To find the missing children the Grandmothers rely mostly on anonymous phone calls or letters from people who inform on neighbours acting suspiciously or who move away suddenly. ‘There can be all sorts of clues,’ says Haydee. ‘It could be that they worked in the regime and then appeared with a baby after showing no signs of pregnancy, or that they are dark while the child is fair, or they treat the child badly. They often act shiftily and are usually not liked because of their military connections. Although people are scared of them, they will still denounce them anonymously.’
Estela recalls the time when the Grandmothers first launched their heart-rending search. ‘It was real 007 stuff. Imagine, we’re looking for children whose names we don’t know, nor their appearance, nor even their date of birth.’
With the aid of international fund-raising, the organisation now has an investigating team. Their task was made easier in 1984 when the new civilian President, Raúl Alfonsín, sanctioned the setting up of a National Bank of Genetic Data. Samples of blood from all the grandparents are registered there, creating a genetic map for each child. Once a child such as Marie Jose is found, the data can then be used as proof to match her up with her legitimate family.
So far the organisation has found 50 of the 215 confirmed niños desaparecidos. They believe, however, that there are many more – the estimated total number of ‘disappeared’ adults is a staggering 45,000. Of the children they have traced, twenty-five have been returned to their legitimate families, thirteen are in contact with their legitimate families but have remained with their adoptive families, who were unaware of their origins, five are currently being fought over in court and seven were found to have been killed.
Haydee had been looking for Marie Jose for eight years, ever since she was told of her granddaughter’s birth by a friend of her daughter’s. She says: ‘I knew when Monica was taken that she was pregnant and I often imagined there had been a child. But I didn’t know how to begin finding her.’ Haydee joined the Grandmothers and began what was to be a long and painful struggle. To fund her search she sold her wedding ring and television. Her house was broken into – an act she believes was connected – and everything was stolen, leaving her only memories and one crumpled black and white photo of Monica and Gustavo. The other grandparents, Gustavo’s parents, refused to acknowledge that the couple were missing; like many Argentinians they tried to ignore the repression. Disapproving of Haydee’s involvement with the Grandmothers, they sought to restrict her access to Monica’s other daughter, Marie Laurie, whom they were bringing up. A year older than Marie Jose, she had been abducted as a baby with her parents but was found a few days later abandoned near her paternal grandparents’ house, suffering from malnutrition.
When Marie Jose’s adoptive parents heard that the Grandmothers were on their trail they moved four times. Marie Jose was scarcely allowed out. Each time the family moved, complaints would come in from suspicious neighbours. Finally Judge Padilla, who was investigating complaints from the local Grandmothers group, discovered that Teresa Gonzalez had worked in the Banfield concentration camp, where many of the missing children were taken, between 1976 and 1978.
At first Gonzalez denied she had taken Marie Jose, but after being detained she openly admitted that the child was not hers and that she had worked in the detention centre where the child was born. In fact she was said to seem almost relieved, ‘as if she had discharged a ten-year lie’, says Padilla. When Judge Padilla told Haydee about this little girl, she knew the age fitted, but hardly dared hope it was her grandchild. She was lucky – Marie Jose was only the second niño desaparecido to be located.
Judge Padilla was unsure of what to do. ‘It was all new and I didn’t know what was best for the child. It seemed to me a terrible suffering for a child to suddenly discover that the people she assumed were her parents were not. I spoke with psychiatrists and was unconvinced. Finally I talked to my 12-year-old son who said, ‘Look, Daddy, truth is truth.’ I realised then that it was better for a child to know the truth, however painful, than to be lied to.’
At the same time Marie Jose’s sister, Marie Laurie, was coming to terms with her true identity, the fate of her real parents and the knowledge that she had a younger sister.
Marie Jose was silent and withdrawn during counselling sessions with the judge and a psychiatrist. ‘At first I thought I’d rather go back to the people who had brought me up because I was frightened. I had always been with them,’ she says. Finally she was left alone with her sister, to whom she bears a striking resemblance. After forty minutes of complete silence the judge heard voices, then giggles and finally bursts of laughter. The two came out showing their arms – they had discovered that they each had a moon-shaped birthmark on the same part of the arm. ‘As soon as I met my granny and sister I didn’t want to go back,’ Marie Jose admits. And Marie Laurie adds: ‘It seemed as if we had always been together.’
Gonzalez’s confession made Marie Jose’s case far simpler. Within a week of her discovery, Marie Jose had chosen to live with her grandmother, and Marie Laurie decided to leave her father’s parents. Now 72-year-old Haydee is very happy living with her two grandchildrenin their small Buenos Aires flat. They were both brought up as only children and often have terrible fights, but they are adapting, she says. Through the Grandmothers, Marie Jose and Marie Laurie have access to a team of psychologists to help them readjust.
Marie Jose appreciates that she was brought up in some measure of luxury, almost spoilt. But she says: ‘They treated me well and overprotected me, but it was all a lie.’ As Haydee says: ‘A child can be given beautiful clothes and toys but if she has been robbed of her identity, she has lost the most precious thing. It’s worse than being a slave, as at least a slave has a history.’
