Many laboratories can claim to improve lives — devising gene therapies that ease the agony of sickle cell disease or new treatments to combat cancer — but perhaps none has changed lives quite so fundamentally as Argentina’s Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos, or the National Bank of Genetic Data.
For nearly four decades the B.N.D.G. has been a steady custodian of scientific proof and long-awaited justice, working to restore the identities of the hundreds of children stolen by the military during Argentina’s last dictatorship and reunite them with their blood families.
Now, as scientific research endures sweeping funding cuts and cynical attacks — in Argentina, the United States and beyond — the B.N.D.G.’s future has been thrown into question. That threat should concern anyone who values the role of science in uncovering truth and rectifying past wrongs, but it is especially alarming to the grandmothers who fought so hard to establish the gene bank, and to their grandchildren it helped find.
One of them is named Daniel.
In April 2023, a 46-year-old man named Daniel Enrique González walked into the Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos in downtown Buenos Aires. He was there to investigate a crime — a 46-year-old crime in which he suspected he might be the victim. He sat in a blue chair with pronounced armrests and rolled up his sleeve for a phlebotomist. As the needle pierced his skin, he felt excited.
Daniel had always been told he was born on March 24, 1977, exactly one year after a brutal military junta took power in Argentina. He was raised in Buenos Aires Province by a police officer and his wife. His father treated his revolver like an extra limb, removing it only for meals, during which he lay it, loaded, next to his plate. His mother was a good 20 years older than his friends’ moms — in her 50s by the time he was a toddler. But Daniel never thought much about these things. Wasn’t everyone’s family a bit peculiar somehow?
Then, in his early 20s, Daniel’s mother died, inspiring his much older adoptive sister to make a startling confession: She suspected that Daniel was not the biological child of their parents, either. One day, she explained, as the dictatorship raged, he had simply appeared, as if delivered by a stork.
On March 24, 1976, the armed forces had seized power in Argentina, promising to quell the political violence that had plagued the country for years. But in the pursuit of order, the military government trampled the law. Unmarked Ford Falcons flooded the streets, driven by officers in plain clothes who pried people from homes, offices, churches and hospitals and threw them in secret jails, where most were tortured and quietly killed.
Their targets included not only Argentines involved in the leftist revolutionary movements the security forces aimed to annihilate but also journalists, artists, lawyers, nuns, priests who ministered to the poor and anyone else deemed to have “ideas contrary to Western and Christian civilization.” Human rights groups estimate that Argentina’s armed forces forcibly disappeared about 30,000 people in the nearly eight years they ruled the country.
The Argentine military’s most heinous act was the disappearance of at least 358 pregnant women. These women were held in clandestine detention centers until they gave birth, then separated from their infants and taken away, never to be seen again. Their babies were given to other families, many of them headed by military and police officers. The armed forces did the same with young boys and girls captured alongside their parents in raids. These children were given falsified birth certificates with new names, birth dates and parents, their family ties erased, just as their mothers and fathers had been made to vanish.
But the dictatorship’s leaders had failed to grasp something essential: Not everything can be disappeared. Identity cannot be snuffed out as bodies can — and neither can parental love. Both are inalterable, irrepressible and eternal.
The grandmothers of the children stolen by the military understood this instinctively. At a time when doing far less could get you taken from your home and tortured, they quickly mobilized to find their grandchildren. With help from a renowned American scientist, they pioneered genetic methods that could expose what the military government wished to conceal. Genetics, they realized, would provide them with a weapon far more potent and enduring than the dictatorship’s machine guns: the truth.
As the dictatorship began, very little was clear to the grandmothers, who were missing not just their children but also their grandchildren. They swarmed churches, courts and the ministry of the interior — anywhere they could think to seek information. Eventually, they found one another and formed an organization called the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, after the iconic square in front of Argentina’s presidential palace where they boldly protested each week.
