‘Finding your identity can take a lifetime’
Whether it is to finding the courage to speak up or to learning to live with a recovered identity, time is crucial for the children stolen by the officers of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship says Guillermo Amarilla Molfino, one of the roughly 130 grandchildren who have successfully discovered their truth
How did the search for identity restitution go?
The approach to the Abuelas [de Plaza de Mayo] took a long time, questions, concerns, doubts, wanting to know if I belonged to the family that had raised me or not.
He [the appropriator] was a member of the Army during [the era of] state terrorism in Argentina. She [the appropriator] was not, but she was too old to have had a child. She was 50 years old when I was born [in 1980]. In their story there was a concealment, it was very palpable.
It was an atmosphere of silences, of denials. I covered up those gaps, those absences, with my own stories, with imagination. For many years, until I was 20, I thought that they could be my grandparents and not my parents.
I approached the Abuelas after seeing an episode of the [TV drama]
Televisión por la identidad (“Television for Identity”) series that moved me very much. I identified very much with the young person in that real story made as fiction.
The first step was to do a DNA extraction to check with the National Bank of Genetic Data, but the result was negative. The DNA of my mother, Marcela Molfino, was not there because when she was kidnapped she was very recently pregnant and her family did not know about it, so they did not look for a child.
Only in 2003, in a trial [investigating the crimes of the dictatorship], a survivor said that during her captivity she found out about Marcela Molfino’s pregnancy. A blood sample was taken from the Amarilla and Molfino families and a new comparison was made: the result showed 99.8 percent kinship. I was 29 years old.
How do you live with these two identities?
The DNA result gives us the answer about the real family we belong to, but it doesn’t mean that one’s identity has been resolved. This reconstruction of identity takes time, it requires the exercise of bonds, of memory, of being oneself.
I used to be called Martin, but now my name is Guillermo. When I was recovered I had no memory of “my Guillermo.” So an active memory began to take shape.
For me there was no break, it was like a change of state. Over time there was a construction as a brother, as an uncle, as a nephew. A construction as Guillermo. Martin didn’t break up, he dissolved and became Guillermo.
You are currently helping and advising others in their search for identities. Do you think there is an urgency?
The first leap into the void is to approach the Abuelas with doubts. But you meet people who are prepared, with tenderness, patience, without prejudice, who listen. That’s all I was missing: there was no tenderness, no preparation, no knowledge.
Now there is an urgency to look for more people because with time, it becomes more difficult for the person who has concerns. When silence sometimes becomes one’s ally, it ends up being an ally and coexists. You can live with it all your life. There is an urgency because time goes by and the possibilities of reconstructing one’s identity are lost.