The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, a group that identifies children born in captivity to parents illegally detained and forcibly disappeared during the 1976-1983 dictatorship, released a communiqué on Friday announcing that they have identified four pregnant women extrajudicially murdered during the civic-military regime as Dora Elena Vargas, Olga Liliana Vaccarini, Hilda Margarita Farías, and Liliana Beatriz Girardi.

The discovery, which was made with the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology (EAAF, by its Spanish acronym), brings the number of identified grandchildren to 137. The women’s remains had been recovered over a period of 10 years, between 2012 and 2022. 

At the time of her disappearance, Vargas was a 24-year-old militant in the left-wing guerrilla group known as the Montoneros. She was kidnapped in San Francisco Solano, Buenos Aires Province, on November 12, 1977.

Vaccarini was 22 when she was abducted on May 16, 1977, and three months pregnant at the time. Her companion, Gustavo Adrián Rodríguez, was a member of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party and Revolutionary Army of the People (PRT-ERP, by their Spanish acronyms) — left-wing political groups that also fought the dictatorship.

Farías was 23 and pursuing a degree in social work when she was kidnapped in public on December 20, 1976. She, too, was a member of the Montoneros.

Girardi, who was between four and six months pregnant, had been a militant in the PRT-ERP when she was abducted at her home in Rosario at the age of 20. Survivor testimony indicates that she was taken to the Quinta de Fisherton clandestine center in Santa Fe.

In a post on social media, the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo issued the following statement:

“We communicate the resolution of four cases based on the sharing of information with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF), the National Commission for the Right to Identity (CONADI), and the judiciary. It refers to four women who were murdered before giving birth. With them, we now count 137 resolved cases [of missing grandchildren]. 

Unfortunately, it is not the first time that we have completed a search like this one. Over the course of almost 46 years of struggle, we have closed the cases of 15 women who were murdered before giving birth, and today we must add four more to that list. These are cases that have taken years of investigation, procedures, and reconstruction, as well as time for assimilation by families who, in many cases, have decided to grieve in private. 

This terrorist state committed the most horrendous crimes: forced disappearances, kidnappings, torture, murder, and rape. The genocidaires threw people into the sea and kept pregnant women alive before murdering them. They riddled pregnant women with bullets, sometimes in their stomachs, as in the cases of Dora Elena Vargas, Olga Liliana Vaccarini, and Hilga Margarita Farías. They also shot women who were showing, like Liliana Beatriz Girardi, who was six months pregnant.

The identification of these four women is the product of documentary investigations, the exhumation of mass graves, and a comparison of footprints, among other expert techniques carried out by various institutions and organizations that work to reconstruct what happened to the victims disappeared by the dictatorship, whose members remain silent. We continue to demand justice and to know the whereabouts of hundreds of appropriated children, not only for their families but also for Argentine society, which has gone 40 years of democracy without learning the truth of what was done to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren.”

With information from Télam. Photo credit: Alejo Manuel Avila / Reuters