Children of the Dirty War

Photographs by João Pina

On November 24, 1976, eight months after a military junta took power in Argentina, launching the Dirty War that introduced the term los desaparecidos—“the disappeared”—to the world, a house in a peaceful, tree-lined neighborhood of La Plata, about forty miles southeast of Buenos Aires, came under attack. The assault, which involved two hundred armed forces on the ground and bombing and strafing from the air, lasted for four hours. María Isabel Chorobik de Mariani (known as Chicha), an art-history teacher who lived a few blocks away, heard it, as did others throughout the city. The next day, Mariani found out that it was her son’s house that had been attacked. Daniel Mariani, an economist, and his wife, a graduate student, were both members of the leftist guerrilla group known as the Montoneros. They had been in the house that day with their three-month-old daughter and three other militants. Neighbors called the building the House of Rabbits, because the people who lived there bred and sold rabbits, but that business was a front; the basement held the printing press that put out the underground newspaper Evita. The militants were only lightly armed. “They should have surrendered,” Mariani told me. Instead, they resisted.

Daniel, it turned out, had left for a meeting in Buenos Aires shortly before the attack. His wife, Diana Teruggi, was slain on the patio. She had hidden their daughter, Clara Anahí, in a bathtub, covered with towels. After the attack, a soldier found the baby and carried her out to the street. He asked the commander of the operation, Colonel Ramón Camps, what to do with her. Two police officers were sitting in a car nearby, and Camps told the soldier to give the baby to them. Thirty years later, a neighbor told Chicha Mariani that she had seen one of the policemen place Clara Anahí in an ambulance. When the policeman noticed her watching, he shouted at her to go back into her house or he’d kill her.

As soon as Mariani found out that her granddaughter had been in the house, she began to search for Clara Anahí, checking police stations, hospitals, juvenile courts, and churches. In months of looking, she found no trace of the child and no one who would discuss the situation with her. Even Mariani’s closest friends now crossed the street to avoid her. Finally, a woman working in a juvenile court took pity on her. “You’re very alone, Señora,” she said. She suggested that Mariani meet up with other women who were searching for missing children, and gave her the telephone number of Alicia de la Cuadra. De la Cuadra, whose daughter had been pregnant when she was “disappeared,” told Mariani about a group she belonged to—the Madres de Plaza de Mayo—which had been created in April, 1977, by mothers searching for children who had been detained by the military regime. The Madres gathered in front of the Presidential Palace in Buenos Aires every Thursday to march in silent protest around the plaza, wearing white kerchiefs embroidered with their missing children’s names. Mariani participated in a protest with the Madres and soon formed another group, with de la Cuadra and ten other Madres who were also looking for missing grandchildren. They became known as the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.

Mariani’s son, who had continued his militant life, was shot dead in a La Plata street eight months after the death of his wife. Years later, Mariani’s husband, a symphony conductor, still often hallucinated that the floors of their home were soaked with blood. He spent most of his time in Italy, and he died in 2003. Mariani stayed in La Plata and dedicated her life to finding Clara Anahí.

During the Process of National Reorganization—the military junta’s grandiose name for the period of its rule, from 1976 to 1983—as many as thirty thousand people, mostly young Argentines, were disappeared. The government justified its tactics as part of a war against a revolutionary insurrection waged by “subversive terrorists,” though the junta’s first leader, General Jorge Rafael Videla, defined a “terrorist” as “not only someone who plants bombs but a person whose ideas are contrary to Western, Christian civilization.” The junta’s security forces exceeded even that sweeping mandate when targeting dissidents for elimination. Sixty students from Manuel Belgrano High School, in Buenos Aires, were disappeared simply for having joined their student council. Victims were abducted as they stepped off buses, as they walked home from work or school, or in midnight raids of private residences and of the safe houses where members of guerrilla groups or of banned trade and student organizations lived in hiding. The abductees were taken to clandestine detention centers, where the majority of them were tortured and killed.

Approximately thirty per cent of the disappeared were women. Some were abducted with their small children, and some, perhaps three per cent, were pregnant, or became so while in detention, usually through rape by guards and torturers. Pregnant prisoners were routinely kept alive until they’d given birth. “The regime’s depravity reached its outer limit with pregnant detainees,” Marguerite Feitlowitz, then a Harvard professor, wrote in her groundbreaking study of the Argentine nightmare, “Lexicon of Terror.” One former detainee told Feitlowitz, “Our bodies were a source of special fascination. They said my swollen nipples invited the ‘prod’ ”—the electric cattle prod, which was used in torture. “They presented a truly sickening combination—the curiosity of little boys, the intense arousal of twisted men.”

Sometimes the mothers were able to nurse their newborns, at least sporadically, for a few days, or even weeks, before the babies were taken from them and the mothers were “transferred”—sent to their deaths, in the Dirty War’s notorious nomenclature. A common method of “transfer” was to inject the women with drugs and shove them from planes into the River Plate or the Atlantic. According to human-rights groups, as many as five hundred newborns and young children were taken from disappeared parents and handed over, their identities erased, to childless military and police couples and others favored by the regime.

It has long been assumed that these baby thefts arose partly from the military’s collusion with sectors of the Catholic Church, which gave its blessing to the death flights but not to the murder of young or unborn children. The Process of National Reorganization wanted to define and create “authentic Argentines.” The children of subversives were seen, Feitlowitz explained, as “seeds of the tree of evil.” Perhaps through adoption, those seeds could be replanted in healthy soil.

