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.

All through the afternoon, the boy in the square wouldn’t let go of the baby girl at his side. By the bench where they huddled, rides clattered around their circuit, their operator eyeing the children. They did not seem to be accompanied by an adult. Eventually, he thought, someone would come for them. But nobody did.

As the day wore on, the people in the square began to pay them more notice. They had been there too long to be waiting for someone. Their neat little clothes suggested they were not street children. And they were in Valparaiso, Chile, but the boy did not speak with a Chilean accent.

Eventually, the police came, and the children were taken to a home run by the juvenile court, then into Chile’s care system. Local newspapers reported on the strange case of the children who had appeared in Plaza O’Higgins square. But still, nobody came for them. It was December 1976, shortly before Christmas.

As the months turned into years, a Chilean couple met the children and started the long process of adopting them. The boy’s name was Anatole and the girl, Victoria.

Then, in 1979, an older lady arrived. For the past three years, she had been speaking to embassies, human rights organizations, social workers, and anyone else she could think of who might have a clue as to the whereabouts of her kidnapped grandchildren. After a tip-off from a Chilean social worker living in Venezuela, who had spent time with the children in the care system, she had made the voyage from Uruguay.

The appearance of María Angélica Cáceres de Julién in the children’s lives was the beginning of a decades-long journey during which they would learn about who their biological parents were, why their family had been torn apart, and how an estimated 500 babies and young children had also been taken away from their parents by Argentina’s dictatorship.

Mario Roger Julien Cáceres and Victoria Lucía Grisonas Andrijauskaite were Uruguayan activists with the Partido por la Victoria del Pueblo (PVP), a group for political exiles, which exists today as a political party. After the dictatorship swept to power in their home country in 1973, they fled to neighboring Argentina with their young son, Anatole, seeking safety.

It was in Buenos Aires, in May 1975, that Victoria Lucía gave birth to her daughter, Victoria Eva. She registered her under her maiden name, Grisonas Andrijauskaite: the Uruguayan dictatorship were looking for her husband and giving her the unusual surname Julien could have attracted dangerous attention.

Just under three years after the coup that ushered in a brutal period of dictatorship in Uruguay, Argentina’s military also forced out the government of Isabel Perón, which, despite growing increasingly violent and authoritarian, was nonetheless democratic. Between March 24, 1976, and December 10, 1983, the junta........

© Buenos Aires Herald