Dic

10

Victoria Donda was 26 when she discovered the truth about her real parents. Both political prisoners of Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship, they were tortured and presumably killed sometime around 1977. Donda was adopted and given a new identity. She describes what it was like to discover the truth, and to find she has a biological grandmother and sister – and also a paternal uncle, an evasive ex-naval officer who is said to have been behind the incarceration of her parents

It was the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo [a human rights group] who started investigating my case. It wasn’t easy. There are no photos or documentation of the babies that were born in captivity.

The Grandmothers had received an anonymous tip-off from one of my neighbours. I guess they’d never seen my mother pregnant, so there’d always been a suspicion lurking over where I’d come from.

A friend of mine who’d been in touch with the Grandmothers was the one to break the news to me. That was back in August 2003. I’d just turned 26 at the time. He was crying when he told me. I remember him taking off his glasses and wiping his eyes.

Of course, it came as a terrible shock. Not just that my parents might not be my parents, but that my biological mother and father had been “disappeared” during the dictatorship [of 1976-1983]. Part of me could believe that it was true, but I was still totally confused. I guess I was shell-shocked.