“Victoria Montenegro recalls a childhood filled with chilling dinnertime discussions. Lt. Col. Hernán Tetzlaff, the head of the family, would recount military operations he had taken part in where “subversives” had been tortured or killed. The discussions often ended with his “slamming his gun on the table,” she said.
Montenegro’s case is but one of more than 500 cases of children stolen from their parents. Yet its repercussions could be felt long and wide in the ongoing process of remembering military rule in Argentina between 1976 and 1983. In the prosecution of her adoptive father, Argentina has the first significant evidence that, rather than adoptions of murdered civilians’ children merely being the act of a few low-level military officers and torturers, there may have been a top-level plan to systematically steal infants from so-called “subversives” whom the military saw as a threat.
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For years, Ms. Montenegro rejected efforts by officials and advocates to discover her true identity. From a young age, she received a “strong ideological education” from Colonel Tetzlaff, an army officer at a secret detention center.
If she picked up a flier from leftists on the street, “he would sit me down for hours to tell me what the subversives had done to Argentina,” she said.
He took her along to a detention center where he spent hours discussing military operations with his fellow officers, “how they had killed people, tortured them,” she said.
“I grew up thinking that in Argentina there had been a war, and that our soldiers had gone to war to guarantee the democracy,” she said. “And that there were no disappeared people, that it was all a lie.” […]
By 2000, Ms. Montenegro still believed her mission was to keep Colonel Tetzlaff out of prison. But she relented and gave a DNA sample. A judge then delivered jarring news: the test confirmed that she was the biological child of Hilda and Roque Montenegro, who had been active in the resistance. She learned that she and the Montenegros had been kidnapped when she was 13 days old.
At a restaurant over dinner, Colonel Tetzlaff confessed to Ms. Montenegro and her husband: He had headed the operation in which the Montenegros were tortured and killed, and had taken her in May 1976, when she was 4 months old.
“I can’t bear to say any more,” she said, choking up at the memory of the dinner.” - Alexei Barrionuevo, “Daughter of 'Dirty War,' Raised by Man Who Killed Her Parents.” The New York Times. October 6, 2011.
