Human Rights and the Status of Children as Victims in the Late Cold War

ABSTRACT

This article argues that in the late 1970s the human rights movement recognised children as subjects in their own right, giving them their own voice. The author questions the claims that until recently the dominant view of victims and their suffering was adult-centric and that human rights and humanitarianism were two unrelated paradigms. In studying this process, the author offers a historiographical contribution that centres on the value of children as a way of gaining new insights into the Cold War and history in general.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War end
• human rights
• childhood
• Latin America

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Gerda Henkel Foundation for its support, which enabled me to write and discuss this article, as well as the Library and Archive of the Ibero-American Institute and the International Institute of Social History, which allowed me to access their collection. I would also like to thank the Cold War History reviewers and editors and participants at the Columbia University Latin American Workshop for their comments, as well as Laura Pérez Carrara, my friend and translator, for skilfully rendering my words into English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

¹ ‘Argentina Latest Abductions’- Urgent Action (UA) 1/76, Boxes 928–36, Amnesty International Archive, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, Netherlands (archive hereafter cited as AIA-IISH).

² See https://www.abuelas.org.ar/caso accessed 11 July 2020; Julio Nosiglia, Botín de guerra (Buenos Aires: Tierra Fértil, 1985); Rita Arditti, De por vida: historia de una búsqueda. Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo y los niños desaparecidos (Buenos Aires: Grijalbo-Mondadori, 2000); Carla Villalta, Entregas y secuestros: El rol del Estado en la apropiación de niños (Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Puerto, 2012); Sabina Regueiro, Apropiación de niños, familias y justicia en Argentina (Rosario: Prohistoria, 2012); and Fabricio Laino Sanchís, ‘De “niños desaparecidos” a “nietos restituidos”: actores, escenarios y discursos en torno a los procesos de búsqueda y restitución de los/as niños/as apropiados/as durante la última dictadura en Argentina (1976–2004)’ (PhD diss., Universidad Nacional de San Martín, 2020).

³ Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Vania Markarian, Left in Transformation: Uruguayan Exiles and the Latin American Human Rights Network, 1967–1984 (London: Routledge, 2005); and Patrick William Kelly, Sovereign Emergencies: Latin America and the Making of Global Human Rights Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).

⁴ Isabella Cosse, ‘Childhood, Love, and Politics: The Montonero “Nursery” in Cuba during the Cold War’, Journal of Latin American Studies (forthcoming).

⁵ Most notably, H.I.J.O.S. (the Spanish acronym for Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice and Against Forgetting and Silence, which also spells out the word for ‘children’).

⁶ See Mariana Eva Pérez and Ulrike Capdepón at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNJge-RdsuI accessed 20 July 2022. In October 2017, to give visibility to and problematise the children’s experience and counter an adult-centric view, this generation of activists launched a project at Olimpo (a former Clandestine Detention, Torture and Extermination Centre turned memory site) entitled ‘¿Aquí hubo niños?’ (‘Were there children here?’).

⁷ Isabella Cosse et al., Infancias: políticas y saberes en Argentina y Brasil (siglos XIX y XX) (Buenos Aires: Teseo, 2011); and Susana Sosenski and Elena Jackson Albarrán, eds., Nuevas miradas a la historia de la infancia en América Latina (Mexico City: UNAM, 2013).

⁸ Barnett, ‘Introduction: Worlds of Difference’, in Humanitarianism and Human Rights: A World of Differences?, ed. Michael N. Barnett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 1–30.

⁹ Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006).

¹⁰ Moyn, ‘Human Rights and Humanitarianization’, in Humanitarianism and Human Rights, ed. Barnett, 38–48.

¹¹ Organisation of American States – Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (OAS-IACHR), El informe prohibido: Informe sobre la situación de los derechos humanos en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Cels, 1980), 71–6.

¹² Judith Filc, Entre el parentesco y la política: Familia y dictadura, 1976–1983 (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 1997).

¹³ Nosiglia, Botín de guerra; Arditti, De por vida; Laino Sanchís, ‘De “niños desaparecidos”’; Villalta, Entregas y secuestros; and Regueiro, Apropiación de niños.

¹⁴ Nosiglia, Botín de Guerra, 17–41.

¹⁵ Fassin, Por una repolitización del mundo: Las vidas descartables como desafío del siglo XXI (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2018), 122–7.

¹⁶ ‘Urgent Action Structure’, 23 June 1976, NS 116/76, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

¹⁷ ‘To All National Sections Argentina Co-Groups and Other Groups Working on Latin America Refugees’, 14 December 1977, Index 13/08/77; and ‘Chile and Argentina Campaigns: Guidelines for Coordinating Actions’, 28 February 1977, AMR 01/01/77, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

¹⁸ ‘To All National Sections Chile and Argentina Coordination Groups’, 28 February 1977, AMR 01/01/77, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

¹⁹ Emilio Crenzel, Memory of the Argentina Disappearances: The Political History of Nunca Más (New York: Routledge, 2012).

