Practically all of Argentina has cried on this one,” says
Ignacio Montoya Carlotto,
patting his right shoulder. We are crisscrossing the old cobblestone
streets of San Telmo, the colonial district of the capital, Buenos
Aires. The 36-year-old musician, his crinkly curls prematurely greying,
his mouth fast to resolve into a smile, is not bragging. It’s impossible
to walk even one city block without someone rushing to hug him and then
burst into tears, as he predicted, on his rumpled T-shirt.
Maybe
it’s because, thanks to his grandmother, the whole of Argentina had been
waiting – praying – for more than 30 years for the day when he would be
“found”. Most Argentinians can remember exactly what they were doing
when that moment finally came in August last year.
“When I turned
80, I begged God not to let me die before I found my grandson,” says
Estela Carlotto. Estela has led an extraordinary life, rising from
tragedy into one of the most loved and respected public figures in
Argentina. It took four more years. “We all cried; everyone has
something to say about how they felt to have found this grandson we were
all searching for.”
Estela was a 47-year-old schoolteacher,
housewife and mother of three in November 1977 when a death squad from
Argentina’s 1976-83 dictatorship picked her daughter Laura off a street
in the city of La Plata where she lived, about 32 miles south of Buenos
Aires. Laura, a 22-year-old political activist, became one of the
thousands of young dissidents who were made to “disappear” by a bloody,
fascist regime. Unknown to Estela, her long-haired, strikingly beautiful
daughter was three months pregnant at the time of her abduction. She
was taken to a secret “detention centre” called La Cacha. There, in her
presence, they killed her companion and the father of the child she was
carrying, 26-year-old Walmir Montoya.
Ignacio was born in June
1978 while his mother Laura was still in captivity. One report states
she gave birth handcuffed and was allowed only five hours with her baby.
Two months later, she was dragged out of the camp and a mock armed
confrontation was staged by the military. When her body was turned over
to Estela, she had been shot through the stomach and her face was
smashed, apparently by a rifle butt. Survivors of the camp told Estela
about the birth, and that she had named the newborn Guido, after her
father.
For 36 years afterwards, Estela devoted herself to finding
her grandson. All she had was a name, Guido, and an approximate birth
date. An excruciatingly difficult search led her through three decades
of legal action against police officers, military officers and doctors
involved in the “missing grandchildren” cases. Leads were hard to come
by. Her grandson had been swallowed by the complicity and silence that
surrounded so many of the regime’s horrendous crimes.
Estela
realised there were many others like herself looking for the babies of
their “disappeared” daughters. They formed a group called the
Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo,
named after the city square facing the presidential palace in downtown
Buenos Aires where they marched, drawing attention to their plight. By
1989 Estela had become president of the association.
The group
believes there are some 500 cases of grandchildren born in captivity. In
most cases, the babies were turned over to military families to raise
as their own. In the warped thinking of the profoundly Catholic yet
murderous generals who ruled Argentina then, it would have been
unchristian to kill an innocent, unborn child by executing the expectant
mother. By the same token, in their macabre minds turning the babies
over to “good” military families to raise as their own represented the
ultimate victory over the “godless” left-wing enemy they wished to crush
into nonexistence.
Even now, three decades after the
collapse of the dictatorship, some Argentinians defend the military’s
campaign against Cuban-inspired guerrillas in the 1970s, but even the
most die-hard reactionaries draw the line at the baby-snatching cases.
Each DNA confirmation that a missing grandchild had been found and
reunited with their biological family, usually accompanied by legal
action against the “mother and father” who had appropriated them, has
been greeted with joy across the political spectrum.
Over three
decades of work, 113 cases had been resolved by the slowly ageing
grandmothers, but despite this, Estela Carlotto’s missing grandson
remained unaccounted for, which left a deep, unhealed wound in the
nation’s psyche. Despite being behind the restitution of the
grandchildren of so many of her fellow grandmothers, the white-haired,
softly spoken woman who had endeared herself as a perennial hopeful for a
Nobel Peace Prize for Argentina, and a worldwide symbol of peaceful
women’s activism, had not yet been able to find her own slain daughter’s
son. “I am such a well-known public figure,” says Carlotto. “Everybody
kept asking me: ‘When is it going to be your turn?’”
