Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo

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Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo

The mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo enter the former Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics detention center.
Formation	1977
Type	NGO
Legal status	Active
Headquarters	Plaza de Mayo
Location	Buenos Aires

The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo (Spanish: Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) is a human rights organization with the goal of finding the children stolen and illegally adopted during the 1976–1983 Argentine military dictatorship. The president is Estela Barnes de Carlotto.

The organization was founded in 1977 to locate children kidnapped during the repression, some of them born to mothers in prison who were later "disappeared", and to return the children to their surviving biological families. Around 30,000 people between the ages of 16 and 35 are believed to have disappeared; around 30% were women, and of those women, around 3% were pregnant.^[1] The work of the Grandmothers, assisted by United States geneticist Mary-Claire King, has led to the location of about 25 percent of the estimated 500 children kidnapped or born in detention centers. During the military era they were illegally adopted, with their original identities hidden.^[2][1]

By 1998 the identities of about 71 missing children had been documented. Of those, 56 were located alive and 7 others had died. The Grandmothers' work led to the creation of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team and the establishment of the National Bank of Genetic Data. Aided by breakthroughs in genetic testing, the Grandmothers succeeded in returning 31 children to their biological families.^[3] In 13 other cases, adoptive and biological families agreed to jointly raise the children after they had been identified. The remaining cases are bogged down in court custody battles between families.^[4] As of December 2022, their efforts have resulted in finding 131 grandchildren.^[5]

The kidnapped babies were part of a systematic government plan during the "Dirty War" to pass the children for adoption by military families and allies of the regime and thereby avoid raising another generation of subversives.^[2] According to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the junta feared that "the anguish generated in the rest of the surviving family because of the absence of the disappeared would develop, after a few years, into a new generation of subversive or potentially subversive elements, thereby not permitting an effective end to the Dirty War".^[4][6][7]

As an offshoot of the Silvia Quintela case, former dictator Jorge Videla was detained under house-arrest in 2010 on multiple charges of kidnapping children. In July 2012 he was convicted and sentenced to fifty years in prison for the systematic stealing of babies.^[8]

On 14 September 2011 the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo received the Félix Houphouët-Boigny Peace Prize in Paris for their work in defense of Human Rights.^[9]