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Victor B. Penchaszadeh, MD

GENETIC IDENTIFICATION OF CHILDREN OF THE DISAPPEARED IN ARGENTINA

Published in: Journal of the American Medical Women Association 52(1): 16-27, 1997

ABSTRACT

During the military dictatorship that rule Argentina between 1976 and 1983
the security forces embarked in a well planned repression that included
abduction, torture and disappearance of thousands of dissidents. Repression
did not spare children nor pregnant women. Approximately 220 babies and
children of the disappeared victims were also abducted and appropriated by
families with connections with the military. After the restoration of
democracy actions were taken to find and identify the missing children, with
the goal of restoring their personal and familial identity and restituting
them to their surviving relatives. Instrumental in this quest was the
Association of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo and a number of geneticists who
developed and applied methods of genetic identification to this human rights
cause. Initial use of HLA typing for genetic identification was later
followed by nuclear DNA typing and mitochondrial DNA sequencing. Of 56
children found and identified, 30 were restituted to their legitimate
families, 13 remained with the families who had adopted them in good faith, 6
are still the subject of custody litigation in the courts and 7 were found
death. Psychological and ethical guidelines protecting the best interests of
the children were followed in all proceedings.




INTRODUCTION
In this article I report on a gruesome human tragedy that began in
Argentina 20 years ago and left a painful legacy in Argentine society and the
world. It is the saga of children of murdered political dissidents, who were
appropriated and raised under a false identity by individuals linked to the
security forces, sometimes by the very torturers and killers of their
parents. The protagonists of this chronicle are the repressors and
appropriators, the disappeared dissidents and their children, their brave
relatives who never abandoned the search for them, the national and
international human rights organizations that denounced the horrors, and the
Argentine and American geneticists who implemented the methodology for the
genetic identification of the missing children. The understanding of the
madness and perversion imposed on the Argentine society by the military and
their allies in that period requires a minimum of historical background.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
Between 1930 and 1973, Argentina suffered 30 military coups, only one
elected president ever being able to complete his mandate. Vast sectors of
society were politically disenfranchised and economically deprived. A
civilian government elected in 1973 was unsuccessful to handle the serious
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political and economical problems and turned gradually to illegal repression
to confront widespread social unrest, only to be eventually ousted by the
military. The ensuing eight years of military rule (March 1976-December 1983)
were characterized by a brutal dictatorship and state-sponsored terrorism
directed against a wide spectrum of citizens. The targets of repression were
primarily young workers, students and intellectuals who were active in the
struggle for democracy and social justice.
The military Junta implemented a well planned plan of extermination of
thousands of political dissidents. The method consisted in going after
suspected activists, their friends and relatives, and abducting them
violently from their homes in the middle of the night. The houses were
ransacked of anything of value and the victims were confined to clandestine
detention centers where they were subjected to vile methods of torture.
Thousands of people were eventually assassinated after variable periods of
time, depending on the political "value" of the prisoner. All these actions
were conducted by special military units under central command, with express
orders to conceal their identity. The military government, on the other hand,
would systematically deny the facts and their own responsibility, attributing
accusations to the action of "anti-patriotic" forces.
The figure of the "disappeared" was thus created for the first time in
the modern history of repression. It was in fact the Argentine experience
that led to the creation of the Working Group of Forced Disappearances at the
UN's Human Rights Commission. Most of what really happened during those dark
years became public knowledge only when a civilian elected government took
office in December 1983, after the total failure of the military to govern
the country and the fiasco of the ill-fated invasion of the Malvinas-
Falklands Islands. Before then, however, courageous human rights
organizations and relatives of the victims were able to document the gross
violations of human rights and to estimate that about 30,000 people
"disappeared" violently in the hands of the security forces during the
dictatorship. These charges were corroborated by several international bodies
like Amnesty International and the Organization of American Sates (1,2). A
National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons, appointed in 1984 by the
civilian president Raul Alfonsin, documented close to 10,000 disappearances
and sadly concluded that none of the disappeared were alive (3). Its report
laid the grounds for the prosecution of several top ranking military officers
by the Argentine courts, which found them guilty of gross violations of human
rights, with convictions ranging from 10 years to life in prison (4,5).
A number of abducted victims were living with their children when the
security forces violently irrupted in their homes. These babies and young
children were treated by the military as "war booties" and were abducted as
well. In fact, this was part of a deliberate policy, based on the militarys
conviction that "subversives breed subversives" and that they had the "duty
of freeing these children from the subversive education" of their parents
(6). The fate of these children varied according to the circumstances (7). In
some cases they were handed over to neighbors with orders that they take care
of them and threats of reprisal if they revealed their true identity.
Occasionally, small babies were anonymously left in institutions for
abandoned children. But most commonly these infants and young children were
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either kept as "war booty" by someone within the security forces, or handed
over to childless couples associated with the repressive apparatus, or simply
sold as objects to people who would not ask questions.
