The Government of Argentina and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo
In reality, governments do not change
simply because a spotlight is on them.
They know what to do in the spotlight
to allow themselves to continue, unabated.
They’ve perfected it down to the point
that it can be found in the wording
of any of their standard forms.
It took me several years to stop cowering in fear out of habit. I spent those years in England, still being sent off on late-night excursions to questionable labs and medical facilities. It felt so much like living back “home” with my abductor again that I thought the feeling must all be in my head, like a lingering sense that I couldn’t quite shake off. It wasn’t until I took a drug test to confirm my suspicions, and it detected Rohypnol and ketamine, that it truly occurred to me that what I was experiencing wasn’t simply exhaustion and a lingering memory. What I was feeling was a combination of my situation and the familiar experience of significant and consistent drugging.
During those years, dragging through and trying to put my thoughts together rationally despite the drugs clouding my mind, I finally looked back at the life I had lived and what I had been involved in. It appeared like a nuclear explosion on the landscape, only growing larger the further away I ran. When I had been in the center of it, it felt personal and tangible. But at a distance, I began to understand what a giant it truly was. I couldn’t find adequate words to describe my relationship with it.
I completed my research on where I had been kidnapped from originally and found the name and location of the Argentine prison that had been my earliest home. I reached out to the “Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo” organization in charge of helping us lost children to return home under the “right to seek identity,” as they called it.
Unfortunately, it was then that I realized that while I had escaped one mess, there was another one there to greet me upon my exit.
They weren’t ready to accept me back into their fold. They asked for my papers. I didn’t have the original ones from Argentina, so I gave them the falsified ones from the United States, assuming two things that were incorrect:
1. They actually wanted to find the children who were sent internationally.
2. They knew how to start the process and would look into the identity papers of someone illegally adopted from their country to confirm if the identity was a forgery or not.
That Argentine office never called the issuing North American Vital Statistics Office to confirm if the forged birth certificate was valid or not. And as mentioned, it’s not valid, something that has caused me multiple issues throughout life and left me with sporadically accessible ID. It has the very real discrepancy of being filed several years after my birth and not until after I was trafficked out of Argentina. That North American vital statistics office, in the time period in which I was born and trafficked, always recorded births within weeks, not years. Because my “U.S. birth record” was filed three years after I was born, and thus was placed in the order and year in which it was received, and thus in the 1980 birth records book despite having a 1977 birth date on it, it has triggered their fraud alert multiple times over the decades. In addition, the hospital listed on it has never had any record of my birth. Any of this could have been confirmed with a call.
I was in communication with that United States Vital Statistics Office at that time (after a lifetime of them not being able to locate the document reliably, I tend to make contact before, during, and after any official inquiries into it, primarily to point them to the 1980 records book to make sure they can locate the document) and confirmed that Argentina never contacted them to verify or inquire about the identity. Instead, the Argentine office told me, within an hour of my submitting the ID, that it was a beautiful ID and I should be happy for it. Then they quit responding to me. That was 2012.
Things were fairly quiet for a few years on the American front until a series of events caught my eye even from an ocean away. The recruiter’s younger son, who was in Asia at the time, broke up with his then-wife. The wife took one of their children (to protect the child’s privacy because he’s still fairly young, I’ll call him Sam) and returned to Russia, where she was from. The recruiter was not happy about this. She was in child-collecting mode and wanted the boy.
The recruiter already had one of her grandsons in her custody by that point (I’ll call him Tim). The recruiter had used her son in court to remove custody from Tim’s mother (one of her son’s previous wives – an impoverished American mother who couldn’t win in court against that much money) and then the recruiter took Tim for herself. He did not stay with his father even though that father had been granted custody. Are you following so far?
Shortly after the Russian mother brought Sam, the first grandchild I mentioned (there are many, but I’m only discussing these two), to Russia, she came down with a sudden case of stage 4 cancer and died extremely quickly. Her son, Sam, ended up in America with the recruiter. He did not stay with his father. Now, the recruiter had two boys in her custody again, just like she had before me.
