After a protracted search, Argentine activists said on Friday that they had located one of hundreds of infants who had been removed from their parents and placed for adoption during the dictatorship that lasted from 1976 to 1983.
The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo rights group has been searching for their daughters—and the now-adult children they had while in captivity—for decades.
The group said Friday that it has found “grandchild number 138,” the son of political activists Juan Carlos Villamayor and Marta Enriqueta Pourtale, who vanished in 1976.
“This is the 138th case resolved in these 47 years of relentless search for truth and identity,” the organization’s president Estela de Carlotto told a news conference held in a former torture center.
“On December 10, 1976, the couple was abducted from their home in Buenos Aires in an operation carried out by plainclothes personnel. She was eight-and-a-half months pregnant,” Carlotto added.
Pourtale and Villamayor belonged to the left-wing guerrilla group in Montoneros.
Humanitarian groups claim that they were later spotted in ESMA, an infamous facility where over 5,000 political prisoners were detained, many of whom were tortured and killed.
