MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

President of Plaza de Mayo Grandmothers, Mercosur ‘illustrious citizen’

Estela de Carlotto when the inauguration in Paris of a plaza dedicated to the Mothers and Grand Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Photo Wikipedia)

The president of Argentina’s Plaza de Mayo Grandmothers Estela de Carlotto will be honoured as “illustrious citizen” of Mercosur during the group’s coming summit to be celebrated in Asuncion, Paraguay at the end of June, reported the Argentine Foreign Affairs ministry.

Mercosur will acknowledge not only Ms de Carlotto’s personal conditions but also the role she played together with the rest of grandmothers in the “indefatigable struggle to find and restitute to their legitimate families the kidnapped children disappeared during the political repression and state terrorism of the last Argentine military dictatorship (1976/1983)”.

Mercosur will pay homage to Ms de Carlotto who has become “one of the symbols of a cause which is common to all countries of the region: promoting the right to identity, to memory, truth and justice, as well as the creation of conditions to guarantee that ‘never again’ the violation of human rights is repeated”,

A retired teacher and school principal Ms de Carlotto had a pregnant daughter abducted and her grand child remains disappeared. An estimated 500 children were either kidnapped or seized at birth from women in detention during Argentina’s notorious Dirty War. The vast majority were given or sold to adoptive parents, including numerous perpetrators and accomplices in the murder of their biological parents.

The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo located the first missing grandchild in 1984. They secured the establishment of the National Genetic Data Bank for Relatives of Disappeared Children in 1987, and the National Commission for the Right of Identity, an office tasked with facilitating answers to those who doubt the nature of their adoptions, in 1992. Mrs. Carlotto announced the discovery of the 100th grandchild on December 21, 2009.