Within a fairly short amount of time, Sam came down with lymphoma (cancer). Normally, this wouldn’t be concerning (other than general concern for his health). However, the recruiter had a history of people developing cancer around her if they fell into one of three categories:
1. People she was exploiting for cash and/or research.
2. People she did not like.
3. Family members, including those not biologically related to her.
The same recruiter who used to tell me stories about how she would inject mice with cancer cells in the lab.
Not that the story about the mice was really enough to concern me, or even the fact that the recruiter appeared to be the source of a cancer cluster in her own right. I’d heard and dealt with a lot in my life regarding her; I couldn’t spend my time panicked by all of it. But there was the issue of the recruiter’s ex-husband’s demise still fresh in my mind. He had gone to dinner with her one evening (a very rare event), and before the next morning, he was in the hospital with sudden acute leukemia. One of the two primary causes of the condition is radiation poisoning, and the recruiter had access to radioactive materials from her work. He never recovered and he ended up dying within a few short months.
So, when I saw that Sam now had cancer, and I noted all the fundraisers for him popping up on the internet, and the recruiter looked like she would be raking in somewhere around $11,000 in funds just from what was published (an online fundraiser plus an at-school fundraiser and possibly a third one by a school club), I became reasonably concerned that she was making Sam into a cancer cash cow. It reminded me of how she had used me in paid cancer research when I was a child in order to collect the stipend money they offered to parents. It looked like she was still up to her old methods of gaining an income at the expense of a child in her home.
Image Source: GoFundMe
“…5 month chemotherapy treatment regime. …The main goal right now is to raise enough money to get … and his grandmother a vehicle to travel to all of his appointments. … truly appreciates everyone helping him out and supporting him on his road to defeat cancer.
Text Source: GoFundMe
I contacted the authorities in the United States because a child was involved and I was an adult now. I felt obligated to. For once, they actually did something. They removed Sam from the recruiter’s custody. So, the recruiter brought her son in from Asia. She got him a plane ticket, paid for his attorney, and brought him to the court to go up against Child Protective Services. The judge ruled in his favor and handed Sam into his custody because he was the father. Then, he left the country and left Sam with the recruiter. I don’t know what happened after that. I cannot fix broken people and a broken system on my own. I’ve tried. I probably should have tried harder, but honestly, I’m so accustomed to defeat. I mean, look at my life. It’s all been defeat when it comes to these things. I felt that it was a miracle that I had even managed to get the child a short break away from the recruiter.
I went back to focusing on life around me and I stopped looking at anything going on in America. It was too painful to watch.
This was the image that made me turn away in sadness. Remember when the recruiter tried to get me to sleep with an exposed radium dial under my pillow when I was so small? When she told me brain cancer was a wonderful thing to develop and that I might get lucky if I slept with the radium under my pillow for long enough? When I looked at this picture, with the plastic table dragged in from outside to create the illusion of poverty, it wasn’t the plastic I saw. It was the depression-era antique uranium plates that she had carefully collected over the years and never served anyone on until she had those boys in her custody. The same antique uranium plates the Environmental Protection Agency says not to eat from due to potential radiation toxicity.
Image Source: Additional GoFundMe
The same plates that reliably set off every single one of her Geiger counters.
Image: Uranium Depression Glass Plates
Image Source: The Vintage and Antiques
She was still playing her favorite at-home game that always made her smile when I was little – child radiation Russian roulette.
Image Source: Environmental Protection Agency
“Glassmakers used small amounts of uranium to create yellow and green glass (Vaseline glass)…
…Do not use ceramics like… Vaseline glass to hold food or drink. They can chip, and you can ingest particles of uranium with your food or drink.
…Do not take apart radium watches or instrument dials. Radioactive antiques are usually not a health risk as long as they are intact and in good condition.”
