Yet it proved easier to hide the truth from Gonzalo and Matias than from the rest of the world. One of the Miaras’ relatives suspected that the boys’ real parents had been tortured and killed by associates of the man who was teaching them to respect authority and hate “communists.” The relative disclosed his doubts to the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, an organization of women investigating the disappearances of their children and grandchildren. Fifteen years later the fight to recover the teenagers continues, testing the limits of Argentine politics and the law. The case has come to symbolize the lingering torment not only of the broken families, but also of a society that wants desperately to obliterate the demons of the “dirty war.”
After taking power in 1976, the Argentine military stamped out leftist subversion by “disappearing”-murdering-between 9,000 and 15,000 people, many of them leftist guerrillas, but many more peaceful dissidents. The victims were dumped into mass graves or dropped alive from helicopters thousands of feet above the Rio de la Plata. And more than 140 pregnant women were kept alive just long enough to give birth to children who became the living spoils of war. At least 60 other infants were abducted with their parents and also vanished.
Of the 217 reported cases, the Grandmothers have located 51 children. A few were adopted by families who had no idea where the children came from. Others were given to couples with close ties to the military or political elite. Many children of the disappeared ended up with police and military officers, in some cases the very ones suspected of killing their real parents.
After the end of military rule in 1983, Raul Alfonsin, the first post-junta president, not only put the top generals on trial, he appointed a prosecutor to formally push for the children’s return to their biological kin. He also set up the National Bank of Genetic Data, which stores blood samples of 320 families related to the children. Through the process of genetic “fingerprinting,” forensic-medicine specialists have matched the blood of some children of the disappeared with that of relatives. As a result, 25 children were restored to their real families; 13 remained with adoptive families by mutual agreement with the biological families. The rest still don’t know who they are. Alfonsin, shaken by several coup attempts, exonerated midlevel officers, then called off the military trials altogether. Although the children’s cases were exempted from the amnesty, not a single case involving children of the disappeared has been resolved since January 1989, when the case of Ximena Vicario turned a searchlight on the issue.
Ximena was 2 months old when she arrived at a state orphanage in 1977 wearing a sign that said: I AM THE DAUGHTER OF SUBVERSIVES. THEY KILLED MY PARENTS TODAY. A therapist at the orphanage fell in love with the baby and decided to keep her. The baby’s grandmother tracked her down in 1983 and eventually won her restitution. But Ximena didn’t want to go, and her adoptive mother staged a last-minute protest. “I’ll commit suicide before I go with that crazy old woman,” the child wailed.
“Ximena’s case kept me up for nights,” recalls Horacio Cattani, a federal court judge who helped decide the case. “I’ve had homicides and everything, but I’ve never had to resolve such a difficult question. My friends said, ‘How can you do this, opting for the family of the womb over the family of the heart?’ But we knew that we had to change the power relations, so that she could escape the lie and start living the truth.” And while Ximena has recovered-living happily with her grandmother in Rosario-the system has not. Her case set off a public backlash. The Supreme Court concluded that the decision was flawed. It didn’t annul the ruling, but it made future restitutions more difficult by limiting appeals by the biological families.
That has left the twin boys Gonzalo and Matias as the most prominent of the unresolved cases. They still have not learned the truth about their parents, but in 1988, Miara told them they were adopted-the “gift,” he said, of his police commander. “It was a huge shock,” recalls Matias.
The Miaras were extradited from Paraguay to stand trial for allegedly appropriating the children. They admitted that the twins were not their natural children, but federal Judge Ricardo Pons released the couple after 10 days in jail. The twins’ blood test confirmed that they were not the Miaras’. But it also showed that they were not the lost children of the family that had been claiming them for five years. Judge Pons made a startling decision. Despite all the doubts-Miara’s confession, the atrocities he allegedly committed in the dirty war, the continuing search for the twins’ true family in the Genetic Bank-Pons handed the boys back to the Miaras on July 11, 1989, three days after President Carlos Saul Menem was inaugurated. With the search still on, Pons warned the Miaras, “you will have the sword of Damocles hanging over your head.”
Make that two swords: Eduardo Tolosa and his 73-year-old father, Hipolito, a retired lawyer who has taken the twins as his last case. In October 1989, blood tests indicated the twins were almost certainly the sons of Tolosa’s sister, Maria Rosa. Immediately, the Tolosas attacked a judicial system they consider beholden to the military. They lambasted Pons for giving the twins back to the Miaras. “It was an act of hatred,” Eduardo says. Pons, offended, removed himself from the case. When the new judge, Ricardo Weschler, declared the blood tests void-because one sample had come from the United States-the Tolosas were livid. The annulment, though eventually overruled by a superior court, delayed the case nearly two years. Weschler has now kept Samuel Miara in jail for 13 months on evidence of illegal appropriation of the children and evasion of justice. But even with the prosecutor’s recommendation on his desk since October-asking 20 years for Miara, 10 for his wife-he has not ruled on their fate or on where the children will go. “Your judgeship’s unexplainable delay,” Hipolito wrote Weschler, “brings moral torture on the grandchildren and their blood relatives.”
Yet Weschler faces a torturous dilemma. The twins, unlike others who have been returned, are not young children anymore; they are nearly 16. “It’s like with plants,” argues Beatriz Miara. “If you try to replant them when they’re old, they have little chance of survival.” The boys, too, say they want to stay with the Miaras. “Tolosa will never be able to separate me from my parents,” says Matias. “He wants me to go from being one human being to another, but he can’t change me because I have already assumed an identity.” Do they have any say in their future? How much of their upbringing is now part of their own identity? Can the Tolosas, a poor family destroyed by the war, offer the twins enough emotional and physical sustenance? And if they are returned, could either side recover from all the hate? “Nobody knows exactly what the psychological effects would be,” admits Gustavo Bruzzone, the prosecutor who filed the accusation against Miara. “But the legal path is clear: the rights of blood relatives prevail and the state cannot allow the kidnapping of children.”
