Thursday 11 February 2010

Argentina: Alejandro Rei, Found Grandchild

"I weighed everything that I had lived in my 26 years," Alejandro explained. "I thought, what I had received was a real love, a real affection, and so I determined that I would defend them as much as I could."
[...]
"You then begin to realize that the person who raised you was a participant in that situation," he recalled. "You feel everything: pain, anger, sadness, rage. Everything."
The Washington Post has a very detailed article on Argentine Alejandro Rei and his discovery that he was the child of disappeared persons. It describes his upbringing, the process of finding out about his true origins, the subsequent legal proceedings and Rei's emotional reactions to all this.

The latter is a particularly interesting aspect - surely all those who know of the plight of the disappeared children and the Grandmothers have asked themselves how they would feel if they suddenly found out that not only were they adopted, but their biological parents had been murdered by the State, and possibly with the complicity of their adopted family? The Grandmothers generally emphasise that many of the found children ultimately develop very positive relationships with their bio-families, but, as they would also never deny, it's a very difficult process to get to that stage.

Orphaned in Argentina's dirty war, man is torn between two families (Washington Post)

2 comments:

Maggie7 said...

Hello, do you know where I can find the full interview with Alejandro and Victoria Montenegro?

Lillie Langtry said...

Hi Maggie,

Well, the link posted above to the full article is still live. See also

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/world/americas/argentinas-daughter-of-dirty-war-raised-by-man-who-killed-her-parents.html?pagewanted=all