget

Baby Snatching

The trial of Videla and co-defendant Reynaldo Bignone for the baby snatching did not end until 2012 when an Argentine court convicted the pair in the scheme to murder leftist mothers and farm their infants out to military personnel, a shocking process that was known to the Reagan administration even as it worked closely with the bloody regime in the 1980s.

Testimony at the trial included a videoconference from Washington with Elliott Abrams, Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs who said he urged Bignone to reveal the babies’ identities as Argentina began a transition to democracy in 1983. Abrams said the Reagan administration “knew that it wasn’t just one or two children,” indicating that U.S. officials believed there was a high-level “plan because there were many people who were being murdered or jailed.”

A human rights group, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, says as many as 500 babies were stolen by the military during the repression from 1976 to 1983.

General Videla was accused of permitting and concealing the scheme to harvest infants from pregnant women who were kept alive in military prisons only long enough to give birth. According to the charges, the babies were taken from the new mothers, sometimes after late-night Caesarean sections, and then distributed to military families or sent to orphanages.

After the babies were pulled away, the mothers were removed to another site for their executions. Some were put aboard death flights and pushed out of military planes over open water.

One of the most notorious cases involved Silvia Quintela, a leftist doctor who attended to the sick in shanty towns around Buenos Aires. On Jan. 17, 1977, Quintela was abducted off a Buenos Aires street by military authorities because of her political leanings. At the time, Quintela and her agronomist husband Abel Madariaga were expecting their first child.

According to witnesses who later testified before a government truth commission, Quintela was held at a military base called Campo de Mayo, where she gave birth to a baby boy. As in similar cases, the infant then was separated from the mother.

What happened to the boy is still not clear, but Quintela reportedly was transferred to a nearby airfield. There, victims were stripped naked, shackled in groups and dragged aboard military planes. The planes then flew out over the Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean, where soldiers pushed the victims out of the planes and into the water to drown.

According to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Argentine military viewed the kidnappings as part of the larger counterinsurgency strategy.

“The anguish generated in the rest of the surviving family because of the absence of the disappeared would develop, after a few years, into a new generation of subversive or potentially subversive elements, thereby not permitting an effective end to the Dirty War,” the commission said in describing the army’s reasoning for kidnapping the infants of murdered women. The kidnapping strategy conformed with the “science” of the Argentine counterinsurgency operations.

Small snip from long article - [link to consortiumnews.com (secure)]

Wow, very interesting. She sounds like a full blown psychopath, of which there are a disproportionate percentage in govt and govt related entities.

What do you know about her background (family, ethnicity, etc)?

Have you gone full no contact with her and any other "relatives"?

The number of views on this thread is quite interesting. There have always been a lot of .gov trolls working this place. Makes one wonder...

OP, look!

Dirty War Orphan Wins Kidnapping Suit

[link to www.npr.org (secure)]

Sounds about right.

From the inside, I do know the pregnant mothers hated the doctor in our prison more than anything. He didn't allow a normal or healthy birth. I don't know exactly what he did, but he made it excruciating for them, I got the sense many died during or after childbirth, and then there was the kidnapping of the babies. The mothers literally seethed when they saw him.

In a front room of a prison building, above street level (it was a big complex of buildings) they had the nursery. In the day, when I went through there, I would see rows of cribs with babies in them. That's where new parents would come and adopt the babies. I had a friend my age who was convinced she would go out that same front door after being adopted.

There were probably at least a dozen of us who were no longer crib age. I remember two on my hall clearly. One was my best friend. I don't know where they were stowing away the rest at night, probably in the other buildings. I tend to wonder what the hell was so wrong with me that I didn't get adopted out as an infant, but after looking at pictures, I think it might be because I looked more native Argentine than European, and they so aspire for European lineage. That's just my pondering, though. No one gave me any indication of why I was still there.

It was a prison, it may have been in the middle of hell, but it was still a prison. There were protocols, procedures, and schedules. During the days, us kids were on that adoption side of the prison, separated from the mothers. We had to follow the rules, all of the rules. We were told they would take our mothers away if we didn't. I was always an anxious child - geez, I wonder where that started.

I came back to our hall one evening and my mom wasn't there anymore. They said she had gone to the infirmary with a fever. To this day, I don't know if she had a very bad fever (Argentina is nasty, you need about 50 vaccines to stay there, and I say that as someone mostly opposed to vaccines) or if they killed her while I was gone.

I tracked down what country her mother came from, what country her father came from, how they got to America (and, funnily enough, how much of their paperwork was bull - forgery was not a new thing by the time I got to that family).

But her? I have no idea if she was their child or some random adoptee. I can't tell what ethnicity she is. Something pale with a vendetta.

And I enjoy my no contact... immensely.

If we wave big enough, do you think they'll notice?



You found one! I'm assuming she still had to go through the whole identification process first. By the time they even let me in the door to sign up for it, it's going to be my ghost doing the signing.

You were probably older than an infant when you and your mother were put there.

Such a traumatic life you've had, OP, and I've had my own serious trauma (family related, including irregular adoption) so can relate, even though our situations were different. The bottom line is all children need stability and their parents love and when we don't get it, it fucks us up. I've spent my life struggling with shit that happened long ago.