Chicha Mariani and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo made it their goal to find those adopted children and restore them to whatever remained of their biological families. In the late seventies, however, the science of DNA testing was not fully developed, and the Abuelas had no sure way of identifying the missing children, especially those who had been born in detention centers. Sometimes just the glimpse of a child’s face in the street made their hearts race. Children were photographed as they came out of school, or they were followed home. One grandmother even became a maid in the home of a couple she believed might be raising a stolen child.

In the early eighties, geneticists at universities and research hospitals in the United States, some of them South American exiles, began to take an interest in the Abuelas’ quest. In 1984, a year after the end of the military regime, Mary-Claire King, a geneticist at the University of California at Berkeley, travelled to Buenos Aires to work with the Argentine geneticist Ana María Di Lonardo. Together, they developed the Grandparents’ Index, a human-leukocyte-antigen test that can identify a genetic link between grandparents and their grandchildren. Later that year, genetic testing was used for the first time to identify the child of disappeared parents. The girl, Paula Logares, had been kidnapped with her parents, in 1978, when she was twenty-three months old. The police officer who raised her—and who was likely involved in the death of her parents—had registered her birth date as two years after the actual date. (Logares was eventually returned to her biological grandmother.) The Abuelas began pushing the government to establish a national genetic data bank to store the genetic profiles of families seeking missing children, and in 1987 the Banco Nacional de Datos Genéticos, or B.N.D.G., was established.

Mariani was the president of the Abuelas until 1989, and during her tenure about sixty other grandchildren were identified and united with their biological families. “It always made us feel more or less as happy as if we’d found our own,” she told me.

Chicha Mariani, at the bullet-scarred house of her son, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. Armed forces attacked the house in 1976.

Photograph from Kameraphoto

Estela de Carlotto, who took over from Mariani, was another grandmother in search of a lost baby. In April, 1978, Carlotto, then a school principal in La Plata, learned from a former prisoner that her daughter, Laura, who had been abducted in November, 1977, was being held in a detention camp called La Cacha and that she was pregnant. Carlotto knew the sister of an important general, and she went to plead with him for her daughter’s release. The connection paid off only to the extent that a few months later Carlotto and her husband were summoned to a police station to receive their daughter’s bullet-riddled corpse. Carlotto joined the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo a few days later.

In 1980, on a trip to Brazil to interview exiled survivors of the detention centers, Carlotto met Alcira Ríos, a lawyer, and her husband, Luis Córdoba, who were two of only five prisoners at La Cacha in 1978 to have survived the camp. At La Cacha, Ríos, who was kept chained to a wall in a cavelike hole for five months, had come to know Laura, who had been there for ten months already when she arrived. When Ríos’s husband was severely tortured and fell ill with an infection, Laura had cared for him and used her influence with the guards to procure antibiotics. By then, she had given birth to a baby boy, named Guido, for his grandfather. After the birth, Laura had been told that her baby would be taken to his grandmother. Ríos remembered her weeping and wailing, “I have a son! Where en mierda is he?” In August, 1978, Laura was told that she was being taken to the Escuela Superior de Mecánica de la Armada, the naval-mechanics school, the most notorious detention camp in the country, where she would be prepared for release. Soon, she was told, she’d be home with her son and her mother. On August 24th, the night of her “transfer,” she was allowed to say goodbye to the other prisoners at La Cacha. She crawled into Ríos’s cave and asked her for something to remember her by. “What did I have that I could give her?” Ríos told me. “I had only the clothes I’d been abducted in. But I had a bra, a black lace one. I gave it to her, and she put it on.” Years later, when investigations into the crimes of the Dirty War were under way, Laura’s body was exhumed; she had been buried in Ríos’s black bra.

In 1984, Ríos returned from exile, and Carlotto invited her to work for the Abuelas. The legal situation she was thrust into was complex. A year earlier, Argentina’s military leadership, humiliated by the British in the Falklands War, had ceded power to a democratically elected government, headed by President Raúl Alfonsín. In 1985, an unprecedented Truth Commission report on the crimes of the Dirty War, titled “Nunca Más” (“Never Again”), led to the trials and jailing of, among others, nine former junta leaders. But in 1986 Alfonsín, feeling threatened by the military unrest that followed the trials, passed a new law, Full Stop, which put an end to investigations of political violence during the Dirty War. The following year, another law, Due Obedience, ruled that people could not be prosecuted for crimes committed while carrying out the orders of their superiors. In 1990, Alfonsín’s successor, President Carlos Menem, pardoned and released the imprisoned junta leaders. Argentines, officially free of the dictatorship, were nevertheless forced to live in passive accommodation with its crimes and its criminals. Some of the junta’s most notorious sadists roamed Buenos Aires with defiant smirks and told their stories on television. Women ran into their torturers and rapists in supermarkets. Veteran officers hosted their old comrades for parrilladas at their country chalets, toasting one another as heroes who had saved the nation from Communism.

Baby-theft cases provided one small loophole to the amnesty laws: parents who were judged in court to be guilty of having adopted—or “appropriated”—the children of the disappeared while knowing the truth about their origins could be imprisoned. In 1998, the Abuelas, in tandem with another human-rights group, investigated the case of Claudia Poblete. She and her parents had been abducted in 1978, when she was eight months old. Her parents were then tortured and killed, and Poblete was taken and brought up by a military man and his wife. Through DNA testing, the Abuelas matched the twenty-one-year-old Poblete to her biological family, and her adoptive parents were sentenced to prison. (The mother, then over seventy, was allowed to serve her term under house arrest.) Under the amnesty laws, however, the two police agents responsible for the abduction, torture, and murder of Poblete’s biological parents couldn’t be prosecuted. The judge in the case, Gabriel Cavallo, argued in a hundred-and-eighty-eight-page ruling that Full Stop and Due Obedience conflicted with Argentina’s obligation, under international law, to bring to justice those responsible for crimes against humanity. Both laws were repealed by the National Congress in 2003 and ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2005. The two police agents in the Poblete case, detained in 2003, were the first officers to be charged in disappearances since 1987. One died in a prison hospital in April, 2006, before the trial began; the other was sentenced to twenty-five years.

