A Flower Traveled in My Blood

On the evening of October 6, 1978, armed men seized José Manuel Pérez Rojo from his toy and party supply store in a Buenos Aires suburb, then drove to the apartment he shared with his partner, Patricia Roisinblit, and their 15-month-old daughter, Mariana. Patricia, in the late stages of pregnancy, was forced into a car. The men left Mariana in a basket at a relative's doorstep. Neither Patricia nor José was ever seen again.

The book traces how this family's devastation connects to the broader catastrophe of Argentina's military dictatorship (1976–1983) and the decades-long campaign by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, a group of grandmothers, to recover hundreds of children stolen by the state. Argentina's twentieth-century history sets the stage: once among the world's wealthiest nations, the country lurched between civilian and military rule after the Great Depression. Juan Perón dominated politics from the 1940s through the 1970s. After his death in 1974, his widow Isabel inherited the presidency amid spiraling violence between leftist guerrilla groups, including the Montoneros, and right-wing death squads. By March 1976, a military junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power.

Around mid-1975, Patricia joined the Montoneros' health division at a clandestine clinic, and José joined through Catholic social activism. By 1978 they had stepped back from the movement, but the security forces caught up with them. Patricia's mother, Rosa Tarlovsky de Roisinblit, an obstetrician and the daughter of Jewish immigrants from the Russian Empire, learned of the abduction the next morning. She filed legal petitions that were rejected without explanation. In two late-night phone calls, a man warned Rosa not to search for her daughter and promised to deliver the baby after it was born. When Rosa visited the couple's apartment, she found it stripped bare except for Mariana's crib.

The junta's terror operated through hundreds of clandestine detention centers where prisoners were tortured and held in cramped cells. At the ESMA (Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada), a Buenos Aires naval academy and the regime's most feared detention site, sedated prisoners were loaded onto planes and pushed alive into the Río de la Plata in so-called death flights. The regime's reach extended across borders through Operation Condor, a transnational network of South American dictatorships that coordinated abductions and killings with significant US support.

In April 1977, Azucena Villaflor de De Vincenti, whose son had been abducted, rallied other mothers of the disappeared to gather in the Plaza de Mayo, the symbolic heart of Buenos Aires. Marching in pairs to skirt a ban on public gatherings and wearing white handkerchiefs as their emblem, the women became known as the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. That November, 12 women who were also missing grandchildren met separately and formed what would become the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Among the founders was María Isabel "Chicha" Chorobik de Mariani, whose infant granddaughter had been stolen after a military raid. The junta struck back: in December 1977, a naval infiltrator helped abduct several Madres, including Azucena. Their remains, found years later, confirmed they had been thrown from planes.

Rosa joined the Abuelas in late 1978. The grandmothers developed elaborate investigative methods, from coded phone conversations to disguises as saleswomen to confirm whether children lived in certain homes. In 1980, they located their first grandchildren, half-sisters Tatiana and Laura Malena Britos. In 1982, Rosa traveled to Geneva and met two ESMA survivors who confirmed that Patricia gave birth to a healthy boy on November 15, 1978, in the ESMA's basement. Patricia named him Rodolfo Fernando. Days later, she was led away with her newborn and never seen again.

The Abuelas' greatest breakthrough came through science. Chicha carried a newspaper clipping about a blood test, asking every scientist she met whether a similar method could connect grandparents to grandchildren without the parents' blood. The search led to Mary-Claire King, a geneticist at the University of California, Berkeley. King developed the Index of Grandpaternity (Índice de Abuelidad), a formula using HLA (human leukocyte antigen) types to calculate the probability of a grandparental relationship. In 1984, she applied the index to the case of Paula Logares, a girl living with a former police officer, yielding a 99.82 percent probability of a match. Paula became the first stolen grandchild returned to her family through genetic evidence. When HLA's limitations became apparent, King turned to mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), genetic material passed unchanged through the maternal line that requires only one maternal relative to confirm a match. She stored samples in a locked deli fridge in her Berkeley lab, creating a parallel genetic bank beyond the reach of Argentine authorities.

Argentina's defeat in the 1982 Falklands War accelerated the junta's collapse. Democracy returned under President Raúl Alfonsín, whose truth commission published Nunca Más (Never Again), documenting thousands of disappearances and the military's theft of babies from imprisoned mothers. The 1985 Trial of the Juntas resulted in a life sentence for Videla. But military pressure forced Alfonsín to pass amnesty laws shielding most officers, and his successor Carlos Menem pardoned Videla in 1990. The Abuelas' credibility was also damaged when a girl's HLA results falsely matched a biological family, and advanced DNA testing later disproved the connection, triggering an internal rift. Chicha left the organization. Estela de Carlotto, whose daughter Laura had been killed by the military, became president; Rosa became vice president.

On April 27, 2000, 21-year-old Guillermo Gómez was working at a fast-food restaurant in Buenos Aires when Mariana Pérez, Patricia and José's daughter, approached him claiming to be his sister. She left him a book about disappeared children containing a photograph of José that looked exactly like Guillermo. That same day, he traveled to the Abuelas' headquarters, pricked his thumb, and squeezed blood onto filter paper. King's analysis confirmed a perfect mtDNA match with Rosa.

Guillermo's journey toward accepting his identity was protracted and painful. Francisco Gómez, the air force employee who illegally took and raised him, eventually confessed that Guillermo's parents were Montoneros held at the facility where Gómez worked. After Gómez was arrested, Guillermo lashed out at his biological family and refused further DNA testing. Gradually, with the support of his partner Cintia and Rosa's patient persistence, he began to engage with his true history. A pivotal moment came in 2005 when he visited the ESMA basement where he was born. ESMA survivor Miriam Lewin, a former colleague of his parents, pointed to a spot on the floor and addressed him by his birth name, Rodolfo, for the first time. He and Rosa held hands and wept.

Under President Néstor Kirchner, Argentina's reckoning with the dictatorship accelerated. Kirchner removed Videla's portrait from the military college and converted the ESMA into a museum. The Supreme Court struck down the amnesty laws, enabling new prosecutions. In 2012, the Plan Sistemático de Robo de Bebés (Systematic Plan of Baby Kidnapping) case confirmed in court that baby theft was a coordinated military policy. Videla was sentenced to 50 years and died in prison in 2013. By 2023, the Abuelas had located 133 grandchildren, though more than 250 remained missing.

In 2016, Gómez and two military superiors were convicted for the disappearance of Patricia and José. Rosa, 96, testified that she once had a daughter but no longer does. Outside the courthouse, she embraced Guillermo and Mariana. In 2022, Rosa stepped back as vice president at 102; Guillermo took her seat on the Abuelas' board.

The book closes with the 2023 election of right-wing president Javier Milei, who disputes the number of disappeared, cuts the Abuelas' funding, and disbands investigative units that supported dictatorship trials. Ford Falcons, the cars the military used during abductions, reappear on Buenos Aires streets with photos of Videla in their windows. The Abuelas respond as they always have: by marching. At a recent protest, Estela de Carlotto, the last active founding member, circles the Pirámide de Mayo, the plaza's central monument, once, slowly, supported by recovered grandchildren.