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 dissidents across the region.

The plan, which would go on to include also Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru, would formally come into effect in November 1975. The immediate result of this development was that political refugees and people who had fled their countries in exile were no longer safe, as the interconnected scheme meant that the security apparatus in the nations they had fled to could persecute them or tip off their location.

Operation Condor played a key role in the fate of María Claudia. It is unclear why she was separated from her husband and taken to Uruguay. While security forces would indeed send prisoners across state borders, these were usually foreign nationals who were taken back to their country of origin. As María Claudia was an Argentine with no ties to Uruguay, there was no apparent reason to take her there. 

Sometime in early October 1976, María Claudia was taken to a clandestine detention center in Montevideo known as the Servicio de Información de Defensa (SID, in Spanish). It is believed she gave birth in the Central Military Hospital on November 1. 

The date cannot be confirmed, as there is no record that María Claudia was ever at the hospital. Official documents, however, show that a birth took place that day, and the baby had the same blood type as Macarena.

María Claudia was last seen leaving the detention center in late December 1976 carrying Macarena in a basket. She remains unaccounted for to this day.

Marcelo Gelman didn’t leave Orletti alive. His abducters murdered him in October 1976, put his body in an empty oil barrel, and dumped him into the San Fernando Canal, the preferred method Automotores Orletti torturers used to dispose of victims. 

The barrel was fished out of the water shortly afterwards, but the remains couldn’t be identified, and he was buried as a John Doe. 

His identity wasn’t confirmed until 1989, when the Argentine Team of Forensic Anthropology (EAAF, for its Spanish initials), an NGO created in the aftermath of the dictatorship to search for and identify remains of desaparecidos, did a dig in the cemetery where he had been buried and tested the DNA against his family members. 

Read more of the Herald’s coverage of the 50th anniversary of the 1976 military coup here

Macarena grew up as an only child. Although she wasn’t overtly political growing up, she did go to a couple of Marchas del Silencio (March of Silence), an annual march on May 20 that has taken place in Uruguay since 1996 demanding that the disappearances carried out by the dictatorship be solved. 

She also remembers coming across a book about desaparecidos when she was 15 and asking her father what it meant. 

“I couldn’t fathom how anybody could just vanish and nobody would ever hear from them again,” she says. 

For the most part, she had a normal upbringing and the same anxieties and desires as any girl her age. Unbeknownst to her, however, a global movement to find her was brewing. 

The most recognizable figure in the search to find Macarena was her paternal grandfather, Juan Gelman. In the 1970s, Gelman had been a member of Montoneros, a left-wing revolutionary guerrilla group that was one of the main targets of the military junta.

He managed to escape the violence, and was outside of his native Argentina when the military took over in March 1976. He remained in exile for the rest of the dictatorship, eventually settling down in Mexico, where he passed away in 2014. 

In addition to being a journalist and translator, Gelman was one of the most celebrated poets in Spanish. In 2007, he won the Miguel de Cervantes Prize, an annual award honoring the lifetime achievement of a writer in Spanish and considered to be the most prestigious distinction in this language.

In February 1978, a high-ranking Vatican official told Gelman that his grandchild had been born but had no details on when or where, or whether it was a boy or girl. In the late 1990s, he received confirmation that the child had indeed been born in Uruguay. 

It’s believed that Gelman first heard that this grandchild could be in Uruguay through survivors of Automotores Orletti. They knew that a pregnant woman had been taken from the center to Uruguay in October 1976. Unfortunately, nobody knew her name.

In 1995, Gelman wrote an open letter to his grandchild in Página 12, a newspaper he frequently wrote for. The text, in which Gelman goes over the history of Macarena’s parents and the multiple ramifications that had run through his head about his grandchild, has become an iconic document of the harrowing experience relatives of dictatorship victims live through while searching for their stolen family members. 

“You are now almost as old as they were when they were murdered, and soon you will be older than them. They remained 20 forever. They dreamt a lot about you and a more livable world for you. I’d like to tell you about them, and for you to tell me about yourself. To see my son in you, and for you to see in me what I have of your father: we are both his orphans,” reads a fragment of the 855-word text. 

Gelman traveled to Uruguay in 1999 and began knocking on every door he could think of to try and get information. He even reached out to President Jose Mária Sanguinetti but was met with obstruction, as the Uruguayan leader made public statements flatly denying that child appropriation had taken place in his country during the dictatorship. 

The turning point came precisely via the campaign’s most visible move to pressure the Uruguayan government. An open letter signed by 20,000 people, among them notable figures like Nobel Prize winners Gunter Grass, José Saramago, Darío Fo, and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, was sent to Sanguinetti asking him to help Gelman.

“Help Juan Gelman, help justice, help the dead, help those who were tortured and kidnapped. Help yourself by helping those who are living that cry and search for them, help your conscience, help the missing grandchild he doesn’t have but could have,” was the letter’s opening fragment. 

