Human rights organisation Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, has been at the forefront of the fight to find those born in captivity. Here the organisation’s president, Estela de Carlotto, shows the picture of a recovered grandchild (photo: Télam)
The trial of two doctors and a midwife, accused of kidnapping babies during the last military dictatorship, has began in Buenos Aires. It is the first time medical workers have been prosecuted for their role in falsifying the birth certificates of the babies born to those held in detention during the military regime.
The group are accused of being involved in the theft nine women’s babies, five of whom have since recovered their identities. All nine women were subsequently killed.
Prosecutors accuse doctors Norberto Bianco and Raúl Martín, and the midwife Luisa Yolanda Arroche, of “providing essential assistance” to hide the identities of the babies born in Campo de Mayo clandestine detention centre and hand them over to sympathisers of the military government to raise them as if they were their own.
Martín was the head of clinical services at the military hospital and has been accused of relaying information about the kidnapped women. Bianco, head of the hospital’s traumatology service, has been called a “key figure” in the theft of the children, and Arroche is accused of having falsified the birth certificate of one of the stolen babies, Francisco Madariaga Quintela.
It is estimated that around 500 children born in captivity and then stolen from their mothers during the 1976-83 military dictatorship. The human rights organisation Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo has since recovered 115 children, including the grandson of the president of the organisation, Estela de Carlotto.
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