140th ‘stolen grandchild’ tracked in Argentina

BUENOS AIRES (AFP) — Nearly five decades after he was born in a dictatorship-era detention center and snatched from his mother, a Buenos Aires man has become the 140th person identified as one of Argentina’s hundreds of “stolen grandchildren.”

DNA tests confirmed the birth identity of the 48-year-old introduced by the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo activist group Monday simply as “Grandchild No. 140.”

The group has worked for decades to trace the whereabouts of young activist women who were arrested and “disappeared” by Argentina’s 1976 to 1983 military dictatorship, and the now-adult babies they bore in captivity.

Nearly 500 infants are believed to have been taken, many given to childless people close to a dictatorship keen to have them raised as regime loyalists.

The identity of “Grandchild No. 140” was not revealed at a press conference held by the Grandmothers to announce the happy breakthrough.

But among those present was his older sister, Adriana Metz Romero, who works with the Grandmothers and tearfully told reporters she could not wait to meet her sibling in person.

“Now I know where my brother is!” she said, sitting with a black-and-white photo of their parents: Graciela Alicia Romero and Raul Eugenio Metz, left-wing activists snatched by authorities in December 1976.

Romero was 24 years old, mother to a one-year-old daughter, and five months pregnant at the time, according to the Grandmothers.