In fact Marie Jose has bloomed since moving in with her grandmother. Haydee proudly shows a line written by her granddaughter about her lost years. ‘I could not grow, Granny. It was as if a hand was pressing down on my head.’
For many of the other Grandmothers the search goes on, made more difficult as some of the children have been taken to neighbouring Paraguay. Despite persistent demands, the Grandmothers have been given no access to police records. In 1987, all officers in the junior and middle ranks involved in the repression were pardoned by the government. In December 1990 President Menem pardoned all those senior officers still behind bars, making the Grandmothers’ fight even harder, because even when children are found, the courts in today’s officially democratic Argentina are not necessarily sympathetic.
Estela hopes that as children who are still living with their foster parents get older, they will start asking questions about their past, become suspicious and approach the Grandmothers. They are already getting lots of inquiries following a publicity campaign, one they hope to take to prime-time television.
There are various theories about why the repressers took the children. Alicia lo Judice, a psychiatrist involved in counselling returned children, says: ‘They don’t accept they stole the children, they say they adopted them. Maybe they even believe it. But it’s not adoption – it’s stealing children.’
None of the ‘parents’ who have had to return children are willing to explain their side of the story, but an acquaintance of Teresa Gonzalez said in her defence: ‘She wanted to give Marie Jose a chance of life. Surely it’s better that the child was saved and brought up in security than left to die in the camp.’
The grandparents are less sympathetic. Some believe it’s a macabre form of war booty; others see it as a form of brainwashing. Estela says, ‘It’s as though, having killed the parents, the repressers then wanted to control the destiny of their children.’
In summing up the case of Marie Jose, Judge Padilla pointed out that Teresa Gonzalez had deliberately falsified her birth documents and compared the child’s condition to that of ‘a pet animal which is treated with affection but with the sole objective of giving pleasure to the owner’.
Estela hopes that, as
they get older and discover the truth, the children will turn against their adoptive parents, seeing them as captors. Marie Jose repeats: ‘They treated me well but now I don’t want anything to do with them. What more can you take from a person than their history?’
‘My people trust and love me’: on the road with the President of Peru
The Spectator, 13 August 1994
Lima
‘CAN YOU HEAR ME, CHILDREN?’ asks the Japanese man on the platform in the wheedling manner of a pantomime performer. Hundreds of small, dusty faces shake stubbornly, impervious to anxious gestures from rows of mothers and teachers in shiny best dresses and pink make-up, greasy in the midday heat. Black-clad marksmen on the roofs of half-built adobe houses surrounding the new brick school train their guns on the crowd. ‘Can you hear me now?’ yells the man. This time the playground erupts in a frenzy of red and white flag waving and chants of ‘Fuji! Fuji!’ led by a long-armed youth in a scarlet tracksuit.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Peru’s President, Alberto Fujimori. Born of Japanese parents, he is called the Emperor by his critics. As he rushes round the country smashing bottles of apple champagne to unveil public works and bestow largesse on a bemused public in staccato Spanish, Fujimori’s role does seem more imperial than governmental. With his smooth, round face, wire-rimmed glasses and sombre suit, he may look like a Japanese banker but he clearly sees himself as a modern-day Inca bringing prosperity to all four corners of his empire.
The Benito Juarez school is in one of the sprawling slums amid the permanent smog that hangs above the ugly city of Lima. It’s the President’s second school visit today in a helter-skelter schedule of inaugurating public works that keeps him out of his office all but two days a week. ‘This is my style,’ he says, in between autographing photo-calendars and kissing blushing teachers. ‘Other presidents know the interiors of their own offices. I know the reality of my country.’
Such populist activities are rather surprising for a technocrat who calls himself the ultimate anti-politician and who defeated the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in the 1990 elections by standing as the outsider not tied to any party. The 55-year-old former rector of the National Agrarian University prefers to be addressed as Engineer Fujimori rather than as President and never misses an opportunity for politician-bashing.
His public seems to appreciate it. Despite having closed down Congress and the courts and assumed near dictatorial powers in April 1992, in a move which received international condemnation, Fujimori is by far the most popular president in Latin America. In his last year in office he still notches up more than 60 per cent approval ratings, and, having changed the Constitution to be able to stand again, may well be re-elected. Voters in nearby countries such as Brazil and Venezuela regularly place him top of polls of those they believe most capable of solving their problems. A new verb, ‘fujimorisation’, has entered the lexicon for the process of auto-golpe, or self-coup – the seizure of complete control of all branches of government by a civilian head of state.
Although his means may have been dubious, Fujimori’s popularity is understandable. The Peru he inherited had been as stripped of wealth by years of misrule as it was back in the sixteenth century by Francisco Pizarro’s conquistadors. Between 1985 and 1990, under the populist rule of Alan García, who is now in exile, prices had increased 20,000-fold. Real per capita GDP had fallen to the level of 1960. Sixteen exchange rates were in operation, and the state was bankrupt, with no more foreign exchange reserves, and a pariah of the international community for non-servicing of debt. The proliferation of iron bars, lookout towers and security guards in Lima testifies to the havoc wrought by Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla movement, which cost the nation $20 billion and 25,000 lives and made life unbearable for citizens with constant car bombs and power cuts caused by attacks on transmission lines. Risk analysis firms rated Peru the most dangerous place in the world to do business.