Text Source: Environmental Protection Agency
I also recognized the drink in her hand. She doesn’t drink milk, but she does chelate when exposed to possible radiation contamination in food. I know. I learned it from her when I was growing up. And I remembered because, with being forced to eat the food she served, I felt it was better for my survival if I knew as well.
Image Source: Current Medical Chemistry via National Library of Medicine
“The removal of plutonium by chelating agents is of great importance… Similarly, uranium is a radionuclide, which causes severe renal dysfunction within a short time period due to chemical toxicity. It may also induce cancers such as leukemia and osteosarcoma in cases of long-term internal radiation exposure. Investigations on chelating agents… were initiated in the 1960’s and 1970’s.”
Source: Current Medical Chemistry via National Library of Medicine
Every few years I would attempt to contact the Argentine NGO again, contact other related offices, contact external trafficking NGOs, and contact offices within Argentina’s government. In two separate cases, workers from within Argentina’s government told me that I had the right to seek my identity without having to show the documents from that identity first. One told me to sue the Abuelas organization (the gatekeepers for the DNA testing) in court for that right (an attempt a human rights attorney in the Netherlands told me would cost more than the purchase of a new house after she offered to write a “strongly worded letter” for approximately $4000 U.S. dollars to start the process).
The most helpful Argentine government worker advocated for me directly with the Abuelas. They chose to ignore him. Most of that happened, primarily, between 2015 and 2020. I went through one final round in 2023 and copied in around twenty offices. The silence of their response had depth.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, they have a very standard policy of rejecting our requests to seek our identities. I’ve spoken to other victims of theirs, all international cases. They’ve used various tactics, including saying, “We’re working on it,” for nearly a decade now in the case of a child they abandoned in an orphanage in another part of South America.
The deceptive con they use most often is that they “cannot” open a case to search for an internationally trafficked child’s legal identity and documentation unless that child somehow managed to keep a government ID and documentation from the country they were trafficked from.
Images Source: Author’s Personal Emails (First Image: Automatically Translated to English, Second Image: Original Email)
“Unfortunately without the documentation we cannot start the file at CONADI.”
Text Source: Author’s Personal Emails
They deny the right to begin a case to search. I’ve tried multiple times through their various agencies and always get the same standard form rejection, stating that they cannot proceed to help me locate my original government documents from Argentina unless I can provide them with my original government documents from Argentina first. This standard response happens regardless of how much or little I explain or beg, or how many different ways I explain it.
Images Source: Author’s Personal Emails (First Image: Automatically Translated to English, Second Image: Original Email)
“We ask you again to send us the following information:
- Attach the documentation that proves your identity”
Images Text: Author’s Personal Emails
The government agencies and the NGO use the same form with the same requirements and the same standard form rejection. It’s not left versus right or NGO versus government. They work together, feed off each other, support each other financially, and keep that entire country bound by their eternal political back-and-forth theatrics while they bury the children beneath their feet. They do it together, as a team.
Images source: Author’s Personal Emails (First Image: Automatically Translated to English, Second Image: Original Email)
“Automated response” only.
Images Text: Author’s Personal Emails
To reiterate (probably because I’ve lived through this dismal interaction with them so many times that I feel like it needs to be repeated at least half as many times as I’ve dealt with them):
Their denial is always based on our lack of having the documents of the identity we seek.
They only help us seek our legal identity and its documents if we already have that identity and its documents. That’s not ethical, legal, sane, or human.
Image Source: Author’s Personal Emails
“Do you have any information that proves the context in which your birth appears to have occurred? That is, a birth certificate or certificate…
At least you could tell us in which country you were born and in which civil registry you were registered… it is the minimum we need to move forward…”
Text Source: Author’s Personal Emails
(I’d told that person the country of my birth was Argentina and the city most likely Buenos Aires at least ten times by that point, and then they simply stopped responding.)
