Silvia Quintela
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A leftist doctor who tended to the indigent of Buenos Aires in the 1970s, Silvia Quintela became one of "the disappeared" during Argentina's Dirty War. Quintela's case is best known for the fact that at the time of her detention by Argentina's military junta, she and her husband Abel Madariaga, an agronomist, were expecting their first child. It is thought that Quintela was allowed to give birth in custody and that the child was then taken away and adopted while she was later killed, all of which took place in secrecy.
Quintela and Madariaga met while attending the School of Medicine in Buenos Aires. Both were active members of the Peronist Youth, followers of Juan Perón, who at the time held his second presidency of Argentina. After Perón's death in 1974, his wife Isabel took power, only to be overthrown in a 1976 coup d'état by the Argentine military. Soon after, the new government began secretly detaining political opponents, many of whom were killed. Estimates of these victims?"the disappeared"?range from 10,000 to 30,000.
On January 17, 1977, Quintela was detained while walking down a road; she was 28 at the time and four months pregnant. The same men who detained her later broke into her mother's house, rummaged through her belongings and told her mother that Quintela had been arrested. With help from Quintela's mother, Madariaga tried to find her but he soon had to flee the country. He wound up in exile in Sweden.
According to witnesses, after being taken off the street Quintela was brought to a military base, where she eventually gave birth to a baby boy. The newborn was taken away from her, and she was reportedly sent to a military airfield. Quintela's fate is unknown, but detainees sent there were often stripped naked, blindfolded, chained together, and put onboard cargo planes. The planes would fly out over the Atlantic Ocean at night and groups of prisoners would be pushed out to their deaths.
In 1983, after the junta relinquished control of the government, Madariaga returned to Argentina and tried to find out what had happened to Quintela and their child. He began to suspect that Major Norberto Atilio Bianco, a military doctor linked by witnesses to pregnant detainees, had in fact taken Quintela's son himself. Babies delivered at the base were either given up for adoption or given to soldiers' families, and Bianco had an adopted son Pablo who was the right age. Furthermore, Pablo's birthday?September 1, 1977?matches the reported date Quintela gave birth.
Madariaga has tried to resolve Pablo's paternity through DNA testing, but Pablo, now an adult, has declined to cooperate.