Although this case was a historic triumph for the Abuelas, the group was also subject to repeated disappointments: many DNA tests came back negative, and not all recovered grandchildren embraced their biological grandparents, who were strangers to them. Many, loyal to the only parents they’d known, refused even to be tested. In 1983, Chicha Mariani thought she had found her granddaughter, a girl with a history that closely resembled Clara Anahí’s. “When it turned out that it wasn’t her, I felt the earth was opening under my feet,” Mariani said. Later that year, Mariani saw a newspaper photograph of Marcela Noble Herrera, the adopted daughter of the head of the country’s biggest media company, and thought she might finally have found the girl she was looking for. “The first time I saw Marcela,” she told me, sipping maté tea with a breakfast of bananas and cream at her document-strewn dining-room table, “was right after Alfonsín became President. Marcela was wearing Morley stockings”—ribbed knee socks—“just like the ones I used to wear. And her legs looked just like mine. I saw the photos of her in England, France, with presidents and kings, and with the Pope. I watched her grow. She has the same body as my daughter-in-law’s mother. And her character seems similar to ours—reserved, modest, sincere, sensitive, and very intelligent.”

By the time I spoke to Mariani last year, the question of Marcela Noble Herrera’s biological parentage had become central to the story of the Abuelas’ decades of work, hope, and grief. It was also at the center of a legal case that had entangled Argentina’s media and political élite in a protracted public battle, a case that had come to represent Argentina’s mercurial and often paradoxical response to its violent past, and that had riveted much of the Argentine population for more than ten years.

Marcela’s story begins with the story of Ernestina Herrera de Noble, the woman who adopted her, in 1976. Herrera de Noble was the widow of Roberto Noble, the founder of the Clarín media empire, which began as a newspaper, Clarín, and now includes radio and television stations and the most popular Spanish-language news Web site in Latin America. Herrera de Noble, who came from a humble background and was twenty-three years younger than her husband, was appointed owner and titular director of Clarín when he died, in 1969, though the actual running of the company was left in the hands of a circle of male executives whom Noble had trusted. (Noble’s only child, a daughter with another woman, accepted a settlement in exchange for relinquishing all ownership claims to Clarín.) In 1976, when the junta came to power, Herrera de Noble was fifty, and apparently in a full-blown midlife crisis. She was reportedly prone to wild mood swings and drinking, and was spending her days on yachts with new friends. According to the journalist Graciela Mochkofsky, who last August published, in Argentina, a book titled “Original Sin: Clarín, the Kirchners, and the Fight for Power,” the inner circle at Clarín, concerned about the future of the company and their careers if something happened to Herrera de Noble, approached her with a proposal. She should adopt two children, they said, and appoint them heirs to Clarín. Then, if Herrera de Noble died before the children reached adulthood, the men could serve as regents until the children were ready to inherit the company. Herrera de Noble agreed to the plan. The executives at Clarín included Rogelio Frigerio, who had been the second in command in the Ministry of Economics from 1958 to 1962, and a lawyer named Bernardo Sofovich. These men took charge of finding two babies for Herrera de Noble, a girl and a boy, and that summer a juvenile court granted her the guardianship of the children, who would become Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera, heirs to a fortune that is now worth many millions.

“He’s all right. I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel.”

Clarín never openly opposed the military regime, and, in 1976, the company profited from its friendly relations with the junta when it was offered a partnership in the country’s first paper plant, Papel Prensa. (Most competing newspapers still had to import paper.) The deal ignited Grupo Clarín’s economic expansion, which was guided by Héctor Magnetto, the company’s former accountant and its future C.E.O. By 1985, Clarín was one of the highest-circulation Spanish-language newspapers in the world.

During the first two decades after the Dirty War, Argentine Presidents generally regarded Grupo Clarín as a rival or an adversary, to be courted or defied. But Clarín never pursued much of an ideological agenda; the company was more concerned with whether each administration represented a business opportunity or a barrier to its expansion. President Alfonsín resisted pressure from Clarín to reverse a law barring newspapers from acquiring radio or television licenses. When economic turmoil and widespread unpopularity sank his government, he blamed Clarín. Carlos Menem, who governed as a privatizing neoliberal, nullified the law, and expected Clarín’s support in return. At first, Clarín, whose media holdings steadily grew, complied. But when other newspapers began publishing investigations into corruption in the Menem government, Clarín, so as not to become irrelevant, aggressively followed suit. Menem was so afraid of Clarín that he encouraged his wealthy allies to build a rival media empire. When it, along with Menem’s ambitions, crumbled, Clarín reaped the spoils.

In 2001, Argentina’s economy collapsed, prompting a run on the banks, the virtual freezing of personal savings accounts, massive street protests, a series of abrogated Presidential terms, the sudden devaluation of the peso, a default on the country’s international debt, and the discrediting of establishment politicians from all major parties. In 2003, Néstor Kirchner, formerly the governor of a remote Patagonian province, was elected President of a demoralized and humiliated Argentina. Kirchner’s government poured money into social programs, and the country’s poverty rate was halved. A boom in soy prices helped drive an economic recovery. In one of his first acts as President, Kirchner removed the portraits of the ex-junta leaders from the Military College gallery. He signed into law the annulments of Full Stop and Due Obedience, and he made the now elderly members of the Madres and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo iconic figures in his government, seating them prominently beside him at public functions, and proclaiming, “We are all the children of the Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo.” His government nominated Estela de Carlotto for a Nobel Peace Prize. In January, 2006, the Madres ended their weekly marches, announcing that the Presidential Palace no longer housed an enemy.