Politics has slowed the wheels of justice in these cases, and President Menem helped create the obstacles. A former political prisoner himself, he flew to Asuncion in 1987 to ask for the twins’ extradition. “Argentina,” he said then, “needs the full application of the law.” Yet in December 1990, he declared a full amnesty for all military officers, arguing that it would close the wounds of the war. Said prosecutor Mariano Ciafardini, “Now there is no political will to resolve these cases.”
But one force may prevail over political will: international pressure. The Organization of American States (OAS) opened an investigation of the twins’ case in late 1991, responding to a formal complaint lodged by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They based their claim on the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which recognizes a child’s right to be with his real family and outlines international standards for adoption. The Argentine government agrees, but has told the OAS’s human-rights commission that “due to the separation of powers, the executive branch cannot intervene.” In October 1992, Zelmira Ragazzoli, under secretary for human rights in the Foreign Ministry, asked the OAS to rule that the case is “not susceptible to a decision at the present time.”
Still, President Menem met with the Grandmothers last July and, in October, set up the National Commission for Identity Rights, with broad powers of subpoena and investigation. Judge Weschler met with an OAS envoy late last year and has started talking, for the first time, about the twins’ definitive restitution to the Tolosa family-not just visitation rights. The next OAS meeting on the twins’ case is scheduled for late February. If the boys are not returned by then, the Grandmothers warn, they may push Congress to open impeachment proceedings against Weschler.
Time is running out on the Grandmothers. And they know it. The twins have become an important symbol, but many more children of the disappeared are still out there, not yet discovered or delivered. Five other custody battles are slogging on. And the remaining 166 or so missing children are getting harder to find. Estela Barnes de Carlotto president of the Grandmothers’ association, suspects that many are in the hands of the military. “Unlike the police, military officers live in a social caste where nobody enters. So we don’t have as much information about them,” says Carlotto. “But good gracious, if a group of old women without political or economic power has been able to find 51 children, how many more could the government find if it tried?”
title: “The Lost Generation” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-20” author: “Amy Tindle”
Whoever.
Whatshisname.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world and you thought you had a really rich contract with Titleist or Callaway or somebody, but now it’s chump change compared to what HE’s got.
But then, you’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world and nobody even cares anymore what ball you’re playing.
Or what you’re wearing.
Or what you’re hitting with.
Or, for that matter: what your name is.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and when the guy next to you on the airplane finds out what you do for a living, he asks you if you know HIM.
And what’s HE really like?
And what’s Fluff, HIS caddie, really like?
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world and when you arrive at the tournament, everybody tells you, isn’t it wonderful because HE will actually play here this week.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and while you’re certainly not as stupid as Fuzzy, you are human, you’re one of the boys, and did-you-hear-the-one-about, and now, can you believe this, all of a sudden, because of HIM, you’re the minority?
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and you remember when you made your first 36-hole cut at a tournament, won $640 for finishing tied for 24th place, went out and applied for an American Express card.
Now you’ve moved up to the Platinum card, but all of a sudden HE is the American Express card. And you can’t even leave home without HIM.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and you hit it right on the button, perfect, right down the middle, 270 yards, and that leaves you only 60 yards short of HIM, because he kinda misplayed his drive.
But, anyway, you absolutely are The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and, after all, you’re playing a game for mature, thinking men, where physical prowess is only part of the act, and you’ve miscalculated with the four-iron and put the ap- proach short in the trap, whereas HE faded the eight-iron hole high, two feet straight in for the birdie.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and HE doesn’t even know you’re the guy paired with him today, but already you’re thinking that maybe, just maybe, HE can’t play a Scottish links course all that well the first time, in a few weeks, so there’s at least one tournament all year I got an outside chance in.
If the wind really blows like a madman off the Firth of Forth.
And HE doesn’t like the food.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and your agent keeps telling you that if you just put a little snap in your best Arnold Palmer anecdotes, you can maybe get a shot on Leno or Letterman, or, for sure, a pop on Tom Snyder … but HE’s already done Oprah and Barbara Walters and turned down the president.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, but away from a tournament city, you can’t even get a good table at a steakhouse, because nobody knows you from the Culligan Man, but already HIS mother has a Q-rating higher than Tea Leoni or Craig T. Nelson and HIS father just sold his book to Miramax.
Starring Bill Cosby, no doubt. With Wilford Brimley as Fluff.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world and you finally got a deal to represent a resort in Florida with a certified PGA course and a mall. Already, though, HE’s got a deal representing a whole country.
Thailand.
I forget: Is Asia just a tour or is it a whole continent, too?
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, so why are you already looking ahead to the senior tour on ESPN2?
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and you’ve reached a point where maybe you win a couple more majors, and they mention you in the same breath as Snead or Nelson, but all of a sudden you realize nobody even heard of Snead or Nelson anymore.
Also, for that matter, now, nobody anymore ever heard of Jones or Hogan or Nicklaus.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world and nobody even stays still and quiet when you putt out, because they’ve got to run to get a good spot so they can shout “You The Man” louder than the other butt-kissing, putter-sniffing guys when HE tees off.
You’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, longtime par-busting star of the tour, and suddenly you realize there is no “tour.” It is just HIS show.
But then, you’re The Second-Best Golfer in the world, and suddenly you understand: there is no second-best golfer in the world.
And, you’re the second-best golfer in all the world of golf, and then you realize there is no golf anymore. It is just HIM, playing around.
It is just Tiger Woods.
Alone.
And this is the way it’s going to be for another 20 years.
Mind if I play through?
