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…”
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