Estela Carlotto (Image: Josep A. Vilar/Casa Amèrica Catalunya). All rights reserved.
Forty years after their founding, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have located and identified 126 grandchildren, including the grandson of Estela Barnes de Carlotto, their president, whom she spent 36 years trying to find. It is estimated that some 500 babies were kidnapped by the Argentine civic-military dictatorship (1976-1983) during the repression, some of them born to mothers in prison who were later "disappeared", as part of a systematic plan to pass the children for adoption by military families and allies of the regime, to avoid raising another generation of “subversives”.
The Grandmothers started their activities in 1977 and since then they have become a global human rights referent. Nominated on five occasions for the Nobel Peace Prize and awarded UNESCO’s Félix Houphouët Prize in 2011, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo’s expressed goal is finding the children stolen and illegally adopted during the Argentine dictatorship and returning them to their legitimate families, in addition to creating the conditions to prevent this crime against humanity from being committed again, and seeking due punishment for all those responsible.
