Argentine woman tracks down brother snatched at birth during country’s military dictatorship-era

Argentina returned to democracy in 1983, but the trauma from those seven years of dictatorship persists. While more than a thousand military officials have been tried and convicted for kidnapping, torturing and murdering Argentine citizens, most of the families of the 30,000 disappeared never learned what happened to their loved ones. Tonight, we’ll tell you of one family’s search for a baby stolen by the military in 1978. It’s a story about truth and memory, both of which have been attacked under the country’s president, Javier Milei, a populist leader who’s vowed to make Argentina great again.

After years of economic stagnation and runaway inflation, in 2023 Argentina elected an economist as its president: Javier Milei, a chainsaw-toting, self-proclaimed sex guru, and true libertarian. While he’s met favor for revitalizing the national economy and slashing bureaucracy, he’s met criticism for his open sympathy for military rule, his denial of its brutality, and his defunding of human rights programs. 

Taty Almeida (in Spanish/English Translation): After 40 years of democracy, we never thought we would have to fight against these denialists, but we know the truth. We lost an election, but we won’t give up, we will resist, which is what we’ve done all our lives. 

Age 94, Taty Almeida is the president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. For half a century, she’s been searching for her son, Alejandro, who left for classes one day, never to return.

Taty Almeida (in Spanish/English Translation): When they took the most precious thing a mother has… a child… we went out like lionesses looking for our cubs. 

Jon Wertheim: They called you Los Locos, the– the crazy ones. You didn’t take that as an insult. Were– were you crazy?

Taty Almeida (in Spanish/English Translation):: We were crazy with pain, with rage, with helplessness. Because we mothers know what it’s like to carry a child for nine months in the womb and then have it ripped away from you like that. 

Twenty five years ago, 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon came to the Plaza de Mayo to report on the story of Patricia Roisinblit. In 1978, she was eight-months pregnant, when she and her husband Jose were hauled away by armed government thugs. Patricia was taken here to the ESMA death camp. Human rights groups estimate that 500 babies were born in camps to mothers kept alive only long enough to give birth before being killed. In a systematic campaign, their stolen babies were then given to childless military couples. Back then Bob Simon spoke to Patricia’s friend and fellow prisoner, Miriam Lewin—yes, the same investigative journalist who discovered the death plane.

Bob Simon: Why did they keep the babies alive?

Miriam Lewin: Maybe they thought of it as an act of humanity. 

Bob Simon (Voiceover): An act of humanity? To take children away from the people they labeled enemies of the state and raise them as patriots?

Bob Simon: Save the baby from the…

Miriam Lewin: Subversives.

Bob Simon: …subversive germ of the babies’ parents and grandparents? 

Miriam Lewin: That’s right.

She remembered Patricia in the brief moments after her baby was born, before he was taken away.

Miriam Lewin: He was a beautiful and healthy baby boy, almost blond, and she told me, “his name is going to be Rodolfo,” and she was smiling.

Bob Simon (Voiceover): Patricia Roisinblit was never seen again, nor was her husband. Her mother, Rosa, spent years searching police stations, hospitals and orphanages for baby Rodolfo.

Bob Simon: You and the other grandmothers have found 64 children?

Rose Roisinblit: Yes.

Bob Simon: You must be pretty good detectives. How do you do it?

Rosa Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): Yes, we are detectives. We call each other detectives. We call each other Sherlock Holmes.

But the search for her own grandchild Rodolfo was anything but elementary. Rosa became a founding member of the abuelas, or grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. She spent years searching for him. She was joined by her granddaughter, Rodolfo’s older sister, Mariana. She was in her early 20s when 60 Minutes interviewed her. 

Mariana Eva Pérez (in Spanish/English Translation):: I have a lot of hope that he comes to realize that he’s been living a lie and that he would come looking for me.

Twenty-five-years later, we returned to Buenos Aires. Today, Mariana is 47 years old. Rosa is 105.

In 2000, just days after our initial report aired, Mariana received an anonymous tip about a man who might be her brother — his name: Guillermo Gomez. He was working in a fast-food restaurant in a Buenos Aires suburb. So she went to visit him. 

Jon Wertheim: You’ve been envisioning this moment for basically your whole life.

Mariana Eva Pérez: Si.

Jon Wertheim: What was the emotion?

Mariana Eva Pérez:(in Spanish/English Translation): At that moment, I felt, I felt dissociated. I had a feeling of peace and relief and that everything would be okay. 

Jon Wertheim: You’re 21 years old. You’re working in a fast food restaurant. And all of a sudden, one day, a young woman comes in to see you. What– what happened that day?

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation):: First of all she asks me my full name… most people don’t go around asking people on the street their full name, with their whole identity right? That seemed strange to me. I denied that I was her brother. I had a document with a different name and birthdate. I didn’t believe it. I didn’t understand it. 

It was a brief encounter, but before departing, Mariana left him a book with photographs of the disappeared, including her parents. When Guillermo saw the photograph of her father Jose, he was stunned.

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): It’s like in a science fiction movie when you see a picture of yourself in the past. It was a picture of me in the past. I felt that Mariana’s father didn’t just look similar, but identical.

Jon Wertheim: You– you felt that in–your heart?

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): Yes, you could say that.

A photograph of a man that looked like him was one thing, but a DNA test could confirm his real parentage.

Jon Wertheim: Did you hope it turned out one way or the other?

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): I was very afraid — at that moment, I didn’t know who I was. 

The results: Guillermo and Mariana were siblings. They tried to cut through time. It wasn’t even a reunion—just a union. 

