BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA – Her white hair always well-styled, Estela de Carlotto is an elegant woman who moves with grace. But the most striking characteristic of this more than 80-year-old grandmother is her level head.
When she walks through the nursery school at Instituto Vocacional de Arte Manuel José de Labardén in Buenos Aires, Argentina’s capital, parents and teachers fall silent, a sign of respect. The school directors receive Carlotto and introduce her to her real hosts: the 4- and 5-year-olds waiting in their classroom to listen to her tell them stories.
But these aren’t just any stories. And Carlotto isn’t just any grandmother.
Carlotto is the president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a group of grandmothers who banded together more than 30 years ago to demand the return of the hundreds of grandchildren who were stolen from them during Argentina’s last military dictatorship.
The stolen babies belonged to pregnant women whom members of the military regime kidnapped for ideological reasons. The officers forced the women to give birth in clandestine detention centers erected across the country and later murdered them. The officers then gave the babies to families associated with the regime, who raised them as their own.
The babies' grandmothers, united as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, have recovered 106 of the stolen babies, now men and women. The association announced the most recent recovery last week – Pablo Javier Gaona, 34. Forces of the military dictatorship kidnapped his parents in 1978 when he was just 1 month old and gave him to a family affiliated with the regime. A genetic exam recently confirmed his true identity.
But 394 people who were stolen as babies are still missing, fueling the efforts of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Among these efforts is this school story program.
On this cold winter morning, Carlotto is introducing the program to its youngest audience yet – nursery school students. Some 20 kids, ages 4 and 5, form a semicircle before her.
“I am a grandmother of children like you,” Carlotto says to the children. “We all have a grandmother and someone who tells us a story. I come so that, in turn, your grandmothers tell you stories. Do you all like stories?”
The children all answer yes. But they don’t just want to listen. They also want to talk, to tell Carlotto what their names are and to share their secrets with her. One girl tells Carlotto about her wish for the sky to rain candy, while another boy says that he has nightmares when he sleeps.
“The nightmares sometimes run away when we have dreams,” she says. “But you have to have pretty dreams.”
She shows the children a folder with many stories selected for them by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. She leaves them with the children as a gift.
Carlotto then says goodbye and leaves the classroom, but the children aren’t alone. The stories' protagonists – the little indigenous boy who transforms into a beautiful parrot, the imaginative toad who is sure he can fly and the owl that doubts him – remain floating in the air, waiting for some adult to give them life by reading their tales to the children.
In the next room, Carlotto addresses the children’s parents and directors of the nursery school.
“I have a wish,” she says, “and it’s that all the children know that the Abuelas, we exist, and that we continue searching for our grandchildren.”
Carlotto’s visit to the school marks the official extension of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo’s story program, Las Abuelas Nos Cuentan, to children in nursery school. The program uses story as a tool for parents and teachers to educate youth about the disappearance of thousands of Argentines and the theft of hundreds of babies during the nation’s last dictatorship. At the same time, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo know that the parents of the children at the schools could be the missing grandchildren whom they search for. But the primary objective is to educate this new generation about the country’s history so that it doesn’t repeat itself.
After a civilian-military coup in 1976, a dictatorship governed Argentina until 1983. During this time, the military regime systematically kidnapped, tortured and disappeared people of opposing ideologies in more than 650 clandestine detention centers around the country, according to the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Many were high school and college students.
They tortured them for information, then killed them and disposed of their bodies in mass graves. For others, they attached weights to their feet and dropped them – while still alive – out of airplanes over Río de la Plata, the river that separates Argentina and Uruguay. Human rights organizations estimate that 30,000 people were disappeared during the dictatorship.
The mothers of the disappeared began to gather in 1977 in Plaza de Mayo in the center of the capital. They became known as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, circling the plaza and demanding information about the wherabouts of their missing children.
The members of the regime also stole and distributed the babies of the victims who gave birth in the detention centers. Around the same time that the Madres de Plaza de Mayo began to meet, the grandmothers of the stolen babies united to present a document to the justice system demanding the return of their grandchildren.
This gave birth to the Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a nongovernmental organization that works to find and return all the stolen babies to their real families. In order to identify the stolen babies, who are now adults, and reconnect them with their families, the federal government created the Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos in 1987 at the suggestion of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.
The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo also organize programs to prevent a repeat of these events, including Las Abuelas Nos Cuentan, the school story program that it coordinates with the Ministry of Education.
The various stories included in the program don’t mention or allude to the disappeared. Written by popular authors of children’s literature, they instead promote positive values: to be good people, to learn how to listen, to tell the truth.
Irene Strauss, who is responsible for the education arm of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, explains that the Abuelas choose the stories for the program. There is also a DVD with an interview that primary school students did with the Abuelas at their central office. The DVD also includes three other stories: one read by the author, another told with puppets and another performed as a play. There is also a leaflet for parents with information about the dictatorship.