Those poor women in that awful place. What happened was worse than in Nazi Germany. The scale was just not as big so it was more easily swept away and, of course, there were no Allies at war with the junta so no big world war victor history to concoct.

I didn't know that about Argentina being, as you say, nasty. I had a friend who lived for a year in Buenos Aries and she loved it. Different circumstances, though.

Where were her parents from and what did they do for a living?

Oh, they're noticing, alright. Some people still have a lot to worry about.

The young woman in Argentina had her own path. Yours would be different. Doesn't mean you can't sue from where you are. You have proof you were raised in the US by someone who was not your mother and no legal adoption. That's all you need.

She lived to be over 100.

They have their own version of hemorrhagic fever, among other things.

I'm sure it's a wonderful place to visit. Very European. Crashing economy so your dollar goes far when visiting. But not one person I have spoken to who lives there thinks it is a good or safe country. Most are clawing to get out.

At 59 this month, I'm not sure I can
stand another 40 years of this anticivilization.
Word is the dark ones are gonna get craptured
off this rock, and those that are salt and light
will then be able to finally clean the place up.

Her mother had fled from the Nazis, I can't even remember what country she was from now...some tiny eastern European thing the Germans didn't like. She wasn't Jewish.

She abandoned her children, left them with her sister and fled to Italy.

There, she hooked up with an Axis scientist (god knows which side he was on at what point in this, Italy's role was as confusing as the country itself is), and they found their way to America after the war to avoid his persecution.

He got a nice little gig working on developing nukes in the US. He also died before retirement age, probably from being exposed to everything they were using to make the nukes.

She became nuevo rich. As far as I can tell, none of her money was gained legally and I was far from the first person she trafficked. She was as mob acting as you can get, although this was a small town, not Chicago or NY. You wouldn't know if from the baubles and furs hanging off her. The first evidence I have of her altering things in the Vital Statistics office was back in the 40s. She didn't like her new first name, so she wrote her old one in, on an official document in the records department - at an angle in her own adult handwriting.

She lived to be over 100.

Her first set of kids - the ones she abandoned - are still in Europe.

Complicated. So, the mother of your kidnapper was not German but from a place at odds with Germany but she married a man who found employment with the Axis powers (fascist Italy, I guess) and then they came here but you're not sure if your kidnapper was her (or the husband's) biological kid?

Just about the only way to escape history to to hop from country to country ahead of it or behind it. And what kind of rootless life it that?

Ever been to East Tennessee? We're being
flooded with people that have been told these
mountains will remain after the (fill in the blank.)

They figure the Smoky Mtns. National Park
will be prime real estate once we get it
back from the U.N.. People that fly in
always remark how green it is here.

I've driven through plenty of it myself
but my wanderlust is waning fast.

They say Hot Springs, NC could go volcanic.

The Cherokee talked of bringing down the fire
from Clingmans Dome, which is 30 miles out
this window where I'm sitting.

I never fill my Bus up with gas because I
always tend to drive until it runs out.
She's got 2,600 miles on this incarnation
and she's better than ever now.
I smile and wave at everyone. Beep beep.

Make that three

i just gave you a 1-star for fun. didn't even read your post

BUENOS AIRES — A court in Argentina on Tuesday convicted two former Ford Motor executives and sentenced them to prison for helping the country’s military dictators kidnap and torture 24 workers during the 1970s.

The convictions were the first in which representatives of a multinational firm were found culpable in a human rights trial in Argentina.

Activists hailed the sentences as a major step toward making amends for the cooperation that several businesses provided to the brutal junta that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983. Union leaders were among the tens of thousands of people sent to clandestine detention centers where suspected dissidents were arbitrarily detained, tortured and often killed.

A three-judge panel sentenced Pedro Müller, 87, then a manufacturing director at a Ford factory in Buenos Aires province, to 10 years, and Héctor Francisco Sibilla, 92, then the security manager at the plant, to 12 years for assisting in the kidnapping and torture of their colleagues.

The two executives “allowed a detention center to be set up inside the premises of that factory, in the recreational area, so that the abductees could be interrogated,” according to court papers.

[link to www.nytimes.com (secure)]

OP, the attorney, Tomás Ojea Quintana (mentioned in this article) was also involved in the case of the young woman who won her suit. Perhaps you could contact him and inquire how you could go about suing your kidnapper without having to travel to the US or Argentina. With depositions and video court testimony, I would think it possible.

When I was little, before the words "illegal adoption" stopped being spoken in the same room as me, my new mom told me, "We are all from wars, coups, and genocides."

I don't know if she was trying to tell me about my own history, or if she was serious and none of us were actually related. I do know she didn't look related to her mother, at all, but sometimes that happens.

And it's still going on today. Imagine all of the kids in Libya and Syria who have lost their families and ended up with the worst opportunists and, worse, jihadists.

This certainly illustrates how these kinds of horror stories don't, necessarily teach people compassion. George Soros is an infamous example. Looks like a lot of sociopaths were hatched out of all of this misery.