At the time
Ignacio Montoya Carlotto still believed he was Ignacio Hurban, the only
son of Juana and Clemente Hurban, a couple of humble rural workers who
lived near the city of Olavarría on a farm belonging to Francisco
Aguilar, a well-to-do, conservative landowner who died last year.
“A
few years ago I was watching television with my wife and Estela comes
on talking about the search for her grandson,” Ignacio tells me. “And I
said: ‘Look at this poor woman. It’s heart-breaking – she’s spent her
whole life searching, and she may never find him.’”
Ignacio had,
he says, a golden childhood. “I had a great life, but there was always
this background noise. I didn’t look like my parents.” Growing up on the
farm, surrounded by animals and cared for by those he still refers to
lovingly as “Mother and Father”, he became a voracious reader, excelled
in school, travelled to Buenos Aires to study music and finally returned
to Olavarría to become a successful music teacher and professional
musician with his own band, the
Ignacio Hurban Grupo.
“When
this all started,” he says. “I was scared of it devouring my whole
life. Things were really great for me, damn it. I was recording records
with musicians I respected, I was able to buy myself a brand-new car
working as a musician, teaching and playing the piano. I had my wife and
we were thinking of starting a family. And before that I had a healthy
childhood on the farm, with lots of love.”
It was precisely that
bucolic, protective environment in the deep countryside that made it
almost impossible for his despairing grandmother to find him. “Where he
was, 200 miles away in the middle of farm country,” says Estela, “I was
never going to find him.”
A year ago, on 2 June 2014, fate
intervened. It’s the date the then Ignacio Hurban has always celebrated
his birthday. Olavarría is a small city of only 111,000. Among them was
Celia Lizaso, a woman who knew the true story of his birth. “Celia
Lizaso was the daughter of a farmer who was very good friends with
Aguilar,” says Ignacio today. “She told my wife that I was adopted.”
After a tearful birthday dinner during which his wife revealed to him
the secret of his “adoption”, Ignacio went to see Lizaso, who had only
told his wife half the story. “She left out the part that I was the
child of a couple killed by the dictatorship.”
© Provided by Guardian News
Estela Carlotto sitting on a sofa, smiling
Both Ignacio’s adoptive parents are still alive and are
certain to face a judicial inquiry due to the fact that he was falsely
registered as their biological son. “When I went to them about it,” he
says, “they explained their reasons for not telling me. They are humble
farm people. They barely finished primary school.”
The
circumstances of their employment with Aguilar weighed heavily in the
equation, believes Ignacio. “They couldn’t have children, and Aguilar
gave them the opportunity of bringing them a child born from a woman who
didn’t want to have it, which was common in those days. They never
suspected anything. They believed their boss – he was like God to them:
they lived on his land and he was their only source of income.”
Ignacio
is convinced of their innocence and good intentions. “I realise the
sacrifices they made to raise me – I have nothing but gratitude for
that. I also understand that they were tricked, they were made to sign
things. They were made to believe things that weren’t true.”
Although
the details remain unclear, and there is a court investigation pending,
Ignacio has been able to piece together the essentials. Aguilar
received him from the military when he was probably only a few days old
and handed him over to the Hurbans, to raise as their own, with a solemn
warning never to tell anyone the truth. “Aguilar probably did it to
collaborate with the military,” he says. “Guys from his social
background, sucking up to power – he’d do anything to ingratiate himself
with some military officer. It’s kind of sad, actually.”
Ignacio
grew up knowing Aguilar and his children well. “The kids used to come
visit the farm. They live across from the music school where I teach.”
