ARGENTINA: Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo announce discovery of missing child kidnapped from "disappeared" Chilean activists during the "Dirty War"

Record ID: 174040

  • Title: ARGENTINA: Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo announce discovery of missing child kidnapped from "disappeared" Chilean activists during the "Dirty War"
  • Date: 7th August 2013
  • Summary: IMAGE OF THE IDENTIFIED MAN WHEN HE WAS A BABY CARLOTTO WITH PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE PARENTS OF THE BABY PHOTOGRAPH OF THE FATHER, ANGEL ATHANASIU PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MOTHER, FRIDA LASCHAN
  • Embargoed: 22nd August 2013 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Argentina
  • Country: Argentina
  • Topics: History,Politics
  • Reuters ID: LVA1JBNNJWZUAB0MR0H48MVTFF3H
  • Story Text: A 38-year-old kidnap victim taken from his parents during Argentina's "Dirty War" has been identified as the child of "disappeared" Chilean activists, a human rights group announced on Wednesday (August 07).
    Paul Germain Athanasiu Laschan becomes the 109th stolen child identified by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a group formed to search for babies taken from political prisoners during the 1976-1983 dictatorship.
    Genetic analyses show that the 38-year-old man is the son of Frida Laschan and Angel Anthanasiu, members of Chile's Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) who fled to Argentina to escape the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Athanasiu Laschan was an infant when he was kidnapped with his parents in 1976 in Argentina.

    "In those conversations that the young people of our team had to approach (him), he was very friendly, he listened to them and agreed to a hematic (blood) sample so that an analysis could be done and compared. Yesterday there was a positive response from the national bank of genetic data of 99.99 percent that he was the son of the Laschan Athanasiu couple," said Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
    The missing children - stolen from their parents and illegally adopted, often by military families - are one of the most painful legacies of the crackdown on leftist dissent in which rights groups say up to 30,000 people were killed.

    "So the issue is that there have been victims of what has been shown to have existed, that was Plan Condor. They were foreigners and therefore went to Automotores Orletti, which was the place where they took foreign prisoners and they were victims of Plan Condor, because many of us have grandchildren who were also victims of Plan Condor, who crossed the borders of neighbouring countries without any authorization, they were open borders for the exchange of their prisoners," de Carlotto said.
    Buscarita Roa, a Chilean member of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, said it will take some time for the news to register, as it has with other children taken from their parents.

    "He is still processing this message that has arrived to him, because ... I think that they have no idea what it means to be taken, to think that this family was his parents, suddenly to find out that they were not and to have to begin the work within all of this. It is not easy for any of the grandchildren that we have found, it costs them a lot," Roa said.
    Although more than 100 of the children have discovered their true identities, many families are still searching more than three decades later.
    Activists say there could be several hundred more individuals who do not know they were taken as babies from their parents.
    Some of the stolen babies were born to women held at clandestine torture centres. Nurses have told how some babies were breast-fed by their mothers for several days, while others were taken away immediately.
    There were no birth certificates, making the task of identifying them and reuniting them with their parents' relatives painstaking and lengthy.
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