The story of 'recovered grandchild 121'

Updated

Maximiliano was stolen as a newborn. His parents were tortured and 'disappeared' by a brutal regime; his mother possibly drugged and thrown into the sea to die. For 40 years, he had no idea.

"We have a hunch you're not who you think you are."

Maximiliano Menna Lanzillotto didn't trust the strange voice at the other end of the phone line.

It told him he could be one of Argentina's 'missing grandchildren' — taken as a baby by the military regime during the so-called Dirty War.

It couldn't be true, Maximiliano told himself. He was certain of it.

But it was.

At the age of 40, Maximiliano officially became 'recovered grandchild 121'.

And so began a journey to discover the truth.

A dark history

The military ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983, and during that time an estimated 30,000 people disappeared.

Ordinary Argentinians had no idea their towns and cities were also home to 700 clandestine torture centres.

Many of the so-called "subversives" that were detained were student activists, trade unionists and journalists.

Some were pregnant women.

They were allowed to give birth before they were killed.

The babies were then adopted out — often by military families, sometimes by the men who had tortured and killed their mothers.

A moment of truth

Two years ago, a phone call changed everything for Maximiliano.

Argentina's Commission of Identity, CONADI, was following a trail that began with a name on his birth certificate.

Maximiliano was certain they were wrong, but there was one niggling doubt in his mind.

The certificate said he was born in the south of Buenos Aires, in a suburb called Wilde, but his parents lived far away in the north of the city.

So he decided to take the DNA test that CONADI was asking for.

Three months later, on October 3, 2016, they called back and insisted he come and see them immediately.

The results were positive to 99.99 per cent.

"It was a very intense moment. I felt like I was in a movie, I couldn't believe this was happening to me," Maximiliano recalls.

He found out his birth parents were young left-wing guerrillas who'd disappeared in 1976.

Maximiliano was shown photos of his birth parents with his brother Ramiro, who is two years older than him.

He also saw images of his brother as a grown man.

"He was just like me, he had the same beard, the same hands, the same balding head," Maximiliano recalls.

"Any doubts I had vanished in that moment."

Before the meeting, he hadn't even known he was adopted.

'If you steal their children… you will defeat your enemy'

Historians can only speculate as to why the detained women, like Maximiliano's mother, were allowed to give birth before they were killed.

The military has maintained a code of silence on the regime, even under oath in court.

Laura Guevara works as a guide at ESMA, which was once a torture centre but is now a museum that educates people about Argentina's dark past.

In one room, an inscription on the floor reads: "How could children possibly have been born in this place?"

"Part of the intention of the clandestine torture centres was to erase the identity of those political subjects," Ms Guevara says.

"So in the case of the pregnant women it was also to take away those babies and raise them with another family."

Ignazio Modenesi, another guide, says it's also linked to the Cold War idea that "you won't beat your enemy in the battlefield but in other fields".

"So if you can steal their children, raise them with a different kind of thinking and different ideals or core values, at the end you will prevail, you will defeat your enemy."

But that wasn't the case with Maximiliano's adopting parents, who weren't in the military.

His mother was a dance teacher, his father worked for a local council — and they had just wanted a baby.

Following a trail

When Maximiliano first asked his mother if he could be one of the missing grandchildren, she lied to him about being adopted.

When she finally told him the truth, she cried.

She and her husband had been unable to conceive a child, and some friends had told them to register for an adoption with Juana Franicevich, an obstetrician in Wilde.

They had no idea the baby they took home from hospital months later was a child of 'disappeared' parents.

"My father in particular took a serious blow, he was very upset for a few days," Maximiliano says.

It was Ms Franicevich's name on his birth certificate that led the investigators to Maximiliano; she had also signed the certificates of two other recovered grandchildren.

A new family

Three days later, Maximiliano met his birth family.

He knocked on the door of his aunt's house in Buenos Aires, expecting a few people would be there. Instead, he was greeted by a "mountain" of relatives.

"They were all very happy but I could also tell that they were holding back some of their overwhelming feelings, so that they wouldn't overwhelm me," he recalls.

Maximiliano found it very easy to talk with Ramiro, who had given an emotional press conference about his long-lost brother.

"I had this deep-rooted feeling… that I was coming back from somewhere that I'd been away from," Maximiliano says.

He wasn't the only one in his family to be affected by the dirty war.

Two of his aunts had gone into exile, and his mother's twin sister was also one of the 'disappeared' — the desaparecidos.

The Madres of Plaza De Mayo

The search for Argentina's stolen generation began in April 1977, with a group of women now known as the Madres of Plaza de Mayo.

They gathered at the square in the heart of Buenos Aires, sharing their stories of loss, and then marched defiantly to the Presidential Palace.

At least a dozen women alleged their children had been taken by the military government.

It was a brave act; by protesting, the women risked being disappeared themselves.

The Madres weren't the only women pushing for information on the whereabouts of the missing.

Some grandmothers knew their daughters had been pregnant when they were detained. They could only hope their grandchildren had survived.

After military rule ended in 1983, the grandmothers heard rumours of children glimpsed at church or at kindergarten that looked like their daughters.