But he has never thought of crossing the street to pound their door in
anger. “Aguilar is dead and I’m told his widow has Alzheimer’s. That’s
for the courts to deal with, I trust justice. There’s only two things
that can affect families like that. Economic consequences, which is
losing what they have, because those families often are what they own,
or losing their prestige, and that they have definitely lost: their last
name is now associated with the worst crime in our history.”
He
is nonetheless adamant that Aguilar’s sons are innocent in the case.
“I’ve met them and talked with them about it. The father was
responsible, but the sons weren’t. They are victims of the shit their
father did.”
Over the decades of their search, it was inevitable
that some of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo died. The years are
ticking by ever faster for those still in the fight – Estela is 84. With
hundreds of grandchildren still unfound, they have set up a DNA bank
with samples from their own DNA to ensure that anyone who suspects they
are a “missing grandchild” can step forward after they are gone. In what
was probably one of the last acts of his life as Ignacio Hurban,
Estela’s missing grandson went to the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo,
took a DNA test and then went back to his daily life.
Estela says:
“Somebody told me – and he hasn’t denied it – that he said: ‘Well, if I
turn out to be the son of a “disappeared” couple, I want to be the
grandson of the top grandmother, Estela.’” But when the phone call came,
it not only showed that he was Estela’s grandson, it also revealed he
was the son of Walmir Montoya, Laura Carlotto’s slain secret boyfriend.
Suddenly the pieces fell into place. Montoya had been a drummer in a
rock band. Nicknamed Puño (Fist) as a baby by his mother, Montoya, as a
young man in the 1970s, soon gravitated to the
Montoneros guerrilla organisation.
He moved to La Plata, where he met Laura. They fell in love and lived
in hiding, in an unsuccessful bid to outrun the secret police.
In
2006 forensic anthropologists unearthed his bones in a common grave.
They found 16 bullet wounds, showing he was probably executed by machine
gun fire. In Caleta Olivia, the coastal town in Patagonia where he grew
up, a statue of Puño Montoya had been erected in his memory. Although
there’d been rumours, no one knew for certain that he had a child, least
of all his surviving 91-year-old mother, Hortensia Montoya, who also
received a phone call with the surprise DNA results.
“God has
given me a long life so that I could live to meet my grandson,”
Hortensia said to the press. Like Estela, Hortensia is an exceptional
woman, considered a pioneering teacher in Caleta Olivia. The two
grandmothers talked to each other in a joint radio interview after the
DNA results were announced, as a wave of joy swept across the nation.
“We still haven’t met, but I love you so much for sharing this wonderful
grandson with me,” Estela told Hortensia. Referring to the photos in
the press of her son Puño, Estela added: “Now I understand why my
daughter fell in love with your son.”
© Provided by Guardian News
Estela with her daughter Laura in the 1970s
The phone call to Ignacio Hurban had been made by Estela’s
younger daughter, who heads the DNA bank which holds the samples. “I
asked for time,” Ignacio says now. “But then I thought: ‘They’ve been
waiting for this for over 30 years. One more day for them must feel
fatal.’” What followed was a hurried 400km journey with his wife and a
group of their friends to meet the Carlottos in La Plata. “We left
early, avoiding the press. We got lost, we went round in circles, it was
a total scream.” By then Argentina’s media were staked out en masse in
front of Carlotto’s La Plata home, so they had to rendezvous at the home
of one of her daughters.
What the then Ignacio Hurban encountered
at the Carlotto home provoked something akin to culture shock. An only
son, raised among animals in a faraway farm, walked into a home where
Estela’s 13 other grandchildren, his cousins, aunts and uncles were
eagerly awaiting him. “It was meeting a whole family who are looking at
you and can’t believe it: ‘It’s impossible – he’s there!’ Seeing the joy
in their eyes simply because I was there – everybody crying, the hugs,
the emotion.”
His grandmother Estela understands: “We’re a noisy
bunch. He’s very quiet – I think he had more contact with animals than
with children of his own age growing up.”
“I was a mess when I
arrived after this long trip,” says Ignacio. As he got out of the car,
he was told his grandmother was inside.