Together, the abuelas wrote pleading letters to international organizations and the pope, and posed as baby supply saleswomen and housekeepers to more closely surveil children they thought might be their relations. (One abuela even had herself committed to a psychiatric facility to glean information about a potential grandchild.) “We worked like ants, we worked like spies,” one grandmother later told the Argentine academic Rita Arditti. “Nobody trained us. We learned everything by ourselves.”
Their bravery began to attract attention, and with it, anonymous tips. Men and women nervously approached the abuelas as they protested in the Plaza de Mayo, passing them crumpled papers with names or addresses before darting away. These clues allowed the abuelas to locate several of their grandchildren even as the military’s rampage blazed on.
Then, in 1983, reeling from its humiliating loss in the Falklands war and growing condemnation of its savagery, the dictatorship fell for good. The military grudgingly returned the country to democracy, but it did not return the abuelas’ grandchildren; hundreds remained missing. Many had been taken when they were still in their mothers’ wombs.
The abuelas pooled their own money and donations from international groups and religious organizations to travel the world, repeating a simple question to any scientist who would listen: Can our blood be used to identify our grandchildren? DNA analysis was not yet available, and for years no one could give them a definitive answer. While paternity testing was commonplace, grandpaternity testing — without blood from the intermediary generation — was unheard-of.
Finally, as the dictatorship unraveled, the abuelas found someone to help them: the American geneticist Dr. Mary-Claire King. Dr. King would later become widely known for discovering the BRCA1 breast cancer gene and was already revered in the field of genetics. She was a committed progressive, having helped organize anti-Vietnam War campaigns as a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley, and had personally witnessed the horrors of dictatorship while teaching as part of an exchange program in Chile in 1973. Her daughter was the same age as the grandchildren the abuelas were seeking. “If I had been born in Buenos Aires, not in Chicago, I probably would have been one of” the disappeared, Dr. King told the magazine Science for the People, “and my daughter would have been kidnapped.”
Along with several others, Dr. King devised an equation called the Index of Grandpaternity that allowed the abuelas to demonstrate their relationships to those they believed were their grandchildren. It was the first formula of its kind and, according to Dr. King herself, represented “the creation of genetic genealogy,” whose use would later become widespread among law enforcement agencies and family heritage companies like Ancestry.com.
As DNA analysis became available, the abuelas incorporated even more powerful genetic methods. In the late 1980s Dr. King helped them implement mitochondrial DNA testing. Unlike nuclear DNA, which is inherited from both parents, mitochondrial DNA is passed down exclusively by mothers, remaining largely unchanged from generation to generation. As such, it proved a mighty tool for linking grandmothers to their grandchildren, even in the absence of other relatives.
Dr. King has often quipped that the existence of mitochondrial DNA proved God was a woman, who put it on earth specifically for the abuelas. Yet the abuelas themselves had always been keenly aware of their own mortality. Many were in their 50s and 60s when their grandchildren were taken. Almost as soon as they began working together, they recognized the need to ensure their mission outlived them.
In 1987, after years of furious lobbying, the abuelas convinced the Argentine government to create a national bank to store their genetic information so that even if they died, their grandchildren might still be found. Ever since, the abuelas’ genetic data has been held in the B.N.D.G. — the first biobank of its kind — waiting for a match.
The current president of Argentina, Javier Milei, has raised doubts about the fate of the biobank. An eccentric libertarian with unruly hair and a pack of cloned English mastiffs, Mr. Milei has clashed constantly with groups like the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo over the year and a half he’s held power. He has attempted to rewrite the history of the dictatorship, casting it as a justified “war” rather than a period of state terrorism.
Last year, as part of his aggressive push to “take a chain saw” to government spending — a campaign that helped inspire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative in the United States — Mr. Milei dismantled the investigative unit of a government body that works closely with the abuelas to find their stolen grandchildren and abolished the subsidies the abuelas have long received from the government, making them more reliant on donations to support their work. While the Argentine state took the abuelas’ grandchildren, the Milei government seems to view finding them as an unnecessary expense.