They knew the only way to prove their identity was with DNA.

In 1989, with the support of a democratically elected government, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo gave their blood and established one of the largest biological data banks in the world.

With the help of CONADI, they started looking for their grandchildren.

A connection with a lost father

For years, the grandmothers, the Abuelas de Plaza Mayo, prepared for the day they would find Maximiliano.

Finally they were able to give him an archive they had gathered, which helped bring his parents to life for him.

It contained photos, letters, a book of poems that his mother had written, and an audio interview they did with his grandfather, who died years before Maximiliano was found.

"He was there with his half-Italian half-Argentinian accent talking about what my father was like when he was a child and when he was older," Maximiliano says.

Now a doctor, Maximiliano discovered his father, Domingo Menna, had also studied medicine.

"He didn't finish, he was in his final year when he had to go underground. That was some connection I found with him," he says.

He learned his parents had been members of Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, The People's Revolutionary Army.

In the 1970s the left-wing group kidnapped industrialists and killed police.

After the military coup in 1976, they knew their time was up.

Maximilano's parents had already bought airline tickets to go into exile when they were both detained.

Notorious death flights

His mother Ana-Maria Lanzillotto was eight months pregnant at the time.

He's been able to piece together her final days with the help of Catalina Lanis, who was in detention with Ana-Maria.

What she told him is like something out of The Handmaid's Tale.

"Catalina told me that they were moving them around a lot," Maximiliano says.

"One time they stopped in the middle of one of these trips and they … pretended to shoot them, about 10 to 20 women."

Eventually the women were taken to a detention centre where they were chained to their beds, blindfolded.

It was there that Maximiliano's mother went into labour. She was taken away to give birth, and never seen again.

It's possible, as Ms Guevara from ESMA explains, that she was on one of the notorious death flights.

"It consisted of giving a sleeping drug to the desaparecidos and then taking them in trucks to an airport, putting them into aeroplanes and throwing them into the river, Rio de la Plata, or into the sea," Ms Guevara says.

One former Naval officer has testified that this practice was overseen by Catholic priests.

"The priests in the Navy said that was a Catholic way of dying because the sea was responsible for the death of the desaparecidos," Ms Guevara explains.

"Some of those priests blessed those aeroplanes before they took off."

Deep wounds begin to heal

Ramiro, Maximiliano's brother, was two when his parents were detained.

When nobody came to collect him from kindergarten, he was sent to an orphanage, and was eventually rescued by his aunt and uncle, who raised him.

He had always hoped that his younger sibling had survived.

"We're so happy to have found him," Ramiro said in a radio interview after his brother was found.

"We don't know what he'll think, but he will have unconditional love, because we won't ask for an ideological ID for loving him."

Maximiliano isn't angry with his adoptive parents.

"I saw how much they struggled to help me and my sister and I'm thankful for the kind of people who found me," he says.

"I was born in a very precarious condition, they didn't know whether I was going to survive, so I'm glad I survived and I'm glad that the people who found me were so kind to me."

Maximiliano feels the experience hasn't changed his identity, but rather, has expanded it.

And he believes the recovery of the missing grandchildren — children just like himself — is changing Argentina.

"So many people felt repaired by finding these grandchildren," he says.

"I'm part of something bigger, of a wound that's starting to heal, that's changing the whole country, not just myself."

So far, 128 missing grandchildren have been recovered.

It is believed there are more than 300 others who are yet to be found.

Credits

Reporter : Claudia Taranto for Earshot

: Claudia Taranto for Earshot Editor : Monique Ross

: Monique Ross Digital production : Monique Ross and Farz Edraki

: Monique Ross and Farz Edraki Photography : Maximiliano and Ramiro images: Getty/Eitan Abramovich; Archival images of Maximiliano's family: supplied; Archival protest images: Getty/Horacio Villalobos-Corbis, Daniel Garcia; Archival image of leaders of Argentina's armed forces: Getty/ Keystone/Stringer; ESMA images: Getty/Eitan Abramovich; Madres of Plaza de Mayo images: Getty/Daniel Garcia, Bettmann; Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo images: Getty/ Eitan Abramovich, Javier Gonzalez Toledo; Rio de la Plata image: Getty/Jose Maria Perez Nunez; Photos of missing Argentinians: Getty/ Mondadori Portfolio.

: Maximiliano and Ramiro images: Getty/Eitan Abramovich; Archival images of Maximiliano's family: supplied; Archival protest images: Getty/Horacio Villalobos-Corbis, Daniel Garcia; Archival image of leaders of Argentina's armed forces: Getty/ Keystone/Stringer; ESMA images: Getty/Eitan Abramovich; Madres of Plaza de Mayo images: Getty/Daniel Garcia, Bettmann; Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo images: Getty/ Eitan Abramovich, Javier Gonzalez Toledo; Rio de la Plata image: Getty/Jose Maria Perez Nunez; Photos of missing Argentinians: Getty/ Mondadori Portfolio. Special thanks to Fabian Iorlano (translator) and Ramon Briant (researcher).

Topics: human-interest, community-and-society, history, world-politics, missing-person, law-crime-and-justice, argentina

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