In addition, a number of kidnapped women were pregnant at the time of
their disappearance. These women were not spared of torture and suffering
during their captivity and delivered their babies in humiliating
circumstances in the clandestine detention centers or in military hospitals,
only to be murdered shortly after delivery. Their babies were usually handed
over to individuals within the security forces or their friends. Birth
certificates were forged and the children were registered as natural sons or
daughters of their appropriators. Sometimes the conscious or unconscious
complicity of a corrupt judiciary appointed by the military led to fast
"legal" adoptions of apparently abandoned children without even checking
whether they might actually be children of disappeared persons. Sadly, at the
very same time, relatives of disappeared people were filing inquiries in the
courts about the fate of their loved ones and their children, only to be
falsely told that the State did not detain them and that nothing was known
about them. It has been estimated that no less than 300 children have either
been abducted with their parents or born in captivity to abducted women (8).
The resistance to the dictatorship took many forms, such as that
developed by relatives of the disappeared, who began to organize the search
for their loved ones demanding acknowledgement by the government of its
responsibility for their fate. One of the first groups to surface publicly
were mothers of disappeared persons, who in April of 1977 founded the
organization Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (9,10,11). Soon the mothers were joined
by women who were searching not only their sons and daughters, but also their
grandchildren. In October 1977 these women founded the Association of Abuelas
(grandmothers) of Plaza de Mayo (7) with the goal of finding their missing
grandchildren. Some had known their grandchildren before their abduction but
others only knew that their daughter or daughter-in-law was pregnant at the
time of her abduction by the military. The Abuelas began to gather
information on missing children as reported by their relatives, such as name,
sex, age, physical characteristics, pictures, date of disappearance, etc. In
cases of pregnant disappeared women, they gathered data of possible detention
centers, estimated date of birth of their babies, etc. In addition, they
started compiling data on children suspected of being offspring of the
disappeared, based on anonymous calls, reports from neighbors, visits to
orphanages, research on suspicious adoptions, reviews of possibly forged
birth certificates, reports from witnesses of birth deliveries in military
hospitals and detention centers, etc (7). They were thus able to document the
circumstances surrounding the disappearance of about 300 children and the
possible whereabouts of some 50 of them (8). The Abuelas knew, however, that
they would have to wait until a civilian government was in place before their
requests for identification and restitution of these children would be heard.
When that time arrived, the challenges faced by the Abuelas would be
not only localizing the missing grandchildren but also: (a) demonstrating
that each of them was in fact the offspring of a particular couple of
disappeared parents, and (b) achieving the restoration of the true identity
of the child and his/her restitution to the biological family within the law
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and respecting the best interests of the child.
THE METHODOLOGY OF HUMAN GENETIC IDENTIFICATION
The human genetic material is constituted by approximately 80,000
thousand genes. The sum of all genes and interspaced genetic material is
called the genome. Each gene is a segment of the hereditary molecule (DNA)
that constitutes a unit of information that instructs cells to produce a
specific polypeptide. The DNA molecule is composed by a string of units
called nucleotides, which can be of four types, according to which base it
contains (adenine, cytosine, guanine, or thymine). The genetic instruction is
carried in the base sequence of the DNA molecule, which in various
combinations of three bases spell out the codes for the aminoacids that make
up a protein. DNA sequences that code for specific aminoacids are called
coding sequences. Most of DNA, however, exists in noncoding sequences, either
within genes (introns), or interspaced between genes. These sequences are
also called satellite DNA or repetitive DNA, because it usually consists of
long repetitions of sequences as small as two different bases. The specific
site of each gene (or DNA sequence) on a chromosome is called locus. The
alternative forms of a given gene are referred to it's alleles. All DNA
sequences exist in pairs of alleles, and only one allele of a parents pair
is inherited by each child, who receives one copy of every gene from each
parent.
A characteristic of the genome is the variability among human beings
in the base sequences along the DNA molecule. When variability involves
coding sequences (genes) it is reflected in variations in the proteins they
encode, which can be detected as "normal variation" in blood types,
histocompatibility antigens and other products. The bulk of human genetic
variation, however, occurs in the noncoding parts of DNA. Considering that
the total length of DNA per haploid set is about 3 billion nucleotides and
that it is estimated that there may be as many as 3 million variable sites,
it is virtually impossible that any two individuals have the exact genetic
makeup, except for identical twins. DNA sequences that have a particularly
high degree of variability are called polymorphic, as they can have different
"forms". Polymorphic loci are also called genetic markers and it is through
their study that family relationships can be established.