Strauss says that the Abuelas have distributed 45,000 copies of the materials in primary schools between 2007, when the program began, and 2012. Along the way, the materials also have proved apt for younger children, so Carlotto’s visit marked the launch of this program in nursery schools. The Abuelas plan to develop new content in the future specifically for this younger audience.
“What happened was that the material was started to be used for classrooms of 5-year-olds in nursery school,” Strauss says. “The play by Adela Basch is a grotesque that had been intended for the older kids and ended up being one of the most used for kindergarten because it is very clear, very fun.”
Haydé Alvarez, the coordinator of the morning session at the nursery school, says that they have to be careful about presenting these topics to children because stealing a baby is an intense subject for 4- and 5-year-olds.
“Although it is an issue that touches us all and that contructs memory, we also understand that there is a construction of subjectivity in a child of 4 or 5 years old,” Alvarez says. “And there is a point where, as teachers, we can’t be responsible for what it awakens.”
She agrees with the Abuelas’ idea to invite the children’s parents to participate in Carlotto’s visit so that they can talk to her and be part of the introduction of this topic to their children.
“I think that it’s important that the adults participate and that they have a place to channel their own silences,” she says. “The children are marvelous questioners, and asking a question generates a response. And the response can lead down very sad paths.”
Alvarez says that at the nursery school, they work on the topic of memory throughout the year.
“We work on March 24th,” says Alvarez, referring to the day when citizens fill Plaza de Mayo to condemn the coup, which took place on this date in 1976. “We talk of a country where there were many forbidden things, among them, two or three people gathering in the street. We tell them that there were many prohibited poems and stories.”
Alvarez says these conversations sometimes generate questions about the disappeared, which the teachers try to answer at a level that is appropriate for children.
“The history is very long for them,” Alvarez says. “They are going to have time to ingest it. This is the initial greeting.”
Carlotto assured the parents who gathered at the nursery school that the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo never lose sight of the children’s age.
“We come with a lot of respect, with a lot of delicacy and adapting the message to whom it is directed,” Carlotto says. “We can’t talk with them about anything crude, anything that is bad to listen to, that affects us in a bad way, but with the delicacy that they are going into the history knowing that this exists.”
Carlotto explains that during her school visits, she passes four pieces of advice to the children from the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: to study; to respect everyone; to get involved in activities that interest them; and to practice solidarity.
“We fight against that which the dictatorship wanted to establish as a norm in life: the absence of solidarity,” Carlotto says, “saying, ‘It doesn’t matter to me,’ ‘It doesn’t touch me,’ ‘Don’t touch what is mine.’ In place of this, feeling that the other interests me and helping each other. That enters many of the children, more so coming from a grandmother.”
Susana Molina is the grandmother of Lola Plazaola, a 4-year-old girl at the nursey school. She says that she values how the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo have been able to transform the pain of losing their grandchildren into constructive actions for society.
“It gave me a big thrill to know that Carlotto would visit the nursery school,” Molina says. “Estela is a wonder. I think it’s very valuable that she was able to transform her pain into this marvelous work that is for the memory, for the kids. I think it’s fundamental that they do these things.”
Molina echoes Carlotto about the importance that grandmothers have in the lives of their grandchildren.
“Grandmothers, we are something very important for grandchildren,” she says. “For me, to be able to chat with my granddaughter, to tell her how things were, is fundamental. I lived it.”
Many of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo long to be able to talk to their grandchildren, now adults, when they are able to find them. They don’t discount the possibility that their school visits could be the medium through which they reunite.
“We visit many schools because it’s true," she says. "There, there are little children who could be the children of our grandchildren, who maybe still don’t know that they are the grandchildren for whom we are searching.”
Carlotto emphasizes the bond that she many times establishes with the children during her school visits and how their response to her and the program empowers her to press ahead with her search.
“I visited many schools,” she says. “In one of them, here in Buenos Aires, a little girl no older than 5 years old who listened to my story came and tugged on my coat and told me, ‘Don’t give up, Estela.’ For me, that a little girl told me that was terribly strong, very beautiful.”
The fact that the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo are still alive enables the youth to have direct sources regarding what happened during the last dictatorship. The Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo endeavor that their stories outlive them and continue to be passed down from generation to generation. They believe that, this way, they can prevent history from repeating itself.
For the program to be a success, Carlotto stresses that it must be a joint effort.
“This history, we are writing it, not only the Abuelas, but all of us,” she says. “And in order to write it, you have to talk about it. This is a present history that still hurts us, that is not resolved and that is not possible to close the memory of by decree. Because it would be a crime, because one has to remember.”
And the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo aim to teach the children through the story program that remembering does not mean seeking revenge.
“I only want to transmit to them that only love moves us,” Carlotto says. “That there is not hatred, vengeance or revenge inside us at all. There is no hatred. We simply want that this history doesn’t get swept under the rug. That it is told, that we understand it and that we understand each other.”
She says that this will make the Abuelas’ lifetime efforts worth it.
“If the pain becomes a struggle, if we do good for the sake of good, without any interest, we won’t have passed through this world in vain,” she says. “We can’t ever allow what happened to happen again.”