At the same time, Kirchner and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, amassed an astonishing fortune, and allegations of corruption and cronyism abounded. In 2007, Kirchner announced that he would step aside so that Fernández could run for President: husband and wife hoped to alternate in power for twelve more years. In December of that year, however, less than a week after Fernández was elected, Clarín published an incendiary front-page story alleging that a Venezuelan who had been arrested with a suitcase full of money at Buenos Aires’s Ezeiza Airport, that August, had been carrying an undeclared donation from the Venezuelan President, Hugo Chávez, to Fernández to fund her campaign. The story did not sit well with Kirchner, who had maintained a strong alliance with Clarín and with Héctor Magnetto throughout his term, and, ten days earlier, had overridden antitrust obstacles to allow Clarín the license to merge two cable companies. (By 2009, those businesses accounted for sixty per cent of Clarín’s earnings.) From that point on, until Néstor Kirchner’s sudden death, from a heart attack, in 2010, both Kirchners were locked in a fierce public struggle with Clarín.

It used to be said in Argentina that no government could survive four consecutive negative tapas—front-page newspaper headlines—but Fernández has boasted that she “holds the record.” The War Against Clarín, as it’s widely known in Argentina, has been waged on several fronts: Fernández has introduced anti-monopoly and media laws that have already begun to shrink Grupo Clarín’s dominance. Her government has also accused Clarín and another newspaper of having acquired their shares of the Papel Prensa printing plant with knowledge of, if not actual complicity in, the military’s abduction, torture, and murder of family members and associates of the plant’s original owners. (Clarín is fighting this accusation in an ongoing legal case.) But by 2009 the iconic battle both for the Kirchners and for Clarín concerned the origins of Ernestina Herrera de Noble’s adopted children.

Marcela and Felipe—in Argentina the siblings are commonly referred to by their first names only or, although they are now thirty-five, as “los chicos” (“the kids”)—are almost never seen in public, and details of their private lives are closely guarded, though it is known that Marcela studied journalism at the Catholic University and now works at Clarín, preparing to take over from her mother one day. She is fair-skinned and blond, with a full, sensitive-looking face. She often dresses in neat, conservative clothing from Zara, the relatively inexpensive Spanish chain. Felipe is darker-skinned, stocky, and balding. He studied industrial design and is said to be even more retiring than his sister.

Soon after the end of the military regime, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo began to hear rumors that the siblings were the children of disappeared dissidents. At the time, the Abuelas were working with a largely uncoöperative court system—in which many judges still had ties to the dictatorship—and they didn’t always have the support of the media. Under the junta, Clarín, like most Argentine newspapers, had refused to print missing-persons notices from the Madres or the Abuelas. Afterward, when Alfonsín’s government was winning acclaim for its Truth Commission, the newspaper began to publish editorials supporting the Abuelas’ cause. The Abuelas knew that it was important to keep the country’s most popular newspaper on their side. But it was hard to turn a deaf ear in the case of Herrera de Noble’s children, especially when two of the Dirty War’s most sinister figures, Bishop Antonio Plaza and General Ramón Camps, were said to have been involved in procuring them for her.

During the military regime, Bishop Plaza was the chaplain to the Buenos Aires Province Police, which was headed by Camps. Plaza turned over to the police dozens of people who were then disappeared, including his own nephew, who had come to him for help. Plaza often accompanied Camps on his rounds of detention and torture centers, and later praised the Dirty War’s amnesty laws, saying that they would spare officers the fate of “poor Eichmann.” (Argentine Jews accounted for a disproportionate number of the disappeared.) Camps was an anti-Semite and a sadist, thought to be responsible for thousands of kidnappings, hundreds of homicides, two rapes, ten baby thefts, and two miscarriages induced by torture. Plaza died in 1987. Camps was found guilty of seventy-three counts of torture and, in 1986, sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. He was freed under the pardon laws, and died in 1994.

In 1992, Estela de Carlotto asked Ernestina Herrera de Noble for a meeting. Herrera de Noble delegated Magnetto, her C.E.O., to speak for her. Three uncomfortable meetings followed. “How could la señora have two children of terrorists?” Magnetto querulously demanded. Any such allegations were politically or financially motivated, he argued. At a later meeting, according to a lawyer for the Abuelas, Magnetto offered to reveal the children’s real identities if Carlotto gave him the sources of the allegations. She refused. (Clarín’s spokesman denied that this offer was made.)

It took the Abuelas two years to gain access to Marcela’s and Felipe’s adoption records. Adoptions in Argentina, as elsewhere in Latin America, were haphazardly regulated in the best of times, but a few details in the records caught Alcira Ríos’s attention. Both adoptions had been carried out with striking haste by the same juvenile-court judge in the municipality of San Isidro. There were no accompanying birth or hospital records. Usually, this alone would have provided enough cause for the Abuelas to investigate. On the other hand, the adoptions of Marcela and Felipe, in May and July of 1976, respectively, had occurred early in the dictatorship, and the dates didn’t seem to correspond to those of any known births in detention centers or baby thefts in the jurisdiction of the San Isidro court. The Abuelas, with so many other investigations to pursue, decided to let the matter drop.

A protest in 1982 by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, a group founded by mothers searching for children taken by the military regime.

