The Herald is publishing a special series to mark 50 years since the Operation Condor agreement was signed. The pieces can be viewed on this link. They were co-produced with the Plancondor.org project, coordinated by Dr. Francesca Lessa in collaboration with Project Sitios de Memoria Uruguay, the Observatorio Luz Ibarburu of Uruguay, and Chile’s Londres38 with support from University College London.

Macarena had just gotten back to her parents’ home in Montevideo in the midst of her everyday life as a 23-year-old when her mother said they needed to talk. The mood was somber, as the woman added that she needed her daughter to refrain from moving around. 

Just sit still and listen. 

Macarena’s first thought was that this was all tied to her father. He had died a few months before and had been acting strange in his final weeks. He had been controlling her movements much more strictly. At one point he had even asked for her forgiveness, without explaining what for.

But before she could articulate any words, her mother burst into tears. 

Out of the blue, Macarena asked if she was actually their daughter. Bewildered, her mother asked who had told her. Nobody, Macarena said. It was just something that crossed her mind, and she blurted it out. 

“I had never thought about it before, but looking back I think on some level I knew all along. Dreams you have — they all start to make sense,” Macarena recalls now, more than 25 years after that fateful conversation.

Her mother went on to tell her that a family friend, a Catholic bishop, had told her that Macarena’s biological grandfather was looking for her. It was February 2000, and Macarena was about to discover the first basic facts of how her life had been turned upside down. 

Namely, that the parents she had grown up with were not her biological parents. 

She would later learn much more, like the fate of her biological parents, who had been kidnapped and disappeared almost 25 years earlier; of the quest of her grandfather, a world-renowned poet who had conducted a global campaign to find her; and of the savage plan that had set her tragedy in motion: Operation Condor. 

From Argentina to Uruguay

The armed forces took power in Argentina via a coup in March 1976, unleashing a reign of horrific violence that would lead to the kidnapping and murder of thousands of people, from political activists and union leaders to journalists and individuals with no public life at all. 

While the military junta would later claim that the deaths were the unfortunate collateral damage of battling armed guerrilla groups, evidence in multiple trials would later show that the crimes were part of a systemic plan executed from day one. 

Between March 24, 1976, and December 10, 1983 — when democracy was restored — the junta forcibly disappeared, tortured, and killed 30,000 people.

The dictatorship’s campaign of political terror was at its apex in August 1976 when María Claudia García Iruretagoyena and Marcelo Gelman, who had been married for only two months, were kidnapped by six heavily armed men from their home in Buenos Aires City. 

The couple, aged 19 and 20, had met as political activists in high school. María Claudia was seven months pregnant at the time of their kidnapping. 

The two were taken to Automotores Orletti, a dictatorship concentration camp that operated out of a mechanical shop, located in the Buenos Aires City neighborhood of Floresta. Subsequent investigations have determined that close to 300 people were taken there, the vast majority of whom remain disappeared. Since 2010, there have been six different trials in Argentina investigating crimes against humanity committed there. 

Orletti was also the main center in the country for the joint scheme of Operation Condor, a systemic plan hatched since the early 1970s by the intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to coordinate the task of hunting down exiled political........

© Buenos Aires Herald