Latin America

Far-right leaders want to erase the memory of the junta’s disappeared. The fight to remember them is now in the hands of Argentine youth.
APRIL 30, 2022, 7:00 AM
By Lucía Cholakian Herrera



Art collectives take their performances to the street in Buenos Aires at a march to commemorate the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice on March 24, as they do each year on this date. MILI MORSELLA PHOTOS FOR FOREIGN POLICY

BUENOS AIRES—On March 24, Victoria Montenegro, a 46-year-old member of the Buenos Aires City Legislature, arrived at the Avenida de Mayo with her son and grandson. For the first 24 years of her life, Montenegro lived by a different name: María Sol Tetzlaff. She was one of the more than 500 babies who were kidnapped by the military or born to imprisoned parents during a right-wing dictatorship from 1976 to 1983. Deprived of their identity, these children were raised in military families or given up for adoption to couples who were, in most cases, aware of the babies’ origin.

Montenegro was 2 weeks old when Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff seized her whole family. The military disappeared her parents, Roque “Toti” Montenegro and Hilda “Chicha” Torres, who were communist guerrilla militants. Chicha was never found; Toti’s remains were identified by the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team in 2012: He was thrown into the river during the infamous vuelos de la muerte (“death flights”) operation. Victoria lived for 24 years with the Tetzlaff military family, under a different name, without having any idea of her roots.

After an advocacy group tracked her through a whistleblower’s information, Victoria had her identity restored in 2000. Her son, Gonzalo Tarelli, was only 8 years old at the time, but even then, he saw his family change before his eyes: His grandfather was no longer the loving family member he had known, Tarelli told Foreign Policy, and he and his mother flew to the northern province of Salta, Argentina, to meet their new family. His mother changed her name back to the one her parents had given her at birth.



Gonzalo Tarelli marches with his mother, Victoria Montenegro, and his son, Noah, in Buenos Aires on March 24.

Now, the family was joining tens of thousands of demonstrators who came to march at Buenos Aires’s Plaza de Mayo to commemorate the Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, which is held on the anniversary of the 1976 coup, when the military installed a right-wing junta and killed or disappeared more than 30,000 people as part of its systemic plan to exterminate any left-wing political beliefs.

More:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/30/argentina-disappeared-history-military-dictatorship-abuelas-memory-human-rights/