Development & Aid, Education, Headlines, Human Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: The Painful Path From Schoolteacher to Activist

Mario Osava

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jul 27 2004 (IPS) - Twenty-seven years separate the start of Estela de Carlotto’s teaching career and the second stage of her life, in which she became an activist with Argentina’s ”grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo” who have spent years searching for their missing grandchildren.

But there is an infinite distance between her work as a teacher, which was largely tranquil despite the contact with poverty, and the nightmare of the life of a woman who was pushed into activism by the forced disappearance of her daughter.

After winning Education International’s (EI) Human and Trade Union Rights Award, Carlotto, 73, said she would be overjoyed to trade in all of the prizes she has received – one of which was from the United Nations – to find the grandson she has never met.

The activist’s white hair and fragile aspect hide an iron will. She has never given up hope of one day finding her grandson, who she imagines ”strong and healthy” at the age of 26, ”short like my daughter, and like his daddy,” both of whom were killed in 1978 during the dirty war against leftists and other dissidents waged by Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship.

The human rights group that she heads, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo Civil Association, which took its name from the square in front of the seat of government in Buenos Aires where she and other mothers of the ”disappeared” gathered weekly, estimates that 500 children were stolen during the de facto regime by those who tortured and murdered their parents. So far 77 have been found.

Human rights groups put the number of victims of forced disappearance during Argentina’s dictatorship at 30,000.

Although their missing grandchildren would now be adults, the hope of finding them has not died. Eighteen have been identified in the past seven years, the most recent of whom was Juan Alfonsín Cabandié, who was found in January.

The EI award also recognised Carlotto’s work as an educator. The prize carries the name of Mary Hatwood Futrell, in homage to the outgoing president of the worldwide organisation of teachers’ unions, who held that post since the EI was founded in 1993.

IPS interviewed Carlotto during the EI’s Fourth World Congress, held Jul. 22-26 in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

In 1951 Carlotto began to teach in ”a little schoolhouse” on the outskirts of her city, La Plata, the capital of the eastern province of Buenos Aires, where she came into contact with poverty – ”children who fell asleep on their desks for lack of food” and ”who sometimes missed class because they had no shoes to wear.”

The school was in an impoverished semi-rural area, and Carlotto taught ”language, math, geography, music and theatre” to third to sixth-grade students all together in one classroom. She also took them on field trips to Buenos Aires, 40 km away, ”so they could have in school a life that they couldn’t have in their homes,” she told IPS.

She eventually became a school principal and the chair of an education council that reached decisions on promotions without permitting political favours. She lived through successive reforms of the educational system, which were affected by budget cuts, an increase in ”vertical” decision-making, and ”a growing lack of respect for teachers and students.”

But her life took a violent turn after the Mar. 24, 1976 military coup d’etat. First her husband was taken away by the security forces in August 1977. He was tortured and went missing for 25 days, but was finally released after she paid the equivalent of 40,000 dollars.

In December that year her daughter Laura, two-and-a-half months pregnant, was abducted and ”disappeared” along with her husband.

Her husband was killed shortly after they were kidnapped. But Laura was held in one of the 340 clandestine torture centres that the armed forces set up around the country, and was not killed until Aug. 25, 1978, two months after she had her baby.

The concentration camp where she was held served as a kind of macabre ”maternity ward” under a policy which involved the systematic theft of the babies and small children of political prisoners – a ”distinctive perversion” thought up by Argentina’s de facto regime, said Carlotto.

Most of the children were raised by military families.

The day before Laura was killed, Carlotto found out from a couple who had been held in the same clandestine prison that her daughter had given birth to a baby boy, and that the military had promised to release her soon.

But her family only received her ”broken body, and no news” of the baby. Years later, the courts found that Laura had been shot in the head at point-blank range.

”Another Estela emerged after my daughter was disappeared”, said the activist.

The search for the missing grandchildren became her life, and led her to retire as a teacher and join the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, one of the organisations created by the mothers who met every Thursday to slowly walk in circles – they were not allowed to stand still – in front of the seat of government during the dictatorship to demand that their children be returned alive.

One of the victories of their struggle was that former general Benito Vignone, the last head of the ruling junta, who claims he has been ”persecuted” by Carlotto since 1983, is now ”under arrest for the theft of babies.”

She said that through the mediation of Vignone’s sister, a fellow educator, she was able to meet with the then dictator in December 1977.

He received her ”like a crazy man, with a revolver on the table,” and when she pleaded for Laura’s life, he responded that in Argentina the dissidents would be executed to avoid ”what happened in (neighbouring) Uruguay,” where political prisoners were held for years, and were sometimes able to influence their guards, with their leftist ideas.

Today, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo is a ”complex organisation” that provides psychological assistance to young adults who suspect they are one of the children stolen in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has a genetic databank containing blood samples from families of the ”disappeared”, and carries out campaigns to raise public awareness on the search for the missing grandchildren.

At the Olympic Games in Athens, which begin in August, athletes from Argentina will hold up banners announcing their support for the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, said Carlotto.

‘Identity, Family, Freedom’ is the group’s slogan, she said, explaining that the concept of ”identity” has taken on unique connotations in Argentina.

There is even a National Commission for the Right to an Identity (CONADI), a government agency set up to help search for the missing grandchildren.

Many young Argentines born between 1975 and 1983 are plagued by questions about their true origins, as shown by the hundreds of young adults who have contacted the Grandmothers or CONADI with doubts about their identity.

Carlotto is still an educator, but now she is specifically dedicated to teaching human rights, with an emphasis on the right to an identity – issues that she is happy to say have been introduced into the training programmes of the armed forces and police in Argentina, after overcoming ”great resistance.”

She also said she is proud of having educated, in the area of human rights, the two police officers who have been assigned to protect her since unknown gunmen opened fire on her home with a machine-gun two years ago.