²⁰ ‘Videla Reassures Argentines on Human Rights’, New York Times, 1 April 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/04/01/archives/videla-reassures-argentines-on-human-rights-private-investors-are.html accessed 10 June 2021, and ‘Der Terror in Argentinien geht witer’, Franfurter Allgemeine, 30 March 1976, Arg. Ha. Folder, Newspaper Clippings Collection, Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (hereafter cited as NCC-IAI). This view was quickly revised, Juan de Onis, ‘Rightist Terror Stirs Argentina’, New York Times, 29 August 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/08/29/archives/rightist-terror-stirs-argentina-demands-grow-for-action-to-end-wave.html accessed 3 June 2021.

²¹ Markarian, Left in Transformation, 64–83.

²² Uruguayan Family Abducted’ – UA 103/76, 3708/76, Boxes 928–36, AIA-IISH.

²³ Rosario Tauriño, ‘Empecé algo que no sé a dónde me va a llevar’, Brecha (Uruguay), 20 May 2016.

²⁴ Ignacio Ampudia, ‘Mamá ¿quiénes son estos señores?’, Haroldo (Argentina), 3 August 2021, https://revistaharoldo.com.ar/nota.php?id=634 accessed 10 June 2021. Also, UAs 20/76 to 70/76, ‘Argentina’, NS 103/76, and ‘Uruguayan Family Abducted’, 3708/76, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

²⁵ UA 89/76 and ‘Disappeared Children’, 6 September 1976, Boxes 928–36; and ‘Argentina: Further Abductions of Children’, UA 30/76, UA 96/76, 22 September 1976, UA 89/76, and UA 007/77, 12 January 1977, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

²⁶ Ana María Lanzillotto’s son, Maximiliano Menna, was identified through DNA tracing by the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in 2016 (https://www.abuelas.org.ar/caso/menna-lanzillotto-maximiliano-28?orden=c), accessed 10 June 2021. The search for Liliana Delfino’s child continues.

²⁷ ‘Argentina Further Abductions of Children – Schaegr Family’ – UA 96/76, 23 November 1976, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

²⁸ Laino Sanchís, ‘De “niños desaparecidos”’.

²⁹ Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998); Markarian, Left in Transformation; For Argentina, see Emilio Crenzel, ‘Las luchas por la verdad, la justicia y la memoria ante los legados o de la violencia política en América’, Cuadernos de Humanidades – Universidad Nacional de Salta (Argentina), 30 (January–June 2019): 15–29.

³⁰ ‘To All National Sections’ and ‘Repression Against intellectual in Argentina’, 1977, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

³¹ ‘Summary of Argentina Mission Report’, 1 March 1977, AMR 13/16/77, AIA-IISH; and Daniel Gutman, Noviembre de 1976: Una misión en busca de la verdad (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2015), 46–85.

³² ‘To all National Sections from Latin American Research Department, Report – Argentina: A Survey of Repression in Cultural, Scientific and Related Fields since the Military Coup of 24 March 1976’, 10 January 1977, AMR 13/02/77, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

³³ At just six weeks old, Simón Riquelo was abducted by state forces in 1976 in Buenos Aires along with his mother, Sara Méndez, a Uruguayan activist. He was one of AI’s witness cases. ‘David Kraiselburd’ – UA 70/76, ‘Zaffaroni Islas Family’ – UA 107/76, and ‘Zaffaroni Islas Family’ – UA 189/77, 23 November 1977, Boxes 449–66 AIA-IISH-AI. Méndez found her son in 2003 after a tireless search supported by various organisations and institutions (https://sitiosdememoria.uy/riquelo-simon-antonio) accessed 20 July 2021.

³⁴ Amnistía Internacional a la República Argentina, Informe (Barcelona-Maracaibo: AI, 1977), 39–40.

³⁵ Daniel Gutman, Noviembre de 1976 (Buenos Aires: Capital Intelectual, 2015), 87–140; and Rodrigo Lloret, ‘El frente externo de la última dictadura y el rol de la diplomacia Argentina ante las denuncias que se realizaban en el exterior contra la dictadura militar (1976–1983)’ (PhD diss., Flacso-Argentina, 2019).

³⁶ AMR 13/78/77, 25 November 1977, Boxes 928–36, AIA-IISH.

³⁷ UA 073/77, 13 May 1977, Boxes 928–36, AIA-IISH.

³⁸ Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 29.

³⁹ Crenzel, Memory of the Argentina Disappearances; ‘To All National Sections from Latin American Research Department’, AMR 13/72/77, ‘Repression Against Intellectuals in Argentina’, and ‘List of Academics, Teachers, Journalists and Writers reported to Amnesty International as Disappeared since March 1977’, Boxes 449–66, AIA-IISH.