Estela recalls: “‘That’s
my grandson,’ I thought. All the love I’d kept for him came over me, to
tell him how much I loved him, how much I’d looked for him. He stood his
ground, holding back. I, of course, had been travelling around the
world looking for a baby, looking for a child, looking for a young man,
and I’d always thought: ‘When I find him, you can all meet him because
you’ve all helped me look for him.’” She soon saw she had to be more
careful. “A grandmother’s anxiety wants everything to be fast, but
there’s been cases where it’s taken years for a grandchild to accept
their grandmother. So my advice to the grandmothers always is: give them
time – that’s how you show your love. You must not get angry, you must
not hurry them, you must demand nothing.”
For Ignacio, the sweetest moment came a few days later, when Hortensia Montoya arrived and the two grandmothers embraced.
“Meeting
my two grandmothers was the most moving thing,” he says, speaking with
passionate anger against the military who murdered his parents, “because
it was like: ‘Bam, there it is, this is it – we won, we did it, we’re
here, seeing each other, talking.’ Do you know what it was like hearing
those two women talking to each other? The ground shakes when they meet.
Two such powerful persons talking about their children, getting to know
each other through the love their children had, crying for joy in the
midst of this terrible tragedy.”
Ignacio has stood his ground by
refusing to give in to one of his grandmother’s most cherished wishes:
to rename himself Guido. “It hurt me when he said he didn’t want to
change his name,” says Estela, sadness clouding her voice. “‘If it’s a
boy, I want him to be called Guido,’ my daughter told one of her fellow
prisoners who survived. She must have called him Guido when he was in
her tummy; that has to resonate. But he told me he is Ignacio. It’s to
reaffirm himself after that explosion. I understood completely. So I
told him: ‘Look, I am going to call you Guido. I’ve been looking for you
for 36 years as Guido.’ And he accepted that. But now, I don’t know –
sometimes I avoid calling him Guido if he doesn’t want it.”
As the
night descends over Buenos Aires at the end of my time with him,
Ignacio Hurban is now fully transformed into Ignacio Montoya Carlotto
the rising musician, talking about his new project, the Ignacio Montoya
Carlotto Septeto. “They’re songs with folkloric roots, closer to folk
music than to tango.”
Driving his car through the busy streets of
Argentina’s capital, he seems slightly lost, far away from the quiet
night skies and open horizons of his home, asking for directions, on his
way to a rehearsal for a television show he will be performing on. He
insists that he will not give in to resentment nor will he feign a
suffering for what happened to his biological parents that he has not
felt himself.
“It was horrible, to be ripped from your mother, but
I have no recollection of that. Plus, what good would it do me to cry
for what could have been? Or to start living a life of suffering that I
have not lived? My parents suffered. When I think about what they went
through, it’s so sad, and that willingness to give up their lives for
their beliefs, such a strong will to go through with the pregnancy. It’s
incredible. But I didn’t live through any of that. My memories are of
growing up on the farm with a mother and a father. And they did
everything any other parents would have done.”
© Provided by Guardian News
Brute force: a protester against the regime is arrested in Buenos Aires.
It is difficult to say whether denial is at play in Ignacio’s
reasoning, although he himself admits to none. Perhaps he is that rare
thing, a person determined to make the best of the world he has been
born into, even if he discovers at the age of 36 that he had been “born”
into a false world, the victim of a heinous crime.
Meanwhile
Estela continues her work. She still travels to the offices of the
Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires every day. That’s about a
three-hour round trip. She travels continuously, carrying her message
around the world. Her grandson was the 114th missing grandchild to be
identified. Two more have been identified since then. Hundreds of others
remain unfound. She has no intention of stopping: “The only thought I
had was: Laura can rest in peace now. I felt Laura said to me: ‘Mother,
mission accomplished.’ But there’s so much still to do. I’m going to
keep looking for the other missing ones.”
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/a-grandmothers-36-year-hunt-for-the-child-stolen-by-the-argentinian-junta/ar-BBkN9rY