However, when the rumors were raised again, several years later, at a court hearing in an unrelated case, and it was suggested that the Abuelas had neglected the allegations out of deference to the wealth and power of Grupo Clarín, Carlotto and Ríos decided to act. They asked the San Isidro court to open an investigation, and the judge, Roberto Marquevich, soon had the case files for the adoptions on his desk. Many of the people who had been involved, including the Clarín executive Bernardo Sofovich and the judge who had granted the adoptions, Ofelia Hejt, were dead by then; others, like the Clarín executive Rogelio Frigerio, were too old or mentally decrepit to testify. But, in 2001, Marquevich summoned whomever he could to piece together the story.

According to the records, on May 13, 1976, Herrera de Noble had testified that on the morning of May 2nd, at her country house in San Isidro, she’d heard the crying of an infant. When she opened her front door, she found a baby girl in a cardboard box. She kept the baby at home for a few days, in case somebody turned up to claim her. Then she took her to the court to report what had happened, and to a pediatrician, accompanied by her next-door neighbor, Yolanda Echagüe de Aragón, who had witnessed the discovery of the baby in the box. Herrera de Noble told the court that Roberto García, the caretaker of a nearby farm, had also seen the baby on the doorstep. The next day, without making any effort to verify the story or to identify the baby’s mother, Judge Hejt granted custody of the child to Herrera de Noble. The baby girl was assigned a birthday, by Hejt, of March 23, 1976, one day before the military coup. Among the three character witnesses listed by Herrera de Noble was Bishop Plaza.

Felipe Noble Herrera’s file was opened a few weeks later. A law student who identified herself as Carmen Luisa Delta, age twenty-five, said that she had given birth to a boy on April 17th, without registering the birth at any hospital or with any pediatrician. On July 7th, when she took the baby to court to give him up for adoption, Herrera de Noble happened to be there and was granted guardianship that same day. The following May, both adoptions were finalized.

By 2001, Yolanda Echagüe de Aragón had died, but it turned out that she had lived not next door to the house that Herrera de Noble claimed was hers but a block away. The other witness named by Herrera de Noble, Roberto García, responded to Marquevich’s summons. He told the Judge that he’d never been the caretaker of a farm in San Isidro. He’d been Roberto Noble’s chauffeur, and then Herrera de Noble’s, until his retirement, in 1977. He said that Herrera de Noble had never lived in any house in San Isidro, though he had occasionally taken her to visit a chalet there, whose exact address he couldn’t recall. He acknowledged that the signature on the witness statement looked like his own, but said that he’d never been to the San Isidro juvenile court. Clarín’s lawyers, he said, had brought him some papers one day and told him to sign them. He called Herrera de Noble’s version of the actions she’d attributed to him “a lie.”

Carmen Luisa Delta, the law student who had supposedly given Felipe up for adoption, turned out not to exist, at least not by that name; her identification number corresponded to that of a man named Hugo Tarkowski.

Judge Hejt had received her appointment to the juvenile court at the start of the dictatorship. In 1977, according to the Abuelas’ records, she had authorized the adoption of a three-month-old baby boy, despite evidence that his parents were disappeared. In 1984, the Abuelas had found the boy and restored his true identity.

In late 2001, six months after opening the investigation, Judge Marquevich told Ríos that the case could not proceed until a plaintiff was named. No families in the Abuelas’ records were seeking children whose presumed births coincided exactly with Marcela’s and Felipe’s, but Ríos knew that the Noble Herrera case file was filled with lies. Why should the birth dates be treated as credible? She chose two families that she thought were the closest possibilities, although she knew that the odds were against either of them turning out to be related to Marcela or Felipe. One plaintiff was the family of María del Carmen Gualdero, who had been nine months pregnant when she was abducted, in June, 1976, near San Isidro; it wasn’t known whether she’d given birth in captivity or not. The other family was searching for Matilde Lanuscou. For years, it had been assumed that Matilde had died along with her parents and two brothers in a military assault on their house in San Isidro, in September, 1976, when she was six months old. But when the graves were exhumed, after the dictatorship, Matilde’s coffin contained only a baby dress and a pacifier. It was possible that she was still alive somewhere, and that she might even be Marcela Noble Herrera.

On March 19, 2002, Marquevich ordered Marcela and Felipe to go to the B.N.D.G. and give samples for DNA analysis. In private meetings, Clarín’s lawyers pushed for a different agreement: they wanted Marcela and Felipe to be tested, they said, by the Forensic Medical Corps, an institution connected to the Supreme Court. To protect the siblings’ privacy, Clarín’s lawyers said, they could be tested against the two plaintiff families, but afterward the samples would have to be destroyed. The Forensic Medical Corps didn’t have its own lab and was considered, by Ríos and others, to be corrupt. “You could buy the results you wanted there,” Ríos told me. She held firm: only the B.N.D.G. was legally authorized to carry out the testing, and the samples would have to stay there. One of Clarín’s lawyers confided to Ríos—“colleague to colleague,” she said—that Felipe and Marcela had said they wanted to be tested. Magnetto and Clarín’s lawyers, however, took charge. The lawyers told the court that the siblings were not interested in knowing their biological identity and were not emotionally prepared to be tested. (The enormous case file for Marcela and Felipe includes psychiatric and medical testimony asserting that the siblings have suffered from a number of psychological afflictions—sleeplessness, anxiety, social withdrawal—provoked by the stresses of the investigation and of the public scrutiny they’ve endured since it began.) The deadlines imposed by Judge Marquevich for giving DNA samples were repeatedly postponed.

