MONTEVIDEO—More than 20 years of tireless effort finally paid off for Uruguayan Sara Méndez on March 19 when she was reunited with her son, Simón Riquelo. Méndez had help from an Uruguayan lawmaker, human rights groups, a journalist and an Argentine judge in locating her son.
Méndez was arrested July 13, 1976, in Argentina. When she was detained, her 20-day-old son was taken from her. Méndez was captured as part of Operation Condor, the coordinated repression by Southern Cone military regimes aimed at eliminating political opponents during the 1970s and 1980s.
Méndez says that Uruguayan soldiers broke into her Buenos Aires apartment, arrested her, and abducted her baby. Her abductors took Méndez to Automotores Orletti, a clandestine jail and torture center, and later returned her to Uruguay, where she was jailed until 1981. No one would tell her what had happened to Simón.
Since her release, Méndez has searched for her son [See María Delgado, “Looking for Simón,” NACLA, Vol. 34, No. 1,]. A breakthrough finally came when a former Argentine military officer told an Uruguayan journalist that the baby had been taken to a clinic and given to an adoptive family. The journalist contacted the Committee for Peace and Uruguayan Sen. Rafael Michelini, son of an Uruguayan senator assassinated in Buenos Aires in 1976. They located the clinic, which provided them with information about the baby. Michelini then began the painstaking investigation that finally led him to the family who adopted Simón, but who had never told him he was adopted. On March 3, when Simón returned from vacation, his family told him that he was adopted and that he was possibly the son of political prisoner whose child had been taken from her. Simón was willing to have DNA testing. Méndez went to Buenos Aires March 12 and met with Simón, although the results of the tests were still not in.
The waiting ended March 19 when the test confirmed that the young man was the son of Méndez and Mauricio Gatti, who had died from cancer a decade earlier in Europe. Méndez said this was a victory “in the battle against impunity. Those who have shared with me during these long years the hopes, the frustration, have the well-earned right, now that we have found Simón, to share the happiness.”
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