The campaign’s public nature unlocked the situation. Neighbors of Macarena’s family who saw the reports and the search on local media told the local bishop that Macarena fit the timeline and the description. They added that they had never seen her mother pregnant. 

Gelman was eventually received by Sanguinetti’s successor, Jorge Luis Batlle. By then, however, Macarena had been located thanks to her grandfather’s efforts and the work of local journalists.  

Macarena and Juan Gelman met for the first time on March 31, 2000. She would later do a DNA test to eventually confirm her identity and become a “recovered grandchild” (in Spanish, nieto recuperado). 

These are people who were stolen by the dictatorship as babies and children and whom the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have managed to locate and identify. Macarena’s two biological grandmothers, María Eugenia Casinelli and Berta Schubaroff, were both members of the human rights group.

Macarena is the 67th nieta recuperada. 

Catching up and reparations

The revelation of her origins shook Macarena to her core. 

“I felt very alone. I didn’t have much of a family beyond my parents, and my father had already died. It was just my mother, and I just remember feeling very alone and confused,” she explained. The fact that her adoptive parents, the people she relied on to protect and make her safe, had lied to her only worsened the situation.

“My sense of trust had been shaken.”

According to her adoptive mother, she was left in a basket on their front porch on January 14, 1977. Inside was a note allegedly saying that the baby was born on November 1, 1976, and that her parents couldn’t take care of the child. 

It is not clear why her adoptive parents were chosen to take her in. Macarena has come across a few theories attempting to explain how the connection was made, but not enough evidence to establish a concrete link. An official inquiry was never conducted.

“The authorities here never investigated anything related to this,” she says.

Despite the earth-shattering revelations, Macarena has maintained a relationship with her adoptive mother. 

“Some things, of course, have changed, but we were able to preserve our bond.”

Establishing a relationship with the biological family, on the other hand, proved to be a global affair. While Juan Gelman lived in Mexico, her paternal grandmother had fled to Spain with her daughter Nora in the aftermath of Marcelo’s disappearance. Her mother’s family still lived in Argentina. 

“I set boundaries early on with my biological and my adoptive family, basically saying that I didn’t want to be in the middle of a tug of war,” she explained. “Some understood it, and some didn’t.”

Macarena’s dual identity, however, began to weigh on her in the years after she learned of her origins. She remembers telling a man on the bus once that her father had Ukrainian heritage. He gave her a strange look and remarked that her surname was not Ukrainian.

She eventually decided to adopt the surnames of her biological parents. She is now María Macarena Gelman García Iruretagoyena.

The Gelman case has been the subject of multiple court proceedings in Argentina and Uruguay. 

The disappearance of Macarena’s biological parents was tried in the Automotores Orletti II trial, which investigated crimes committed within Operation Condor. The proceedings, which took place between 2013 and 2016, convicted 15 people for crimes against humanity committed against 106 victims. 

Macarena’s case was also one of 34 cases the Argentine judiciary presented as evidence in a 2012 trial against nine military officers for their role in the systematic theft of babies carried out by the dictatorship. One of those convicted was dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who received a 50-year prison sentence. 

Things have been more complicated in Uruguay. Juan Gelman filed a criminal complaint in 2002 looking to investigate the kidnapping and disappearance of his daughter-in-law. The case, however, was thrown out because the country passed amnesty laws following the end of the dictatorship in 1985. 

In 2006, Juan and Macarena filed a complaint against the Uruguayan state before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) over the disappearance of her mother. The IACHR issued a ruling convicting the Uruguayan state for the crime, urging them to investigate and determine who the guilty parties were.

Following the IACHR ruling in 2011, Uruguay issued an amendment to the country’s amnesty  law, the so-called “Expiry Law,” stating that it would not include crimes against humanity. In 2017, four former military members and an ex-police officer were convicted of the murder of María Claudia García Iruretagoyena. 

Human rights groups protested the ruling, which was confirmed by Uruguay’s Supreme Court in 2020, saying that she had been disappeared, not just murdered. 

Macarena took on a very public role in the years after she learned of her origin. She told her story in multiple venues and testified in the trials investigating her parents’ disappearance. She also ran for office for the center-left coalition Frente Amplio (Broad Front) in 2014, winning a seat to serve as a member of parliament until 2019. 

These days, however, she’s taken a step back from politics and is keeping a lower profile. Part of it is due to personal issues that have led her to a different stage in her life. But there’s no denying that the difficulties she’s encountered trying to get to the bottom of her mother’s case have taken a toll.

“I’ve had a few disappointments along the way,” she admits, adding that she has concerns about the path forward in the struggle for memory.

“I ask myself why we couldn’t move any further.”

Cover photo: Juan and Macarena Gelman (courtesy Macarena Gelman)

© Buenos Aires Herald