It was Argentine's dictator General Jorge Rafael Videla who made the following statement during a press conference: "They are neither dead nor alive, they are desaparecidos (missing)." During Argentina's Dirty War and Operation Condor, many alleged political dissidents were abducted or illegally detained and kept in clandestine detention centers, where they were questioned, tortured, and sometimes killed. These places of torture, located in Buenos Aires, Argentina, contributed over 6,000 desaparecidos, or disappeared persons, to the overall count in the Dirty War. The Argentine military justified torture to gather intelligence and understood the disappearances as a way to curb political dissent. Whenever the female captives were pregnant, their children were stolen away right after giving birth, while the women themselves remained detained. An estimated 500 children and infants were given to families with close ties to the military to be raised. In a research project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the historian Professor Isabelle Cosse from the Universidad de Buenos Aires seeks to explore how activists, exiles, and human rights organizations in Europe denounced the kidnappings of babies and children perpetrated by the Argentine dictatorship. Thus, the research is situated at the intersection of the history of childhood, human rights studies, and transnational turn approaches. While intending to reconstruct the meaning of childhood for the human rights movement during the Cold War, Professor Cosse also aims to explore how the global stage became a crucial battlefield in the struggle against the Argentinian dictatorship. We asked her some questions concerning her project.
"Understanding the place occupied by feelings"
L.I.S.A.: Dr. Cosse, you are conducting research on the kidnappings of children and babies by the Argentine government that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. What exactly is your object of research and what was your initial point to start your study?
Dr. Cosse: I am studying how human rights organizations and activists in Europe denounced the kidnapping of babies and children and their families perpetrated by the 1976-1983 Argentine dictatorship. I am retracing the campaigns they conducted to raise awareness of this crime, examining the content of such campaigns and the representations they featured, and looking at the activists and organizations involved, as well as the impact their actions had on international public opinion. I embarked on my work from two main starting points. First, I took on the challenge of questioning the naturalization of the nation-state as the final unit of analysis, which is posed by transnational studies. I have adopted a transnational perspective (thinking about the connections, circulations, and interdependencies at the local, regional, and global scales) to consider the human rights movement, which was a new force of enormous importance during the cold war. Second, I think these perspectives acquire greater significance when it comes to childhood. In this sense, my point of departure is the paradox between the exaltation of childhood (which peaked in the 1950s, when children symbolized progress and the future, connecting the fate of the family with that of the nation and humanity) and new forms of violence against children that emerged at the same time as the direct or indirect result of policies implemented by modern states. I believe this contradiction was crucial in sparking human rights activism, because the cruelty inflicted on children crossed the limit of the tolerable for a sensitivity that was thought to be at the very foundation of all of humanity. In other words, I am very interested in understanding the place occupied by feelings, the concern for children, but also the role played by emotions in the political and social actions of movements, organizations, and exiles demanding that the kidnapped children be returned to their families, offering support to the relatives, and denouncing the repression in Argentina.