By Dario Montero
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 1 2000 (IPS)

Argentine poet Juan Gelman’s quarter- century search for his missing granddaughter ended Friday, when Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle revealed that she was born here during the 1973-85 dictatorship and has lived here ever since.

Batlle revealed the identity of Gelman’s granddaughter, and said she was born in the Military Hospital in Montevideo in 1976.

Gelman, one of Latin America’s most well-known writers, whose search triggered an international clamour by prominent intellectuals and personalities, flew to Montevideo Thursday and was received by Batlle in the seat of government Friday.

“I have been looking for my grandchild for a long time,” and that is why “I asked the president for an interview, which was immediately granted, a sign of his humanitarian sentiments,” the poet told journalists after the meeting.

He asked the reporters to show comprehension and not reveal the name of his granddaughter, in order to “preserve her privacy and integrity, because she lives with a family that loves her.”

He added that he would make contact with the family in the next few days.

Batlle described the developments as “important for the life of any person, but also for Uruguayan society as a whole.”

In late April 1999, Gelman asked then-President Julio María Sanguinetti to help him investigate the fate of his grandchild and daughter-in-law, María Claudia García Irureta Goyena, who he said had been forcibly disappeared in Uruguay.

According to article four of a Uruguayan amnesty law passed by parliament in 1986 and approved by referendum in 1989, the executive branch is to carry out an investigation into the fate of the disappeared, although no administration has yet done so.

By Mar 1, the end of Sanguinetti’s term, Gelman had only been told that no children had been disappeared in Uruguay.

García Irureta Goyena, six months pregnant, was taken captive by the military in Buenos Aires in August 1976 – at the start of that country’s 1976-83 dictatorship – along with her husband, Marcelo Gelman, who was later found to have been killed by his captors.

Gelman said his daughter-in-law, 20, was taken two months later to Montevideo, after being held in the Automotores Orletti clandestine torture centre in Buenos Aires.

Her transfer to Uruguay took place in the framework of Operation Condor, which coordinated the repressive actions of the de facto regimes ruling the nations of the Southern Cone of the Americas in the 1970s and 1980s.

She gave birth in the Military Hospital, where she and the baby were last seen in late December 1976, Gelman told IPS in a February phone conversation from Mexico, where he has been living since fleeing into exile from Argentina in the 1970s.

On Oct 10, Gelman sent an open letter to Sanguinetti demanding information on the case of his daughter-in-law and listing the names of 23 Uruguayan officers who he said could provide information, according to his investigations.

One of the forms of cooperation under Operation Condor – in this case between military and police forces of the de facto regimes of Argentina and Uruguay – was the transfer of political prisoners between countries and the illegal adoption of infants born in captivity or young children kidnapped along with their parents.

In recent years, human rights organisations in Argentina have identified eight sons and daughters of Uruguayans who were forcibly disappeared in Buenos Aires. In several cases, the minors had been turned over to families with ties to those who were guilty for the disappearance of their biological parents.

In his frustrated attempt to obtain the assistance of Sanguinetti, Gelman won the support of human rights groups and personalities worldwide.

Among those who sent open letters to Sanguinetti last August in support of Gelman’s request that an investigation be carried out were Argentine writer and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Nobel Literature Prize-winners Darío Fó of Italy, Germany’s Günter Grass and Portugal’s José Saramago.

Others were British historian Eric Hobsbawm, singer-songwriters Chico Buarque (Brazil), Fito Páez (Argentina), Joan Manuel Serrat (Spain) and Daniel Viglietti (Uruguay), and Uruguayan writers Mario Benedetti and Eduardo Galeano.

Sanguinetti, who like Batlle belongs to the Colorado Party, issued a response to Gelman on Nov 5, saying he had carried out “discreet inquiries” and that there was no sign that García Irureta Goyena had been in Uruguay.

The then-president added that “no cases have been reported in Uruguayan territory of the loss of identity of minors like those that have occurred in Argentina.”

Sanguinetti also said that in any case, most of those who might have taken part in the disappearance of García Irureta Goyena “have either died or are elderly,” and “the immense majority of them are no longer subject to military authority or the authority of the Uruguayan state.

“I hope life returns your grandchild to you as soon as possible. I am telling you this as a person who has never harmed you or your family, who has never taken up a weapon to impose his own ideas on anyone, and who has never practiced political violence in any way,” he added.

Sanguinetti also accused Gelman of participating in a smear campaign against his government.

“In the midst of an election campaign, you have fed to exhaustion an effort to depict me as indifferent or insensitive to humanitarian demands. With that you have done nothing to those who deprived you of your grandchild, while distancing yourself from your longed-for objective and instead hurting a democrat,” he wrote.

At the end of his term, Sanguinetti reiterated that investigations by military justice had not come up with any result regarding the fate of Gelman’s daughter-in-law and grandchild.

Batlle’s announcement Friday encouraged the families of disappeared Uruguayans to continue demanding the truth about their lost loved ones, as they have done during the three democratically elected governments in office since the restoration of democracy (Sanguinetti’s two terms, 1985-90 and 1995-2000, and the government of Luis Alberto Lacalle, 1990-95).

According to an influential local human rights group, the Peace and Justice Service, most of the 156 Uruguayans who disappeared during the dictatorship went missing while in exile in Argentina.

During Argentina’s de facto regime, as many as 30,000 people became the victims of forced disappearance.

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