The establishment of family relationships by genetic identification are
based in the analysis of the inheritance of particular genetic markers from
putative parents to a putative child, and are used mainly for paternity
testing. The preferred markers for genetic identification in the early 1980's
were the histocompatibility (HLA) antigens (12). The HLA antigens are
produced by lymphocytes according to information encoded in various genes in
the short arm of chromosome 6, the best known being the HLA-A, HLA-B, HLA-C
and HLA-Dr. The immense allelic variability of the HLA genes (dozens of
alternative alleles for each locus) makes it extremely unlikely that to
unrelated individuals could share the same combination (haplotype).
By the 1980's important developments in molecular genetics had great
implications for the field of human genetic identification. First was the use
of restriction enzymes, that cut the DNA at specific sites depending on the
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base sequence. Then followed the technique developed by Southern (13) of
electrophoresis of fragments resulting from the action of specific
restriction enzymes on particular DNA sequences, which revealed variable
lengths in different individuals (restriction length fragment polymorphism,
or RLFP). The application of this technique led to the discovery of the
variable nature of coding and noncoding parts of human DNA.
One type of variation is based in that in many regions, particularly
the noncoding parts, the DNA is organized in repeated sequences of as small
as two different nucleotides (such as C and SA). The length of these repeats
varies among individuals, hence the name of "variable number of tandem
repeats", or VNTRs. As with all chromosome DNA, these variations are
inherited in a mendelian manner. The analysis of the VNTR type of DNA
variation was coined "DNA fingerprinting" and began to be employed
successfully in genetic identification (14, 15, 16 ). Since the probes used
in this technique recognize multiple sites (loci) in the genome, it is also
called multi-locus testing.
Another type of DNA variation is due to a change in one base at a
particular site (for example substitution of a G for a A): it is estimated
that two unrelated individuals have a difference in the DNA sequence every
500 bases, that is at a total of 3 million sites (17). The techniques to
uncover base changes in specific loci are based in PCR amplification followed
by hybridization to allele-specific oligonucleotide probes, and the test is
referred to as single-locus DNA typing. The selection of highly informative
(variable) loci and the use of several (at least four) single-locus multi-
allele systems gives usually enough discriminating power to establish, or
rule out, family relationships.
In addition to the genetic material in the chromosomes, DNA is also
present in the mitochondria, which are inherited exclusively through maternal
line. In contrast with nuclear DNA, which exists in double copy (diploid), is
subjected to recombination and varies among siblings, mitochondrial DNA
exists in single copy (haploid) and is exactly the same among siblings and
their mother, maternal grandmother, maternal aunts and uncles, cousins via
the mother's sisters and so on (18). The human mitochondrial DNA has been
completely sequenced (19) and is highly variable among individuals. It has
been shown that the noncoding control region is particularly diverse and
contains a hypervariable segment (19). The sequencing of this segment is used
for genetic identification through the maternal line because, as chances that
two unrelated individuals could have identical sequence is extremely low
(20). USE OF GENETIC MARKERS TO ESTABLISH FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
In standard parentage testing (21) the most common question to answer
is whether a particular individual could be the father of a given child.
Since any allele present in a child should come from his/her parents, and if
maternity is not in question, the analysis of relevant alleles in the child,
the mother and the putative father will reveal, for each locus studied, which
allele came from the mother; the other allele must have come from the father.
Some loci are more informative than others, depending on its variability in
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the population, that is the number of alleles and their relative frequency.
Using a number of informative loci it is possible to exclude paternity in
almost 100 % of the cases in which the putative father is not the real
father. Conversely, the very fact of failing to exclude a putative father as
the real father, assigns a high probability that the man is indeed the
biological father. This is called the probability of inclusion (21). This
figure, expressed in percentage, is arrived at after complex mathematical
calculations that take into account the particular alleles at the loci
analyzed and their relative frequency in the population. It states the
probability that the individual in question is indeed the biological father;
this probability never reaches a 100%. American courts usually require an
inclusion probability of at least 95%, in addition to circumstantial
evidences, as grounds to declare paternity reasonably proved. When the
standard test used was HLA typing, inclusion probabilities in paternity cases
that were not excluded usually ranged between 96% and 99%. With modern DNA
analysis of several single-locus or multilocus systems, inclusion
probabilities typically reach 99.9% .
In the Argentine context, the question to answer was: Given
circumstantial evidences suggestive that a particular child could be the son
or daughter of a certain disappeared couple, can this be proven testing
available grandparents? Since all genetic material passed by parents to
their children derive from the grandparents, the genetic relationship between
a child and putative grandparents could be determined in principle with a
very high degree of probability by the same methods used for regular
paternity testing. What was required was a modification of the mathematical
formulations used in standard paternity testing, to account for the fact that
the parents of a given child were not available. Essentially, the genotypes
of the putative parents had to be "reconstructed" from the genotypes of the
grandparents and other collateral relatives.
