Rights watchdog for the Americas, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), called on the Argentine government to guarantee resources for the organizations that search for individuals stolen from their parents as babies by the country’s last dictatorship.

The IACHR’s comment came in a note celebrating the identification of the 138th child. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo announced on Friday that Grandchild 138 had been identified, just hours before rights organizations gathered outside the ex-ESMA former clandestine detention center to protest mass layoffs at Argentina’s human rights organizations.

“Entities in charge of identity restitution should have the necessary resources and faculties to carry out their duties effectively,” the IACHR wrote in an X post on Saturday.

They added that states should ensure that children illegally taken from their families “have all the guarantees to recover their true identity and their family bond.”

Grandchild 138, whose identity has not been revealed for privacy reasons, was identified after genetic tests by the National Genetic Database revealed that he was the biological son of Juan Carlos Villamayor and Marta Pourtalé. The couple were kidnapped from their Buenos Aires home by men in plain clothes in December 1976, while Pourtalé was eight and a half months pregnant. 

The IACHR celebrated the identification of Grandchild 138 and emphasized the importance of the National Genetic Database, the National Identity Commission (CONADI, by its Spanish initials) and the Grandmothers’ work. While Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo is an NGO, the other two are public institutions dedicated to the identification of stolen children. The organizations believe that around 500 babies were stolen by the dictatorship and appropriated by the families of military members or their allies.

The IACHR’s remark comes as Argentina’s memory institutions are facing heavy government cuts. On Friday, hours after the press conference in which the Abuelas announced the discovery, hundreds of people gathered outside the Human Rights Secretariat building to protest the layoff of 400 workers.

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The secretariat, the Grandmothers, and numerous other key rights organisms are based inside the ex-ESMA campus, where the deadliest of the dictatorship’s clandestine detention centers operated. It is the place where Villamayor and Pourtalé were last seen alive, and it is believed Grandchild 138 was born there. 

In addition to the mass layoffs, which came on top of several previous waves of cuts at the secretariat in 2024, the government has slashed the budget for the National Genetic Database and closed CONADI’s investigation unit, which worked with the judiciary to gather evidence in cases such as Grandchild 138’s.

The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo said in a recent report that, in his first year in power, President Javier Milei has carried out “regressive measures” that “endanger” the process of memory, truth, and justice regarding the crimes of state terrorism committed by the dictatorship between 1976 and 1983 in Argentina.

In the document, they said they were worried that memory sites might not be preserved due to budget cuts and the closure of a team of archivists that analyzed military documents so they could be used as evidence in trials. They also mentioned their concern about government “hate speech” against human rights and their “open and public” promotion of denialism.

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