Finally, on December 17, 2002, likely frustrated by the stalling tactics of the Clarín lawyers, Marquevich ordered the arrest of Herrera de Noble, then seventy-seven years old, on charges of having falsified public adoption documents. She was held for three nights in the V.I.P. cell of a police station, then placed under house arrest. Argentina was scandalized. Several higher-ranking judges criticized the arrest, and so did journalists and other human-rights groups. On January 12th, Herrera de Noble published an open letter in Clarín, blaming her imprisonment on a plot to destroy Argentina’s independent press. But her letter included this sentence: “I’ve spoken many times with my children about the possibility that they and their parents might have been victims of the illegal repression.” It was a stunning admission that the investigation into the origins of her adopted children was justified.

Marquevich, who was removed from the case, and finally expelled from the judiciary by a congressional tribunal, was succeeded by Judge Conrado Bergesio, whose decisions, according to Ríos, “were made by Noble’s lawyers.” She added, “For years, Bergesio pretended to investigate but he didn’t.” In 2004, Bergesio ordered the siblings to undergo testing at the Forensic Medical Corps. But lawyers for both the Abuelas and Clarín contested the order, and no testing was performed. It was only after Kirchner and Fernández broke with Clarín, in 2007, that Ríos “began to feel a pressure moving the case that was more political than juridical.” (Ríos left the Abuelas because she felt that the organization had become too politically partisan, though she continued to represent families seeking stolen children and to work on the Noble Herrera case.)

In 2009, Fernández’s government, by then deeply embroiled in its own war with Clarín, persuaded the National Congress to pass new laws that seemed to be aimed directly at the Noble Herrera case. One forbade any transfer of genetic materials out of the B.N.D.G. for testing elsewhere, and another allowed judges to order mandatory blood extractions in cases involving children of the disappeared, if other means of obtaining DNA had failed.

Ríos had argued in favor of mandatory testing. It was too burdensome a decision, she said, to be left solely up to the adoptee, even when that person was an adult. Adoptees were often terrified of being responsible for the imprisonment of the only parents they’d ever known. Ríos knew of at least one parent who’d held a revolver to his adopted daughter’s head to warn her against giving blood.

As babies, Marcela and Felipe Noble Herrera were adopted into a powerful media dynasty. Their origins are a matter of speculation.

Photograph by Natacha Pisarenko / AP

By 2005, it had become possible to extract DNA from a person’s clothing and personal items. Ríos took this information to the courts, and soon an alternative to mandatory blood extractions was established: now judges could order the confiscation of personal items such as toothbrushes. An early test case for this method involved a suspected stolen child named Evelyn Vázquez, who had reportedly threatened to commit suicide rather than allow a blood test. When her upper-floor apartment was raided, in 2006, police guarded the windows to prevent her from jumping out. Vázquez had just returned from the gym, and Belén Rodríguez Cardozo, a biochemist from the B.N.D.G., confiscated her gym bag, stuffed with sweaty workout clothes. DNA testing proved that Vázquez was the daughter of Susana Pegoraro and Santiago Bauer, both disappeared in 1977. “One of the first things she did after she found out was change her name to Evelyn Bauer,” Ríos said. Bauer established a relationship with her biological grandmother, but also remained close to her adoptive parents—her adoptive father had been a counter-intelligence officer—who were sentenced to prison last year. The judge in the case noted in his sentence that many appropriated children continued in adulthood to be “hostages or prisoners of the nets woven by their appropriators” and that the erasure of identity imposed by these adoptions could produce “pathological” symptoms.

Catalina de Sanctis, another adoptee, agreed. She grew up, she told me, referring to herself as “Nothing Face,” because she resembled no one in her family. Both of her parents were psychologically afflicted, prone to depression and mood swings. “Not just anyone does what they’d done,” she said. “And having done it made them sicker.” Whenever the Abuelas were mentioned on television, her alcoholic father, a military-intelligence officer, erupted in anger, spewing insults. In 2000, de Sanctis confronted her mother, who broke down and confessed the truth. Her father told her that if she gave blood they would go to prison. De Sanctis felt paralyzed. The Abuelas opened an investigation into her origins in 2005; the following year, to avoid DNA testing, she fled with her husband and her adoptive father to Paraguay, before returning to the Argentine countryside. Early one morning in May, 2008, police raided the house where she and her husband were hiding, with orders to confiscate personal items. “I cried,” she said. “But it was also a relief.” That September, she learned that she was the daughter of two students, René de Sanctis and Myriam Ovando; her mother had been six months pregnant when she was abducted. For nearly two years, de Sanctis refused to meet her biological family, but now she has embraced them. She says that recovering the truth about her origins was the best thing that ever happened to her. Her adoptive father, after faking a mental breakdown, is under house arrest in a retirement home, she told me. Of Marcela and Felipe, de Sanctis said, “The pressures they are under must be very great.”

In December, 2009, a federal court up held Judge Bergesio’s earlier order for Marcela and Felipe to have their blood and saliva tested at the Forensic Medical Corps. The siblings complied; two sets of samples were held at the lab, and one was sealed in a safe in Bergesio’s office. The Abuelas immediately threatened to denounce Bergesio to the Council of Magistrates for having knowingly violated the law by ordering testing at the Forensic Medical Corps, instead of at the B.N.D.G. Bergesio may have panicked at the possibility of censure at the end of a long, tranquil career. The next day, he ordered searches of Marcela’s and Felipe’s residences to confiscate items and take them to the B.N.D.G. Several items were taken, but months of legal squabbling followed, and no test results were announced. (Last November, Bergesio retired after he had been accused of partiality and stalling in his handling of the case.)