But soon, Guillermo learned the awful truth. The couple who had raised him, Francisco Gomez and his wife, Dora, had not only seized him after his mother Patricia’s murder, but Gomez, who worked in Argentina’s air force intelligence, had taken part in Patricia’s capture.

Jon Wertheim: How did it feel when you learned that not only were the people you thought were your parents for the first 20 years of your life weren’t your parents, but also they had abducted, they had appropriated you?

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): It’s a very, very confusing time because it’s like all the ties that you have at that moment are cut and you’re absolutely alone.

From that moment of revelation, Guillermo’s life cleaved into two parts, the lie, and the painful search for truth as he rebuilt his identity, and learned about his real parents whom he would never meet.

Jon Wertheim: What is it like for you to see these pictures here?

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): It’s necessary so that those who come here know they aren’t just a number. They aren’t just a grave that doesn’t exist, you know? They were people. They were people that had a life that was interrupted, they had dreams, they were ordinary people like the rest.

The ESMA death camp—achingly—marks where he was born; and it’s the site of his mother’s death sentence, just days later.

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): The worst thing is what happened to me here, in this place, that was the worst. 

Jon Wertheim: Where we are right now?

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): Of course, the worst is that I was born in captivity like a zoo animal, my mother was also kidnapped, I was separated after three days, I was disappeared for twenty-one years. I’m a contradiction because I am a disappeared person alive. I’m a person who was missing without knowing I was missing.

Guillermo says his childhood was unhappy and that Gomez was violent. He sometimes hoped Gomez wasn’t his real father. Guillermo felt differently about Dora, who’d always tried her best, he says, to take care of him.

Jon Wertheim: It seems to me something complicating this even more is that you have differentiated between how you feel about the man who raised you and the woman who raised you.

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): Well, they were two completely different people. I grew up being afraid of him, running away from him. And she, for a long time, was practically my whole world. She was the person I called mom. 

Jon Wertheim: Dora, the woman who raised you?

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): I see her and I love her, and I need her in my life. The only thing I wished for the person I had called mom was for nothing to happen to her, for her not to go to jail.

But for Mariana and Rosa, Guillermo’s relationship with Dora was a constant source of conflict. It felt like a betrayal. They wanted consequences.

Mariana Eva Pérez (in Spanish/English Translation): Everyday, every morning, when she woke him up, she knew she had stolen someone else’s son. And I don’t forgive that. They stole a brother from me, and they stole him for all my life. 

Jon Wertheim: You don’t– don’t “forgive and forget.” 

Mariana Eva Pérez: No.

Gomez appeared in court in 2016 and on the witness stand, Guillermo faced him and made one final plea.

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): I told him I needed to stop being in constant mourning for the death of my parents and that I needed to know when it happened, who had been responsible for their deaths and where their remains are. And he chose to say nothing; that’s what he chose as his last act of cruelty, to say nothing.

Gomez was sentenced to 12 years in prison for Guillermo’s abduction. Dora was sentenced to three. After the trial, the siblings presented a unified front with their grandmother Rosa, but their relationship was all but doomed from the beginning. So little in common apart from DNA. They were after all separated for two decades. And there were struggles familiar to many siblings: jealousies, resentments, issues with money. 

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): Life isn’t a movie. I wish it was a Hollywood production and this had a happy ending. The bottom line is, having been raised separated, not living together, we could never get over that distance between us. 

Jon Wertheim: You don’t have a relationship?

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): No. We won’t be the first or last siblings that don’t have a relationship. But she plays a very important role in my life, in my history. And I recognize how long she spent looking for me.

Today, a year into president Milei’s rule amid his gutting austerity measures, these are convulsive times in Argentina. When we were in Buenos Aires, Mariana, a celebrated artist and writer, was performing her latest experimental play to a packed audience. It was about dictatorship, conjured memories, and her conflicted identity in the shadow of disappeared parents. 

Jon Wertheim: Do you ever wonder whether it would be easier not to have found him and just keep living with this fantasy, this mystery brother?

Mariana Eva Perez (in Spanish/English Translation): No, no, I don’t regret it. Because I see the suffering of those who are still looking for a brother or sister. I don’t think that in any sense my life would be better if I was still looking for him because I would not have stopped for a moment. I wouldn’t be at peace. We all know the seriousness of what the military have done, stealing the babies, raising them as their own children, lying to them. What happened broke everything, so what’s broken is broken. It’s very difficult for us as a society to accept that it’s broken forever. But it’s always better to know the most painful truth than not knowing the truth at all. 

As for Guillermo, 25-years after meeting Mariana at the fast food restaurant, he’s settled into his new identity. Each week, he visits the offices of the grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires, where only a couple of grandmothers are still active. Today, he is a prominent human rights lawyer and has taken grandma Rosa’s seat at the table. For all the complications and all the pain, Guillermo says he wouldn’t have authored the story any differently.

Jon Wertheim: No regrets? There– there’s no sense of, “My life would be better off if I never knew?”

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish): No. Never.

Jon Wertheim: ‘Cause you know the truth now.

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish/English Translation): I would live every day the same because that led me to where I am. My life today, with all the difficulties I’ve experienced, is extremely positive and hopeful. 

Jon Wertheim:  Right now you’re the person you should’ve been? 

Guillermo Pérez Roisinblit (in Spanish): Yes.

Produced by Michael H. Gavshon. Field producer, Dawn Makinson. Associate producers, Nadim Roberts and Elizabeth Germino. Broadcast associates: Mimi Lamarre and Jane Greeley. Edited by Daniel J. Glucksman.

Jon Wertheim

L. Jon Wertheim is an accomplished journalist and 60 Minutes correspondent.