As mentioned above, the advent in 1984 of a civilian government
committed to enforce respect for human rights set the stage for an assertive
search of the missing children. The health department of the city of Buenos
Aires was entrusted with the task of implementing the technology for genetic
identification located children and set up a genetic database at the Durand
hospital immunogenetics lab of city hospital Durand, under A.M. Di Lonardo,
who had experience in HLA typing. At the same time, legislation was enacted
to instruct the courts to open a file on each request by relatives searching
for missing children and to direct them to the genetics lab for HLA typing,
as this was the only genetic identification available then in Argentina. The
Association of Abuelas set up medico-psychological and legal teams and
presented cases in the courts representing grandparents when circumstantial
evidences provided a strong suspicion that a particular child could be the
offspring of a disappeared person.
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At the request of the National Commission on the Disappearance of
Persons, a mission of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
sent in early 1984 a group of forensic anthropologists to work on clandestine
mass graves recently discovered. Geneticists Cristian Orrego of AAAS and
Mary-Claire King of Berkeley joined the delegation and worked with Ana Maria
Di Lonardo of Hospital Durand to develop the statistical formulations needed
to apply the methods of parentage testing to grandparentage testing. The
concept of grandparentage index was thus coined and the first child of
disappeared parents, who was in the hands of a former security officer, was
identified and restituted to her grandparents (22). In July 1984, the author
of this article advised a recently created technical commission to oversee
the work to be performed at Hospital Durand laboratory and then became a
voluntary advisor in genetics to the Association of Abuelas until the present
time (23). The immunogenetics laboratory began HLA typing several hundred
possible grandparents of missing children and logging the results for future
use.
In May 1987, Congress enacted a law regulating all aspects of genetic
analyses for grandparentage testing on presumed abducted children. Among the
provisions of this law, a Genetic Database was created in the Immunology
Laboratory of the Hospital Durand to store genetic information on families
that were searching for missing children. The law stipulated the
responsibility of judges to order genetic testings on such families as well
in any child whose identity was in doubt or when there was sufficient
evidence to suspect that a child could be the son or daughter of a
disappeared.
The mechanism followed in most cases was initiated by a demand
presented in court by the Grandmothers on behalf of a particular family. Each
demand was presented only when sufficient evidence had been gathered on a
particular child. These evidences were usually the result of the research of
the Grandmothers themselves and were based on historical information,
physical resemblance, characteristics of the adults acting as parents
(usually police or army officers) and other circumstantial data. It was then
the judges responsibility to handle the case, to review the evidences
presented, to approach the apparent parents and eventually to order genetic
testings to the relevant individuals: the child, the couple acting as
adoptive parents, and the possible true grandparents. In most instances, the
alleged parents would admit that the child was not theirs, so that the
crucial proof was the matching between the genetic make-up of the child and
that of the possible grandparents. In a number of cases potential
grandparents were excluded as such by the genetic tests. But in at least two
dozen cases, the probability of inclusion of grandparentage for a given set
of grandparents turned out to be very high, and subsequent steps had to be
taken (24).
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The wellbeing and the best interests of the children were always the
top priority of the Abuelas Association. Teams of psychologists assisted the
judges in taking the appropriate steps at the appropriate time to avoid
further psychological trauma to the children (25). The premise was that these
children had the right to learn the truth about their identity, family
history and fate of their parents. It was also recognized that the children
had a right to live with their real family. Notwithstanding these
considerations, some missing children were found living with loving families
who had adopted them in good faith, sometimes not even knowing that they were
children of disappeared. In these cases, adoptive and biological families
usually reached agreements that would preserve the best interests of the
child. In some instances this meant that the child would continue to live
with the adoptive family, but having gained psychologically by learning
his/her true identity and history and incorporating the biological family in
his/her life (26).
The location of a missing child, the court proceedings, the genetic
testing and the restitution process itself were usually not as
straightforward as the reading of these lines may suggest. On the contrary,
many hurdles stood in the way, particularly when the childs appropriators
were security officers or their associates. These individuals would confront
the sloppy and corrupt argentine judiciary, causing undue delays in the
procedures, while keeping their grip on the appropriated child. The
sloppiness of some judges even enabled the appropriators to flee the country
with the abducted children in at least three instances.
In the late 1980s it became apparent that the power of genetic
identification could be enhanced by the application of the new DNA
technology. Since this technology was not available then in Argentina, some
laboratories from the USA and France offered their collaboration. Among
these, Mary-Claire King's Lab in Berkeley specialized in mitochondrial DNA
testing and was instrumental in solving several cases (27). According to
Estela Carlotto, president of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (28), by the end of
1995 there have been a total of 220 reports of missing children of the
disappeared claimed by their surviving relatives. Of those, 56 children have
been located and identified, of which 7 were found dead in various
circumstances. Of the remainder, 13 children had been adopted in good faith
and are currently sharing their adoptive and biological families in various
arrangements. Thirty children were found in the hands of appropriators linked
to the security forces and were restituted to their legitimate families,
after lengthy legal procedures and genetic testing. Seven children are
currently the subject of court proceedings to resolve their identity.