On April 22, 2010, the country’s four largest daily newspapers published a letter signed by Marcela and Felipe. “Like so many adopted children, we don’t know our biological identities, but like any other person we’ve formed our own identities in the course of our lives,” they wrote. “We’ve never seen any concrete proof that we are children of the disappeared. . . . The political use of our story seems unjust. . . . Thirty-four years ago our mother chose us to be her children. And we, every day, choose her to be our mother.” The letter did little to dispel the general impression of the siblings as captives, whose every utterance was controlled by Grupo Clarín and its lawyers, and it only added to the public’s perception of them as having a sense of aggrieved entitlement. Any adopted children born in Argentina in 1976, especially those with as many irregularities in their adoption records as Marcela and Felipe, could be subject to an investigation. The Noble Herreras’ long history of resistance made it look as if they were desperate to hide the truth.

Chicha Mariani, the former president of the Abuelas, still clung to the hope that Marcela would turn out to be her granddaughter. “If they aren’t children of the disappeared,” she said, “then what is the reason to have submerged them in this torture of waiting and waiting, and toying with our emotions?”

On May 28, 2010, Judge Sandra Salgado, who had taken over the case from Bergesio, summoned Marcela and Felipe to her office. The siblings were asked if they were willing to allow any of the samples or materials they’d previously provided to be tested at the B.N.D.G., and they said no. They were also unwilling to give new samples. The siblings left the court building in one car, their lawyers in another, all of them heading to Herrera de Noble’s house in the wealthy suburb of Martínez. Salgado ordered armed police to pursue the cars. A high-speed chase followed; the lawyers’ car was cut off and surrounded by police with rifles. “The Judge had authorized a seizure of clothing right there in public,” Alejandro Carrió, one of the family’s lawyers, told me. “I teach criminal law, and I’ve never seen such a poorly conceived judge’s order. What were they going to do, undress Marcela and Felipe in the street?”

Martínez is a pretty neighborhood, lined with evergreens and palms and orange trees. Herrera de Noble lives in an enormous walled property, a marble-and-glass mansion behind black steel gates abutted by concrete guardhouses. The gates opened for Marcela and Felipe’s car, and it shot through, followed by the police. The lawyers arrived soon after. Rodríguez Cardozo, the B.N.D.G. biochemist, and three colleagues, accompanied by two technicians from the Forensic Medical Corps, arrived minutes later. They found the police and lawyers standing in the foyer of the house, waiting for Marcela and Felipe, who had disappeared into the bedrooms. Later, it was estimated that the siblings were out of sight for ten minutes.

The Judge had instructed the experts to confiscate the siblings’ clothing and whatever personal items they were carrying. As Graciela Mochkofsky describes it in her book, when the order was read out, Felipe began to sob. Marcela called for his psychiatrist to be summoned. The siblings were separated, the male experts going with Felipe, the female with Marcela. Rodríguez Cardozo noticed that Felipe looked as if he were wearing someone else’s clothes. His suit was much too big for him—the pant cuffs dragged on the floor—and so new that it still had a plastic tag on it. Marcela’s suit was so tight that the pants barely closed around her waist. The clothes were nevertheless confiscated—Felipe wasn’t wearing underwear—along with Marcela’s bra, which also looked brand new, and their socks. “Our intimacy wasn’t respected,” Marcela said that evening on Channel 13, a Clarín-owned television station. She and her brother, she said, had been treated like “criminals.”

At the B.N.D.G., Rodríguez Cardozo’s team set to work trying to map genetic profiles from the seized clothing. Felipe’s clothing contained the DNA, in about equal amounts, of two men and a woman; Marcela’s had DNA from either a man and a woman or two women. No DNA could be retrieved from Felipe’s socks, which he’d supposedly been wearing for five hours. Marcela’s socks held the DNA of three people.

It was a public-relations disaster for Judge Salgado, the Abuelas, and the B.N.D.G. Genetic profiles had been drawn from the items seized in the earlier search, under Bergesio, and from the samples the siblings had left at the Forensic Medical Corps, but the Abuelas rejected those profiles. Because nobody from their side had been present when Marcela and Felipe gave blood at the Forensic Medical Corps, they argued, there was no proof that the samples were theirs. Salgado had no option but to order another round of saliva and blood extractions. Everyone assumed, of course, that Marcela and Felipe’s lawyers would appeal the order all the way to the Supreme Court, which would postpone a resolution until after the October Presidential elections.

Then, in the last weeks of June, 2011, there was a surprise: Marcela and Felipe submitted a letter to Judge Salgado. In order to put an end to the “harassment and persecution of the media and the courts,” and to spare their mother “more attacks and suffering,” they wrote, they would not only give new blood samples but also allow these to be tested against the genetic profiles of all two hundred and nineteen eligible families in the B.N.D.G.

By eight o’clock on the frigid morning of June 24th, members of the press, in winter coats, were gathered in front of a hospital ambulance entrance, in the ramshackle Buenos Aires neighborhood of Caballito. The sky was bright, the few trees gnarled and black, some with their last yellow leaves still clinging to them. The ambulance entrance was blocked by olive-green-clad gendarmes and federal police in black uniforms with laced-up black boots. As more soldiers and police joined the line, they traded cheek kisses with their comrades. Photographers and camera crews had brought tall tripods and stepladders, so as to be able to see over the crowd, and were aiming telephoto lenses down the driveway into the shadows underneath a pedestrian bridge, where a doorway led directly into the B.N.D.G. Across the street, photographers crouched in the upper windows of a parking garage, hoping to capture an image of los chicos emerging from a car and going into the hospital.