It took a chess-loving engineer who was told he would become president by a tarot card reader to undo this. Borrowing heavily from the Vargas Llosa programme that he had opposed during the campaign, Fujimori announced on taking office the ‘Fujishock’ to overturn years of statism and xenophobia. Following the same IMF-prescribed ‘miracle recipe’ already in place throughout much of Latin America, the plan involved scrapping subsidies, liberalisation of trade and foreign exchange, lifting price and wage controls, freezing public spending, tightening up tax collection and selling off all state assets, from cinemas and tomato-paste producers to the electricity company.
But while his yellow skin won Fujimori support from a largely nonwhitepopulation who felt exploited by years of white elite rule, his political independence and imperial manner won him few friends in Congress or the judiciary. Frustrated by traditional congressional deal-making slowing his reforms, and by the timidity of the courts towards terrorism, on the night of 5 April 1992 Fujimori sent tanks into the streets to close both institutions. Condemned internationally, the tanks were met locally by cheering crowds. Since then, through an all-out war on the guerrillas, the government has captured Abimael Guzmán, the near-mythical leader of the Shining Path, and most of his lieutenants, and even extracted an apology from him. Fujimori has reduced annual inflation from 8,000 to 10 per cent and set the economy growing again and the stock market booming. All this, he insists, would have been impossible without his auto-golpe. Claiming to have inspired Boris Yeltsin’s suspension of the Russian parliament last year, Fujimori is angered by the international outcry his own move provoked: ‘We were in a state of war and every nation has the right to defend itself in such a situation.’
We had been discussing all this at a long table in the dark-panelled Grau room in the presidential palace when Fujimori suddenly announced: ‘The only way you can understand what is happening is to come with me. If you have any appointments cancel them – say the dictator President commanded you!’ An aide in dapper army uniform whisked me through the garden into which the Shining Path lobbed grenades just two years ago, past the parking lot where twenty ambulances await calamity, and into a convoy of black Mercedes sedans.
Shining Path may be in terminal decline but it is not yet dead, and the President’s activities give his security men nightmares. His schedule is only decided at the last minute, so many schoolchildren wait in vain in hot playgrounds for a presidential appearance. Inside the car Fujimori’s pen is constantly at the ready to note down problems to enter into his Toshiba laptop later. ‘I’m always looking for things which need doing because often it is little things that are at the root of big problems,’ he says. ‘But there is so much to do.’ We both stare wordlessly at the endless line of massive red-and-white pillars that were supposed to hold up a monorail but were long ago abandoned by a previous government.
As we drive through the streets of Lima, he rolls down the one-inch-thick bulletproof glass and waves to the ambulantes, or street-walkers, selling plastic fruit refrigerator magnets and executive toys – strangely inappropriate wares for a country in which two-thirds of the population live below the poverty line. The ambulantes appear amazed and then delighted to recognise him and try to catch one of the photo-calendars he keeps permanently on hand. ‘El Chinito’ (Little Chinaman) they shout as they try to grasp his hand. Others call ‘El Hombre’ (the Man) to signal appreciation for their gutsy President. Tossing out calendars in fast succession, recruiting both myself and the driver to help, he smiles in delight. ‘The names they call me show they trust and love me,’ he says. I try not to laugh as one of the calendars hits a sheep grazing innocuously on a patch of grass.
Fujimori is not surprised by the adulation. Jabbing his stubby finger at a slum on a hill, he says: ‘That slum, San Cristóbal, has been there fifty years. It is right in front of the presidential palace yet it still does not have water or sewerage. That’s what politicians do for you.’
Perhaps reflecting his Japanese heritage, the key terms in Fujimori’s vocabulary are efficiency and good mana
gement. A pragmatist free from the shackles of any ideology, he does not like to waste time and at the Peru-Japan school – our next stop –struggles not to look impatient while a padre sprinkles droplets from a plastic bottle labelled ‘Holy Water’ and two grubby children dance a clumsy marinera, a formal dance from the coastal regions.
Fujimori makes no secret of the fact that he prefers soldiers to civilians. ‘I like to get things done, to execute things, and that’s why I like working with the military,’ he says. He uses the army for everything from carrying out development projects to administering justice. As he announces gifts of computers, school bags and books to each school, it is a general who keeps tally in a notebook. The army is Fujimori’s political party, and his main adviser and intelligence chief is Vladimir Montesinos, a cashiered captain known as Peru’s Cardinal Richelieu and so shadowy that he has only twice been caught on film in the last decade*.
Having initially avoided the foreign press, Fujimori now welcomes them as heralds for his message: ‘My experience can be an example for the world. Various countries can question democracy as we did in Peru. The most important thing is efficiency. Government has to be efficient or people suffer.’
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