SOME ILLUSTRATIVE CASES
Real names are given as all cases mentioned here have been public in
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Argentina and abroad.
1. Mara Eugenia Gatica and Jos Sabino Abdala.
In March 16, 1977 security forces bursted in the home of union
organizer Jos Abdala and his wife Victoria Falabella in the city of La
Plata. The couple, in their mid-twenties, was abducted along with their 2
year old son Jos Sabino and a colleague unionist's daughter, 14 months old
Mara Eugenia Gatica. Former detainees testified later that they had seen the
couple with the two children in a clandestine detention center run by the
army in that city. However, the official response to their relatives' claims
was utter deny that they had been detained. A number of claims were presented
in the courts to no avail. Eight years later, the legitimate parents of Mara
Eugenia Gatica, Oscar and Ana Mara Gatica, who had been forced to fly to
exile in Brazil, were able to track down the whereabouts of their daughter
upon their return to Argentina. Mara Eugenia had been appropriated and
registered as natural daughter by a police officer soon after she was seized
in 1977. After presentation to the courts, HLA testing gave a 99.9 inclusion
probability that Mara Eugenia was indeed the daughter of Oscar and Ana Mara
Gatica. The child was reunited with her parents and a younger brother who had
also been seized in a separate incident and given in adoption to another
couple after the parents flew to exile (29).
The couple Abdala-Falabella disappeared in the hands of the security
forces and were certainly killed as many thousands of disappeared. The search
for Jos Sabino by his surviving relatives continued unabated until 1993, at
the age of 17 years, when he was located living in Buenos Aires province,
falsely registered as natural son by a couple, with a changed age and forged
identity. Through the action of the courts and with the full cooperation of
the youngster was tested and his genetic make-up compared with the brother
and the two parents of Victoria Falabella (Eduardo Falabella and Carmen De
Felice, putative maternal aunt and grandparents). HLA and nuclear DNA testing
in the genetics lab of Buenos Aires gave a very high probability of
inclusion. Mary-Claire King's lab in Berkeley did additional confirmatory
typing of nuclear DNA and sequencing of mitochondrial DNA. The analysis of
two loci of chromosome 12 and four loci of chromosome 17 were consistent with
the hypothesis that the putative grandparents were indeed the true
grandparents (Figure). Sequencing of two informative segments of
mitochondrial DNA of 344 and 325 nucleotides long respectively showed
identical sequences among the child, and the sister and mother of Victoria
Falabella, as expected if the youngster was indeed Jos Sabino. The overall
probability that the child was a grandchild of Eduardo Falabella and Carmen
De Felice (grandparentage index) was 99.9% (30). The judge of the case
ordered the restitution of the true identity to Jos Sabino, who, from there
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on would reconstruct his history with the help and love of his grandparents,
aunts and cousins.
2. Ximena Vicario.
On February 5, 1977 young activist Juan Carlos Vicario was seized and
disappeared by security forces. The same day, his wife Stella Maris Gallichio
and their eight months old daughter Ximena were detained in the Federal
Police Department, where they had gone to obtain their passports. A friend
that was with them reported the abduction to her relatives, who immediately
began requesting information from the authorities. All requests were met by
denial that the police had seized the couple and their child. The couple
Vicario-Gallichio never reappeared and were certainly killed by the military.
Eight years later a girl of the same age Ximena would have, was located by
the Association of Abuelas through an anonymous tip about a covert adoption.
The child was living with an employee of an orphanage, who registered the
girl as her own, with a different name. A number of circumstancial evidences
and physical similarity to her disappeared mother pointed to Ximena's true
identity. After unsuccessful attempts by the maternal grandmother to arrive
at an amicable arrangement with the appropriator, court proceedings started
and eventually genetic identification by HLA testing yielded a probability of
99.82% that the child was indeed the grandchild of Vicario-Gallichio's
parents.
Ximena initially resisted the restitution to her true family. The
initial period of restitution was very stressful, but with proper counseling
and family love, those tensions were overcome and Ximena today lives as a
happy teenager with her maternal grandparents (31).
3. Gonzalo and Matas Reggiardo
Juan E. Reggiardo and his pregnant wife Mara Rosa Tolosa were
disappeared by the military in February 1977. Through testimonies of former
detainees who had seen Mara Rosa in a clandestine detention center, the
family learned that she delivered twin boys in May 1977. Many years later,
the Abuelas received a tip that Samuel Miara, a police officer accused of
tortures and rapes of female prisoners in clandestine detention centers, had
appropriated twin boys born in 1977 to a detainee who was later murdered, and
registered the babies as his own. When in 1986 the Grandmothers took the case
to the courts, Miara fled with the children to Paraguay. It took almost three
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years to have this individual extradited back to Argentina with the twins.