⁴⁰ González Bombal, ‘Nunca más: el juicio más allá de los estrados’, in Juicio, castigo y memorias. Derechos humanos y justicia en la política Argentina, ed. Carlos Acuña et al. (Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1995). In The World Reimagined: Americans and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), Mark Phillips Bradley valorises mothers and children in the symbolising of pain and suffering that was circulated through the media.

⁴¹ Myriam Ticktin, ‘Innocence: Shaping the Concept and Practice of Humanity’, in Humanitarianism and Human Rights, ed. Barnett, 185–202.

⁴² It was only with the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child that childhood was defined in an international instrument. Bina D’Costa, ‘The Rights of the Child: Political History, Practices and Protection’, in Children and Global Conflict, ed. Kim Huynh, Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 89–122.

⁴³ ‘Argentina: Action Paper for Disappeared or Detained Women and Children’, May 1978, AMR 13/35/78, Boxes 459–61, in Microfilm 117–18, AIA-IISH. One of the founding members of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Azucena Villaflor, was abducted along with the nuns and is still disappeared today.

⁴⁴ Arditti, De por vida; and Laino Sanchís, ‘De “niños desaparecidos”’.

⁴⁵ Carla was found in 1983 (https://www.abuelas.org.ar/caso/rutila-artes-carla-graciela-249?orden=c) accessed 30 July 2021. On Operation Condor, see Francesca Lessa, ‘Justice without Borders’, Policy Brief, https://www.lac.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/lac/documents/media/policy_brief_eng.pdf accessed 10 October 2019.

⁴⁶ ‘Argentina: Action Paper for Disappeared or Detained Women and Children’, May 1978, AMR 13/35/78, Boxes 459–61, in Microfilm 117–18, AIA-IISH. On first-hand accounts by women victims, see Claudia Bacci et al., Y nadie quería sabre: Relatos sobre violencia contra las mujeres en el terrorismo de Estado en Argentina (Buenos Aires: Memoria Abierta, 2012); and Barbara Sutton, Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina (New York: New York University Press, 2019). On imprisonment and torture, see Débora D’Antonio, La prisión en los años 70: Historia, género y política (Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos, 2016).

⁴⁷ Roger Chartier, Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).

⁴⁸ Catherine Lutz, ‘Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category’, Cultural Anthropology l, no. 3 (1986): 287–309.

⁴⁹ For a discussion on this, see Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper, and Francesca Polletta, ‘Why Emotions Matter’, in Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements, ed. Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 1–19.

⁵⁰ Fassin, Por una repolitización, 124; and Hunt, Inventing Human Rights.

⁵¹ Marina Franco, El exilio argentino en Francia durante la dictadura (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2008).

⁵² ‘Wie viele sind verschwunden’, Frankturter Rundschau, 21 August 1979, 52; and Iain Guest, ‘Five Other Nations Cited. Argentina Put on UN Rights Blacklist’, International Herald Tribune, 28 September 1979, Arg. Sn. Folder, NCC-IAI.

⁵³ ‘The Missing Children of Argentina’, March 1979, AMR 13/19/1979, Boxes 462–66, AIA-IISH.

⁵⁴ Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Silvia Maria Fávero Arend, Histórias de Abandono: infância e justiça no Brasil (década de 1930) (Florianópolis: Editora Mulheres, 2011); and Nara Milanich, Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile (1850–1930) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).

⁵⁵ Linde Lindkvist, ‘1979: A Year of the Child, but Not of Children’s Human Rights’, Diplomatica 1 (2019): 202–20.

⁵⁶ On the centrality of children at that time, see Isabella Cosse, Mafalda: A Social and Political History of Latin America’s Global Comic (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2019).

⁵⁷ Ampudia, ‘Mamá ¿quiénes son estos señores?’

⁵⁸ ‘The Missing Children of Argentina’, AIA-IISH. The list included Simon Riquelo, Amaral García, Anatole Grisonas and Victoria Grisonas, Mariana Zaffaroni Islas, Jorgelina Planas, Elena Bleza, Sebastián Marquez, Pablo Menna, Carlos Santillán and María Lucila Santillán, and Freida Laschian Meijado and her brother Gabriel Matías Cervasco, both Chilean.

⁵⁹ ‘Palabras Pronunciadas al iniciarse a la Conferencia de Prensa en el Foro alternativo de la conferencia de la mujer, en Copenhague, el 26 de julio de 1980’, Madres de Plaza de Mayo bulletin, year 1, no. 2 (September 1980).