If they had not erased our identities, if they had not trafficked us internationally, we would still have the identity documents they now demand from us before they will recognize us as humans with the right to seek our identities.
The majority of us were infants and toddlers when we were taken overseas.
Very few of us who went internationally (if any) retained an Argentine ID. Human trafficking and illegal adoption of war orphans often result in the loss of our identities from our original countries. This is an issue that most of us outside of Argentina are well aware of.
Image Source: Public Broadcasting Service
“A worker with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Saigon, Bobby Nofflet, recalled the tumultuous days of Babylift: ‘There were large sheaves of papers and batches of babies. Who knew which belonged to which?’
The Babylift lawsuit argued that many of the children in the airlift were not orphans, had been given up under duress during wartime, and that the U.S. government had an obligation to return them to their families. Attorney Tom Miller said that he brought Vietnamese birth parents into the courtroom to plead for their children, but to no avail. Judge Spencer Williams eventually threw out the Babylift case, declaring it to be 2,000 separate cases. ‘He sealed the records, and told us we could not contact any of the Vietnamese families and let them know where their children were,’ said Miller.
…Eventually only twelve children were reunited with their Vietnamese parents, but only after many years and lawsuits.…For a number of Babylift adoptees, finding their birth parents is essentially impossible, because no records exist.”
Text Source: Public Broadcasting Service
Argentina, like many of the worst countries, simply and selfishly uses the excuse of bureaucracy and horrific policies designed to intentionally deny us the right to open a case, no matter what our situation is, so they can continue the war crime of removing children from their group (UN definition of genocide, section E). When that does not work, they resort to hazing behaviors.
Image Source: United Nations
“Article II In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily … harm to members of the group;…
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Text Source: United Nations
They believe they can abuse us and get away with it because we have no one, we were sold to our enemies, and we do not have legal identification. They take advantage of what they see as our weak position.
They fought me tooth and nail, refusing to let me have a DNA test to confirm my genetic identity and compare it against their database of the victims and family members of victims from the war I had been born into. The database they gatekeep.
Images Source: Author’s Personal Emails (First Image: Automatically Translated to English, Second Image: Original Email)
“The (genetics) bank only works with cases sent through CONADI or Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.”
Text Source: Author’s Personal Emails
I was left with nothing but waning faith. All the years of my life, despite being a realist for the single necessity of survival, I had kept one fairytale alive – the belief that there was good where I had come from, that there were souls and kindness in Argentina like the beauty I had seen in my mother.
Giving up on the bureaucrats, I called the prison. After all, I remembered which cell had been mine. They informed me that they did not keep records of the people in their prison, ever, and that no one in their entire prison or criminal system did. In fact, they claimed they didn’t even know which prisoners were there now. I’m not sure how much of that was a lie and how much was complete and utter incompetence. I’m not sure I even want to know.
Images Source: Author’s Personal Emails (First image: Automatically Translated to English, Second Image: Original Email)
“The organization does not have names of current or historical inmates.
I recommend that you approach a human rights organization that works
specifically with crimes against humanity and appropriation of people.
Penitentiary Attorney General’s Office”
Text Source: Author’s Personal Emails
They also like sending a person to other offices. I ended up with a chain involving approximately twenty email addresses and every single office in it sent me to a different one until I have gone in a complete circle several times. The list of email addresses is in the supplementary portion at the end of this book.
With my sole fantasy, of their being humanity in Argentina, rightfully extinguished, the light my mother had ignited in me that had endured so much finally flickered out. All I could see was darkness.
There are no words that can accurately depict how deeply that cut.
To discover that my mother’s nation was full of turncoats, Prada-bag carrying money-grubbing thieves in bureaucratic and radical attire who would sell their own children and grandchildren for a peso and a pat on the head.
To discover that where I came from had no humanity or common sense. That my own people are soulless morons, the people who I clawed out of a hole to get back to, the people who I protected; those were the people who would happily light me on fire and throw me under a bus to watch me burn.