The court ordered genetic testing of the twins and a search for possible
relationship with families registered in the Grandparents Genetic Data Base
who could be potential relatives. There were two families that had some
knowledge that their missing grandchildren were twin boys. One of them was
the family Reggiardo-Tolosa. HLA and DNA testing proved (with a probability
higher than 99 %) that the twins were indeed the sons of the couple
Reggiardo-Tolosa (32). Samuel Miara was found guilty of forgery of birth
certificates, abduction of minors and escaping from justice and sentenced to
two years in prison. However, the twins were allowed to continue living with
Miara's wife until pressure from human rights groups and international
organizations (33) led the judge in the case to assign Gonzalo and Matas
their real last names and assign custody to a maternal uncle. Eventually,
this arrangement did not work out and they later moved to live with a foster
family.
The case of Gonzalo and Matas Reggiardo was complicated by the fact
that the appropriators were allowed, one way or another, to retain custody of
the children for many years after being evident that they were criminals.
The court proceedings were sloppy, the appropriators were able to manipulate
the situation through political contacts, and the government was interested
in trying to erase from the memory of the population all the crimes committed
during the military regime (34). Furthermore, the biological family had been
decimated during the dictatorship and the only surviving relative was a
maternal uncle who did not live up to the twins' psychological needs.
4. D'Elia- Casco
Julio Csar D'Elia and Yolanda Casco were Uruguayan exiles who escaped
repression in Uruguay and settled in Argentina in 1974. Julio Csar graduated
in Economics and was working for a bank in Buenos Aires, until December 22,
1977, when the couple was abducted from their home in the middle of the night
by security forces (the military dictatorships of Argentina and Uruguay were
known to "collaborate" in kidnapping exiles in each country). The couple was
transferred to a clandestine detention center, where they joined a number of
other Uruguayans who were interrogated and tortured by Uruguayan military.
Through testimonies of several of these dettainees that were later liberated,
it was learned that Yolanda, who was pregnant, delivered a baby boy in the
basement of the very detention center. The baby was immediately taken away
from her and the couple was later murdered.
In 1984, the Abuelas, as part of their quest to find missing children
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of the disappeared, asked the government to investigate all birth
certificates signed by the police physician Jorge Bergez. Bergez had been
convicted during the trial of the military Junta in 1985 of aiding the
torture of prisoners and it was known that he had participated in several
births of disappeared women. Through this mechanism, several suspected
missing children were located. Among these, there was the birth certificate
of Carlos DeLuccia, supposedly born in January 1978 and registered as a
natural son of Mr. DeLuccia, a navy officer. Additional suspicious
circumstances were that before the birth of this child the alleged parents
had not had children after 18 years of marriage and that the birth was
registered as having taken place in Dr. Bergez' small clinic. After a
number of proceedings, HLA testing in 1988 excluded Carlos as child of the
DeLuccia couple and all the alleged birth circumstances were demonstrated to
be false. However, no genetic link could be found at the time with any of
potential grandparents registered in the Grandparentage Genetic Data Base.
In 1994, a new development in the case came about when, upon request
from the Abuelas, Mary-Claire King analyzed several unsolved cases in her lab
at Berkeley. Nucleotide sequences of mitochondrial DNA of Carlos were
compared to those of Regina Casco, a living sister of the disappeared Yolanda
Casco, that is a possible maternal aunt of Carlos. Sequences of 751
nucleotides of the highly polymorphic mithocondrial DNA control region of
Carlos and Regina were identical, giving a probability greater than 99% of
this being due to family relationship rather than to chance. Furthermore,
King compared nuclear DNA loci of four chromosomes (chromosomes # 3, 11, 12
and 13) on Carlos and ten members of the D'Elia-Casco family. The
probabilities of granparentage for genotypes from each chromosome
individually were 88.5%, 83.7%, 96.2% and 83.8%, respectively. For all
nuclear markers combined, the probability of grandparentage was greater than
99.98%. For mitochondrial sequences and nuclear DNA markers combined, the
probability that Carlos belonged to the D'Elia-Casco family was greater than
99.99% (35).
Shortly thereafter, the laboratory of the Grandparentage Genetics
Database in Buenos Aires confirmed the relationship between Carlos and the
D'Elia-Casco family. The judge indicted the navy officer and his wife for the
kidnapping of a minor and forgering his identity, informed Carlos, then 17
years old, of his true identity and placed him temporarily under the custody
of a foster family. Psychological support and counseling for Carlos was
provided all along and his grandparents, aunt and cousins came from Uruguay
to meet with him in the presence of the judge. This case is still in the
court, and a number of issues will have to de addressed, not least attending
to all aspects of Carlos' best interests. While Carlos's relatives are happy
to have found him, they recognize that after living 17 years with a different
identity, the path to normality not be easy. The president of the Association
of Abuelas, Estela Carlotto, said: "Carlos will have to be listen to,
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understood and accompanied in the coming journey to recuperate his identity,
history, and family" (36).