⁶⁰ ‘Argentine Women Ask Vance’s Aid on Missing Kin’, International Herald Tribune,r 22 Novembe 1977; and ‘Le drame des “disparus argentins”’, Le Monde, 28 August 1979, Arg. Ha. Folder, NCC-IAI; Iain Guest, ‘Five Other Nations Cited’, International Herald Tribune, 28 September 1979; ‘Verschwundene sind nicht vergessen’, Weser-Kurier, 10 February 1982; Dial Torgersen, ‘Argentina, Grandmothers of the Missing Continue to Ask “Where Are the Children?”’, International Herald Tribune, 7 July 1982; and ‘Le premier anniversaire des “Folles de Mai”’, Le Monde, 16 October 1979, Arg. Sn. Folder, NCC-IAI.

⁶¹ On the role of Argentina’s human rights organisations in the IACHR mission, see Guadalupe Basualdo, Movilización Legal Internacional en Dictadura. La visita de la CIDH y la creación del CELS (Buenos Aires: TeseoPress, 2019), 131–40.

⁶² OAS-IACHR, El informe prohibido, 17, 71–5, 93–5.

⁶³ Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 104–24, and The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 15 and 41.

⁶⁴ Cosse et al., Infancias; and Sosenski and Jackson Albarrán, Nuevas miradas.

⁶⁵ See Mariana Eva Perez, ‘Their Lives After: Theatre as Testimony and the So-called “Second Generation” in Post-dictatorship Argentina’, Journal of Romance Studies 13, no. 3 (Winter 2013): 6–16; and Noa Vaisman, ‘Posmemoria y memoria desaparecida en dos obras de la posdictadura Argentina’, in El Pasado inasequible: Desaparecidos, hijos y combatientes en el arte y la literatura del nuevo milenio, ed. Jordana Blejmar, Silvana Mandolessi, and Mariana Eva Pérez (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 2017), 185–203.

⁶⁶ See, among many others, ‘Die Großmütter der “Plaza de Mayo”’; and ‘Deine Großmütter ist hart wie Stahl geworden’, Tagesthemen,19 May 1982.

⁶⁷ See https://elpais.com/diario/1978/12/31/sociedad/283906807_850215.html, accessed 10 June 2021. On International Women’s Year, see Karin Grammático, ‘La I Conferencia Mundial de la Mujer’, in Hilvanando historias: Mujeres y política en el pasado reciente latinoamericano, ed. A. Andújar and others (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Luxemburg, 2010), 101–12; and Jocelyn Olcott, International Women’s Year (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

⁶⁸ Amnesty International, Children (Leuven, Belgium: acco, 1979).

⁶⁹ See Inés González Bombal, ‘Nunca más: el juicio más allá de los estrados’; and Laino Sanchís, ‘De “niños desaparecidos”’.

⁷⁰ AI, Children, 7, 9, 17.

⁷¹ Ibid., 7, 19.

⁷² Laino Sanchís, ‘De “niños desaparecidos”’, 140–2. On Forschungs- und Dokumentationszentrum Chile- Lateinamerika, Argentinien Folder, Solidaritat 1976–1977, ‘Presseerklarung’, Cologne, October 1979; Jan Dunkhorst, in discussion with the author, 23 January 2020; and information provided by Barbara Potthast via email, 3 February 2020.

⁷³ María Florencia Osuna, La intervención social del Estado: El Ministerio de Bienestar Social entre dos dictaduras (Argentina, 1966–1983) (Rosario: Prohistoria, 2017), 220–30.

⁷⁴ ‘Homenaje a los padres víctimas’, Madres de Plaza de Mayo bulletin, year 1, no. 2 (September 1980).

⁷⁵ Donna Guy, ‘The Pan American Child Congresses, 1916 to 1942’, Journal of Family History 23 (1998): 272–91; and Isabella Cosse, Estigmas de nacimiento. Peronismo y orden familiar (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006).

⁷⁶ Editorial, ‘¿Un Nobel para las Madres’, Buenos Aires Herald, 22 January 1980; ‘Del obispo de París, sobre desaparecidos’, La Nación (Argentina), 26 November 1981; and ‘Ante la embajada en París: Navidad sin presos’, Clarín (Argentina), 11 December 1981, 10. Articles consulted in News Clippings Folder, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales Archive (Argentina).

⁷⁷ ‘Conferencia de Prensa en Copenhague’ and ‘Nómina de las instituciones no gubernamentales que invitaron a las Madres de Plaza de Mayo al a Conferencia Alternativa de la Mujer’, Madres de Plaza de Mayo bulletin, year 1, no. 2 (September 1980).

⁷⁸ George Russell and William McWhirter, ‘Living with Ghosts’, Time Magazine, 20 July 1981, 15–8, Arg. Sn. Folder, NCC-IAI.

⁷⁹ ‘Argentina. Missing Uruguayan Children Traced to Chile’,17 September 1979, AMR 13/59/79, AIA-IISH; and Jacques Després, ‘A la recherche des enfants disparus’, 17 August 1981, Le Monde, Arg. Ha. Folder, NCC-IAI.