At around nine-thirty, vehicles pulled up under the pedestrian bridge; they’d used a rear driveway. The view of the hospital entrance was blocked by the open passenger door of an S.U.V. while Marcela and Felipe hurried inside. The media lingered for an hour, another hour, and then another. At just past one, Alan Iud, a lawyer for the Abuelas, came out to deliver a statement: the siblings had given their DNA samples and the process was complete. The next day, newspapers published the coveted photographs of the siblings leaving the B.N.D.G.: Felipe, in a suit and tie, in the back seat of the S.U.V., fastening his seat belt; Marcela emerging from the hospital, tugging up the collar of her yellow coat, her blond hair pulled into a pert ponytail.

Why had Marcela and Felipe suddenly agreed to the testing? Ríos thought it was likely that they had simply decided to put an end to the matter. The controversy had become a demoralizing burden to many who worked at the newspaper, where Marcela would one day be director. For years, pro-Fernández news programs on state television had brought up the adoptions on an almost nightly basis, routinely applying words such as “appropriator” and “impunity” to Herrera de Noble. “It’s a company founded on a pact of complicity with the genocide” is how Clarín was described on one such news show. Clarín reporters were tired of being taunted with cries of “Give back the children.” Widely distributed propaganda flyers reading “Can you be an ‘Independent Journalist’ and serve the owner of a multimedia company accused of appropriating children of the disappeared?” had included the names and photographs of respected journalists.

But, as I learned, there was another reason. In 2010, geneticists at the B.N.D.G. had tested the Forensic Medical Corps samples and the first set of confiscated items, and had found right away that they didn’t match any of the existing profiles in the bank. “We knew because we’re obsessed with our work here,” my source at the B.N.D.G. said. “They’re just lists of numbers, after all.” Someone from the data bank had shared this information with an executive at Clarín, and Marcela and Felipe had likely concluded that there was little risk of their being matched to another family’s samples. It seemed likely that the Abuelas knew about this, too, though they deny it. Probably it was why they had questioned the authenticity of those samples.

THE FIRST DNA TEST WAS NEGATIVE”: the July 12th headline filled Clarín’s front page above the fold, and was followed by the announcement that Marcela and Felipe were not a genetic match to either of the two plaintiff families. Judge Salgado had ordered the testing to proceed in three stages. The second would involve testing against the genetic profiles of families looking for the offspring of family members known to have disappeared in 1975 and ’76; the third stage would test against the remaining families. On July 15th, the results of the second stage, in which Marcela’s profile was tested against those of fifty-five families—including Chicha Mariani’s—and Felipe’s against fifty-seven, were also proclaimed negative.

Clarín greeted the results with calls for the case against Herrera de Noble to be dismissed. The newspaper and other members of the media also called for the government and Carlotto to apologize to Herrera de Noble and her children. At a July 18th press conference, Carlotto responded, “They ask us to apologize, but the ones who should apologize are the members of the terrorist state that erased all trace of our families, and those who hide information so that we can’t find our grandchildren, and who use our pain for political opportunism.” Carlotto denied that the results of the tests had been negative. It hadn’t been possible, she said, to test the siblings’ DNA against four families whose genetic profiles were still incomplete. The case, she concluded, was not closed. Carlotto’s anger reminded others that she was herself the mother of a brutally murdered daughter and that her grandson had yet to be found. The Abuelas, many of them now in their eighties and nineties, convey at times a heartbreaking sense of urgency.

Mochkofsky’s book, which came out in August, said that Héctor Magnetto, the ailing Clarín C.E.O., had once confided to another Clarín executive that Herrera de Noble had no idea where her children had come from. “And that is the worst situation,” he’d lamented. This meant, Mochkofsky concluded, that it was simply not knowing—and not daring to find out—that had caused Herrera de Noble and Grupo Clarín to expose Marcela and Felipe to ten years of harassment and uncertainty, while allowing their case to be elevated into a polarizing national, political, legal, and human-rights debate. And what of Marcela and Felipe? Their silence, their air of fortressed isolation, seemed impenetrable.

In September, Judge Salgado issued a ruling on the Noble Herrera case. In a long written statement, she argued, as had Carlotto, that, because four of the families searching for children born in 1976 had incomplete genetic profiles, the second stage of the attempted DNA matching was unfinished, and the third stage could not begin. Any further testing in the case was therefore suspended. In December, it was announced, with little fanfare, that three of those profiles had been completed and tested, and the results had again been negative. Judge Salgado didn’t indicate when, if ever, the final round of testing would be performed.

If the third round of testing is carried out and the results are negative, not everybody will consider the matter settled. Since 2006, the B.N.D.G. has entered seventy-four new families into its database. The day I visited the B.N.D.G., an elderly man from Mendoza came to deposit his blood sample into the bank’s database. The question of whether his daughter might have been pregnant when she was disappeared thirty years earlier had finally compelled him to take that step. There is always the possibility, however remote, that the next person to walk through that door will turn out to be a relative of Marcela’s or Felipe’s.

Last August, the Abuelas announced the hundred and fifth match of a stolen child—now a thirty-four-year-old doctor, with two children of her own—to her biological grandparents. Three months later, news of Marcela Noble Herrera’s pregnancy became public. Marcela, who is said to live with a longtime boyfriend, gave birth in early February.

Chicha Mariani is eighty-eight now, and almost totally blind. She has converted the house in La Plata from which her granddaughter was taken into a museum, its bombed rubble enclosed by Plexiglas, and she runs a foundation named for Clara Anahí. “I’m alone in the world,” she told me. “I was always expecting to find Clara Anahí. Every morning I wake and think, I don’t want to, I don’t want to go on. After a while, I think, But if I don’t move, what will happen? And I get up and go out to search for her. Who will look for her when I’m gone?” ♦