LEGAL, ETHICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL ISSUES
The horrors of the war of the generals against the Argentine people
during the last dictatorship have left deep wounds in the society at large.
In particular, the treatment of children as war booties caused tremendous
psychological and social harm to the children themselves and their surviving
relatives. The goal of genetic identification was originally thought as the
most difficult hurdle in the quest of the searching relatives to recover
their missing children. It turned out, however, that this was actually the
least of the problems to solve. Most important were the legal obstacles
derived from a corrupt and inept judiciary and the political pressures from
the government that did not welcome a public discussion of the human rights
violations of the former rulers and it's consequences. It was only in 1992,
after multiple pressures from the Association of Abuelas and public opinion,
that the government appointed a National Commission for the Right to
Identity, with the task to promote the search of the missing children (37).
More recently, the shock caused by disclosures of former army officers that
thousands of "disappeared" prisoners were sedated after torture, boarded on
army planes and dumped into the sea while still alive (38), helped to reopen
the debate over the military's rule in Argentina and injected new energy into
judicial proceedings of missing children.
The main ethical issues in the search and identification of missing
children are related to the clarification of what are the legitimate
interests of the surviving relatives and the best interests of these
children. There is no doubt that the former have a legitimate interest in
recovering a missing child who was made an orphan by the criminal acts of the
security forces and who has suffered a prolonged kidnapping by appropriators.
From the angle of the child, his/her best long term interests are to recover
his/her identity, personal and familial history, and to cease to live in an
environment of lies and deception. A key point to consider is how to proceed
so as to minimize any possible short term psychological harms of revealing
the true identity and restituting the child to the legitimate family. The
experience in Argentina has been complex and it is too early to assess it in
depth. The Abuelas were among the first to recognize that extreme caution had
to be exerted before decisions were made about the identity, custody and
living arrangements of these children. Indeed, when adoptions had been in
good faith, while children learned their true identity and benefitted from
establishing loving relationships with their surviving relatives, they
usually remained with their adoptive families.
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One principle that guided the actions of human rights groups and
concerned lawyers, psychologists and geneticists, was the condemnation of
appropriation as a criminal act not be confused with adoption (24). Indeed,
the appropriation of children during the argentine dictatorship was
committed violently against the will of the parents, who not only had never
abandoned their children, but were ultimately murdered. Moreover, the
surviving relatives who searched indefatigably for the missing children were
systematically denied their parental rights. Moreover, the abduction of
children were not isolated events but part of a systematic plan that included
assassinations, tortures, forced disappearances of adults, ransacking of
their homes, etc. The ideological justification of the abduction of minors
was admitted by former army officers, who claimed that since "subversives
educate their children for subversion" it was the army's duty to find "better
families" for them (24). Since in many cases the appropriators had direct or
indirect links to the murderers of their parents the lives of these children
were a prolongation of a state of captivity and disappearance. Moreover, the
perverse and sinister character of the appropriator-child relationship, based
in concealment of the truth and the constant, albeit hidden, reminders of the
violent and illegal genesis of the appropriation perpetuated the initial
psychological trauma, leading to a number of developmental problems detected
in recovered children (39).
The process of restitution was always preceded by psychological
assessments of the child and his/her circumstances and measures were taken to
minimize trauma. Through the law and the true love of the legitimate family,
and proper psychological and social supports restituted children were able
to recover their identity and family history and developed healthy
relationships with their true relatives, beginning a new and empowering life
based in truth and justice (39). Unfortunately, many cases were allowed to
drag on in the courts by ineptitude and politics. The missing children are
now adolescents, and the psychological and ethical problems of identification
become ever more complex. As these missing persons grow into adulthood, it
seems clear that many cases will never be solved. The Association of Abuelas
is to be commended for their tireless and resolute work on behalf of the
human rights of the missing children. Commenting on the government's lack of
political will on this subject, Estela Carlotto, president of Abuelas said:
"If a group of old women without political or economic power has been able to
find 56 children, how many more could the government find if it tried?" (34).
REFERENCES
1. Organization of American States: Report on the Situation of Human
Rights in Argentina, Washington, 1978.
2. Amnesty InternationaL: The Disappeared of Argentina, London, 1979.
3. Nunca Mas. Report of the National Commission on Disappeared Persons.
New York: Farrar Starus, Giroux; 1986.
4. Pichel M (Editor): El Libro del Diario del Juicio. Buenos Aires:
Perfil; 1985.
5. Ardensen ME. Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecidos and the Myth
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of the "Dirty War" . Boulder: Westview Press; 1993.
6. Madres de Plaza de Mayo, No. 8, July 1985, Buenos Aires.
7. Nosiglia JE: Botin de guerra. Buenos Aires: Cooperativa Tierra
Fertil; 1985.
8. Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. Missing children who disappeared in
Argentina between 1976 and 1983. Buenos Aires; 1990.
9. Simpson J, Bennet J: The disappeared and the Mothers of the Plaza.
New York: St. Martins Press; 1985.