I finally broke under that weight, and I let go. I stopped trying to protect anyone from the danger they had chained me to long ago. Instead, I wrapped that chain around their ankles too, so we could all go down together. I let my captor know that I had blocked off her exit from the United States. While I was running, I had already slammed that door behind me at the risk of my own flimsy documentation. While getting my passport, I had exposed hers as a fraud in an attempt to protect myself and Europe, the land I was standing in. I didn’t want her to gain unrestricted access to the people and countries where I had been standing. Now, she knew.
Having spent so many years with the recruiter, I knew how truly deep her hate was for the United States beneath the mask she showed to the public. I also still had vivid memories of how panicked and trapped she had acted, like a caged animal, when I simply switched out our drinks in the safety of a private kitchen so that she would drug herself instead of me. I knew she would not have a subtle reaction to discovering that her escape was blocked and that she had lost some level of control. It was ironically hypocritical of her, considering she had done the same to me while expecting me to remain calm. She had kept me trapped and bound to the crimes of the United States government, with no escape route.
But she’s a psychopath. She has always lacked the compassion and awareness necessary to comprehend that if you yourself cannot handle being treated a certain way, neither can anyone else. It’s a part of the nature of psychopathy. To expect anything different from her would be the same as expecting a cat to become a dog or a dog to become a cat.
I didn’t know what damage she would do, but I hoped her actions would be adequate in size that they would shake things up enough to alter the geopolitical landscape and present another opportunity to seek my original identity and finally find some resolution and peace for myself.
It was a gamble, but it was the only one I had remaining. I was down to rattling cages.
I still struggled with my guilt for others after telling her, even after I had spent fruitless decades attempting and testing all standard, reasonable, legal, and ethical routes to regain my Argentine documents and identity – my exit. As a supervisor of endgame labs, she was the button I never wanted to press, because she was dangerous and she had access to dangerous things. I had spent decades insulating her, keeping her emotionally level, and protecting people from her on an individual, national, and global level as much as I could manage with my access to her. It may not have been a lot, but I had been doing something.
I had stood directly in the face of that fire to protect those who would never protect me. I never wanted to undo all that work of mine. It had cost me everything. But, in return for it, I needed one hand from humanity to reach back out to me to save me in one little way – with a solitary document that was mine. A simple piece of paper linking me to my mother. One so many have and take for granted. I needed mine returned to me so that I could unentangle myself from the exploiter who would never truly allow me peace or freedom.
My exploiter was the danger I had begged the Argentine authorities and the Abuelas organization to help me escape, simply by doing their job, going through the documentation they had, and/or running a DNA test – all within the scope of what they publicly claim to do for the orphans they disposed of. Instead, they chose to laugh and suggest I go to my state-approved abductor for my documents, as if I hadn’t attempted that before.
They didn’t care about one of their discarded children, I wasn’t bribing them, and they felt no pressure from a high enough authority, so they didn’t help.
On an individual level, we seem to understand that you should never leave a child in the hands of their parents’ murderer, or gang of murderers, due to the likelihood of severe abuse with the potential for death. But, for some reason, that common sense leaves the room when the murderers are also government. In Argentina they pretend to have common sense, so it is the richly paid and kept NGO – an organizational level mistress for a governmental level perpetrator – that is allowed to decide which of their child victims should have rights.
Was there ever any real doubt about how that would actually go?
So, I finally gave in and pressed the one chaotic button I had access to, the emotional rage button of a woman who had a proven track record of effective sabotage, subversion, and large-scale damage, both sanctioned and unsanctioned, within and with the war machine.
Then I sat back, traveled Europe for a few years while working on much more ethical jobs of my own choosing, and watched the world stage to see what would come of her panic. I waited to see if she would overreact and go into a rage, destroying everything within her reach, as I had known her to do.
Next: Post-Nuclear Explosions