Hijos

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HIJOS or HIJOS is an acrostic poem and pars pro toto for the Argentinian organization H ijos por la I dentidad y la J usticia contra el O lvido y el S ilencio , 'Children for identity and justice, against forgetting and silence', which has been growing for years '. "Hijos" is also the Spanish word for "children".

The organization HIJOS, founded in 1999, consists primarily of young adults who, as children, fell victim to the junta government under General Jorge Rafael Videla that came to power in a military coup in 1976 . During the military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 , the state waged a self-declared dirty war against militant resistance groups and opposition groups, which killed up to 30,000 people. Often the victims had not engaged in any illegal activities, but were only suspicious of their political position, trade union or social activity, and then secretly imprisoned and killed. Such people are called Desaparecidos (Disappeared) in Argentina and all of Latin America . Babies born to women in captivity during the dictatorship were systematically robbed, and the mothers were then tortured and killed. The babies made into orphans in this way were sometimes forcibly given up for adoption by the military without the knowledge of the mothers' families , mostly to childless officer families or business people who were friends, where the children apparently grew up normally. The HIJOS consist on the one hand of children who later found out about their origins, often after being tracked down by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo organization ('Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo '), in which the mothers of the women who were murdered at the time organized themselves. On the other hand, it contains children of disappeared people who live in their families of origin, i.e. H. grew up with grandparents, uncles and aunts, or with families friends with their parents, and fight for the justice and investigation of the crimes related to the illegal disappearance of their parents.

The organization HIJOS estimates that there are a total of around 500 children in Argentina who were stolen by the henchmen of the dictatorship and then secretly given up for adoption by the military. In at least 128 cases, children who disappeared during the military dictatorship were returned to surviving parents or legal families by 2018. The efforts continue. The confrontation with their biological origins is usually a very painful process for the now adult children - also because their adoptive fathers, as officers of the time, were often involved in the torture and murder of their birth parents.

The left-wing organization is closely related to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo ('Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo') and the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo ('Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo'). These two organizations were formed from the mothers of the kidnapped and murdered people, i.e. the HIJOS generation of grandparents. The parent generation in between no longer exists or was murdered by the military. While the Madres primarily ask about the whereabouts of their murdered children and the Abuelas are looking for their grandchildren, most of whom have been adopted anonymously, often by the military and other people close to the regime, the HIJOS primarily want the perpetrators to be prosecuted and their sentences are not, e.g. B. be mitigated due to the age of the perpetrator.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Werner Marti: Videla convicted of child robbery. Argentina's judiciary speaks of the systematic appropriation of babies by the military. Neue Zürcher Zeitung online, July 7, 2012