10. Fisher J: Mothers of the Disappeared. Boston: South End Press;
1989.
11. Agosin M: The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Trenton: The Red Sea Press;
1990.
12.Dupont B Ed. Immunobiology of HLA. New Yok: Springer-Verlag; 1989.
13.Southern EM. Detection of specific sequences among DNA fragments
separated by gel electrophoresis. J Mol Biol. 1975; 98:503-527.
14.Jeffreys AJ, Wilson V, Thein SL. Individual-specific "finger-prints"
of human DNA. Nature.1985; 316:75-79.
15.Kirby LT. DNA fingerprinting: an introduction. New York: Stockton
Press; 1990.
16.U.S. Department of Justice. FBI. Proceedings of the international
synposium on the forensic aspects of DNA analysis. Washington: US Government
Priunting Office; 1991.
17. National Research Council. DNA Technology in Forensic Science.
Washington: National Academy Press; 1992.
18.Giles RE, Blanc H, Cann HM, Wallace DC. Maternal inheritance of
human mitochondrial DNA. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 1980; 77:6715-6719.
19.Anderson S, Bankier AT, Barrel BG, deBruijn MHL, Coulson AR, Drouin
J, Eperson IJ, Nierlich DP, Roe BA, Sanger F, Schreier PH, Smith AJH, Staden
R, Young IG. Sequence and organization of the huamn mitochondrial genome.
Nature. 1981; 290:457-465.
20.Orrego C, King M-C. Determination of familial relationships. In
Innis M, Gelfand D, Sninsky J, White T, eds. PCR Protocols: A Guide to
Methods and Applications. San Diego, CA: Academic Press; 1990:416-426.
21.American Association of Blood Banks. Inclusion Probabilities in
Parentage Testing. Arlington, VA: 1983.
22.Di Lonardo AM, Darlu P, Baur M, Orrego C, King M-C. Human genetics
and human rights: Identifying the families of kidnapped children. Am J Foren
Med Pathol. 1984; 5:339-347.
23. Penchaszadeh VB. Application of genetic marker analysis for the
identification of disappeared children. Report to the Panamerican Health
Organization, Washington. Unpublished document. 1984.
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24. Penchaszadeh VB. Abduction of children of political dissidents in
Argentina and the role of human genetics in their restitution. J Publ Hlth
Pol. 1992; 13:291-305.
25.Guarino M, Liwski: Hijos de desaparecidos. Secuelas del abandono
forzado. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Movimiento Ecumnico por los Derechos
Humanos; 1983.
26.Equipo Tcnico Interdisciplinario, Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: Los
nios desaparecidos. Su restitucion. XXVII Argentine Congress of Pediatrics,
Buenos Aires, 1988.
27.King M-C. An application of DNA sequencing to a human rights
problem. Mol Genet Med. 1991; 1:117-131.
28. Carlotto E. Personal communication. 1995.
29. Chavez L. Argentina's Lost Children: Some Happy Endings. New York
Times. August 14, 1985.
30. King M-C. Personal communication, 1993.
31. Nash NC. Argentines contend for war orphans' hearts. New York
Times. May 11, 1993.
32. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Informaciones, No. 29, 1990, Buenos
Aires.
33. van Boven T. The disappearance of children in Argentina. Report to
the United Nations Commission of Human Rights. August 10, 1988. Geneva.
Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1988/19.
34. Larmer B. The lost generation. The children of the disappeared are
a painful legacy of Argentina's "Dirty War". Newsweek. February 8, 1993.
35. King M-C. Report on the analysis of mitochondrial DNA and nuclear
genes from Carlos DeLuccia and the Casco Ghelfi-D'Elia Pallares family.
Berkeley, February 28, 1995.
36. Carlotto E. Pagina 12. Buenos Aires. June 17, 1995.
37. Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Informaciones, No. 35, 1992.
38. Sims C. Argentine tells of dumping 'dirty war' captives into sea.
New York Times. March 13, 1995.
39. Logiudice A, Volnovich JC. Aspectos psicolgicos en nios
desaparecidos y restitudos. Seminario Internacional de Identificacin,
Localizacin y Restitucin de Nios Desaparecidos. Buenos Aires, April 18-20,
1992.





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GENETIC IDENTIFICATION OF CHILDREN OF THE DISAPPEARED IN ARGENTINA


Victor B. Penchaszadeh

FIGURE LEGEND:

Nuclear DNA typing of two markers of chromosome 12 and four markers of
chromosome 17 of the Abdala-Falabella family. The couple with the diagonal
lines represent the disappeared parents. Individuals 1, 2 and 3 are,
respectively, the brother, father and mother of disappeared Victoria
Falabella; individual 6 is the presumed missing child. The DNA markers are
consistent with the hypothesis that 6 is a grandchild of of 2 and 3 (Courtesy
of M-C King).