A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children, by Haley Cohen Gilliland
The state-ordered abductions were a matter of both secrecy and spectacle: masked men jumping out from cars without license plates, grabbing people from city streets in the middle of the day. Panicked families tried to petition the courts to find out where the men had taken their loved ones, and why. Even the terrible finality of a death record would have provided a measure of relief.
But anxious families were typically given nothing. From 1976 to 1983, when Argentina’s military dictatorship carried out its broad and brutal Dirty War against suspected “subversives,” so many people vanished that language acquired a new noun: los desaparecidos, “the disappeared.”
Estimates of the Dirty War’s victims range from 8,960 to 30,000. But in addition to the disappearances, torture and killings, there was another dimension to the cruelty. Many of the people detained by the military were young, and hundreds of the women were also pregnant. Days after giving birth, some of these mothers were drugged with barbiturates, dragged onto airplanes and pushed to their deaths over the Río de la Plata. Their babies were given away, often to military families.
In 1977, a group of mothers of the disappeared started gathering weekly and formed the Madres de Plaza de Mayo to demand information about their loved ones. A subset of these mothers became known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: Their pregnant daughters and daughters-in-law had been kidnapped and probably killed. The Abuelas dedicated themselves to searching for their stolen grandchildren.
The astonishing story of these grandmothers is the subject of “A Flower Traveled in My Blood,” a powerful new book by the journalist Haley Cohen Gilliland. A former correspondent for The Economist in Buenos Aires, she remarks on the surreal experience of spending time in such a vibrant city — beloved by tourists for its cafes and tango halls — and remembering how recently it was a site of atrocity.
Her first few chapters provide an absorbing and lucid overview of the factors leading up to the Dirty War, including a political system dominated by the populist demagogue Juan Perón and intermittently interrupted by military coups. Economic upheaval and eruptions of political violence by left-wing militants and right-wing paramilitaries pushed the country deeper into crisis. When a military junta led by the “dull, pious and unyielding” Gen. Jorge Rafael Videla took over in March 1976, it gave itself the bland name of National Reorganization Process.
“The repression is directed against a minority we do not consider Argentine,” Videla announced. “A terrorist is not only someone who plants bombs, but a person whose ideas are contrary to our Western, Christian civilization.”
What followed was a relentless campaign of state-sponsored terror that whisked people away to secret detention centers. The methods of torture included beatings, rapes and electrocutions with a prod known as a picana, sometimes done with a spray of water to conduct extra electricity. It was only in 1994 that a former naval captain confirmed the practice of “death flights.” He confessed to participating in “aerial transports” that involved drugging prisoners, stripping them naked and tossing them into the waters of the South Atlantic.
A prisoner who perhaps met that fate was Patricia Roisinblit, a former member of the Montoneros, a militant leftist group, along with her partner, José. The beginning of the Dirty War was so swift and brutal that by 1978 the Montoneros had mostly disbanded. Patricia and José settled into a quiet life of domesticity, opening a toy store and starting a family. When the couple were abducted in October 1978, the kidnappers dropped off their 15-month-old daughter with José’s relatives. Patricia and José were taken to a house west of Buenos Aires, where he was tortured and she was blindfolded and tied to a chair. She was eight months pregnant.
Gilliland’s book mostly follows the story of Rosa, Patricia’s mother, who became a core member of the Abuelas and tried for years to find out what happened to her only child and the baby that surviving witnesses said she delivered in captivity. But Gilliland also widens the lens to include the wrenching stories of other families. She brilliantly conveys the grim and tangled history of Argentina’s last five decades through the people who experienced it up close. She clearly explains the convolutions of the country’s politics as well as how the Abuelas’ searches were transformed by the sequencing of mitochondrial DNA.
You would have to harden your heart to be unmoved by the Abuelas’ quest — women who lost their children to unfathomable violence and dedicated the rest of their lives to locating their stolen grandchildren. But Gilliland is also frank about the stubborn quandaries that emerged as grandchildren were found. Over years and sometimes decades, some of the grandchildren had grown attached to their adoptive families. As one put it at a hearing, “For 22 years they were my parents and I love them.”
The Abuelas are also a constant reminder of a ghastly history that many Argentines are keen to forget. Gilliland’s appendix includes a list of the 139 children located so far (including some who died in utero); another list includes the many more who haven’t been found.
In the decade after the dictatorship, the country’s conservative press regularly cast the women as “vindictive shrews,” insisting that to “move on” from the trauma of the dictatorship “the country should not dwell on the past.” More recently, Argentina’s vice president, whose father was in the military in the 1970s, denounced the leader of the Abuelas as a “sinister figure”: “Because with that kind, grandmotherly face, the reality is that she has justified terrorism.”
“A Flower Traveled in My Blood” gets its title from a poem by Juan Gelman, whose son and pregnant daughter-in-law were disappeared during the Dirty War. In 2000, Gelman finally found his granddaughter. That same year, Rosa found her grandson. When Gilliland met with the 102-year-old Rosa in 2021, Rosa said something that could stand as a quiet rebuke to revisionist rationalizations: “I have always told my story exactly as it is. Nothing more. The truth, before everything.”
A FLOWER TRAVELED IN MY BLOOD: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children | By Haley Cohen Gilliland | Avid Reader Press | 472 pp. | $30
Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times.
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