Now Mr. Milei is targeting the very institution that has powered and protected the abuelas’ mission for decades: the B.N.D.G. On May 22, Mr. Milei issued a decree to restructure the genetic bank. While his deregulation minister called it a “matter of common sense” to combat bureaucratic bloat, the action has sparked panic among the abuelas, who view it as a “de facto takeover” by the government. They have petitioned the judiciary to reject the decree and to ensure all genetic data contained at the B.N.D.G. is copied and preserved. Last month a court responded that any changes Mr. Milei intends to make to the B.N.D.G. will need to be run past the judiciary first.
Meanwhile, the B.N.D.G.’s work continues on tenuous footing. Mr. Milei’s government has not updated the country’s budget since 2023, effectively letting inflation erode the spending capacity of institutions like the gene bank. And no selection process has been held to replace Dr. Mariana Herrera Piñero, whose 10-year term as the B.N.D.G.’s director recently expired; she will remain in the role on a temporary basis until that happens. Dr. Herrera Piñero says the bank contains the genetic information from 180 families who are still looking for their stolen relatives. Hers is among them. Three of Dr. Herrera Piñero’s cousins disappeared during the dictatorship, two of them while expecting children.
About three months after Daniel González visited the B.N.D.G. to give his blood, he was summoned to Buenos Aires and handed a white folder emblazoned with the words “Memoria. Verdad. Justicia. Ciencia. Identidad.” Memory. Truth. Justice. Science. Identity. Inside was a brief report describing the genetic tests the B.N.D.G. had applied to his sample.
The odds were 49,400,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. He was not the son of the couple who had raised him but the child of Cristina Silvia Navajas, who had been disappeared by the armed forces in July 1976 while newly pregnant, and Julio César de Jesús Santucho, who had fled the country during the dictatorship and was still alive — a miraculous rarity, as most of the abuelas’ cases involved two disappeared parents.
His grandmother Nélida Gómez de Navajas had been a dedicated member of the abuelas and was particularly active in the group’s scientific efforts. She had died in 2012, but Daniel learned that every year since her pregnant daughter’s abduction Nélida had baked him a birthday cake on his suspected due date, a ricotta confection studded with chocolate chips. After blowing out the candles alone, she would bring the cake to the abuelas’ headquarters to share.
Soon Daniel connected with one of his biological brothers by video chat. Between sobs, he choked out the words: “Thank you for continuing to look for me, for never giving up, and for carrying on the legacy of our grandmother.” Shortly thereafter, he changed his name to Daniel Santucho Navajas and tattooed his real birthday — Jan. 10, 1977 — on the inside of his forearm along with a sketch of a white handkerchief, like those the abuelas had worn on their heads during their weekly protests in the Plaza de Mayo.
Daniel Santucho Navajas was the 133rd grandchild located by the abuelas. Since then, with support from the B.N.D.G., they have identified six more, bringing the total number of grandchildren found to 139. The biobank’s last successful match was made in January, when it analyzed a blood sample from a woman that coincided with the families of a couple who disappeared in 1977. The B.N.D.G.’s staff poured into the lab area to test and retest the results, staying long after sunset to analyze the woman’s mitochondrial DNA, nuclear DNA, microsatellites and other genetic markers. With every method, the truth emerged, solid and sure as stone.
Obstructing the B.N.D.G.’s mission would not only hinder the potential reunion of scores of other Argentines with their biological families, it would also further delay Argentina’s path to full healing. The window for action is narrowing. Today, the surviving abuelas range in age from 87 to an incredible 105. Many others have died without the privilege of embracing their grandchildren. The grandchildren who remain at large are now approaching 50, leaving just a few decades to locate them.
Grandchild by grandchild, the abuelas and the B.N.D.G. have forced Argentina to reckon with its darkest legacy. Until each stolen identity is revealed and every shattered lineage repaired, that legacy cannot truly become history and will continue to haunt Argentina’s present and future.
Haley Cohen Gilliland is the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative and the author of the forthcoming book “A Flower Traveled in My Blood.”
Source photograph by Gianni Ferrari/Getty Images
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post How a Group of Grandmothers Revealed the Painful Truth About Argentina’s Past appeared first on New York Times.
