- Claudia Victoria Poblete Hlaczik, 46, was abducted along with her parents when she was 8 months old.
- She was raised believing her caretakers were her real parents.
- Meeting her biological grandma changed everything.
“When the court-ordered DNA test arrived, I was surprised, but absolutely sure it’d come back saying they were my real parents,” Claudia Victoria Poblete Hlaczik said of the letter she received in 2000 when she was 21.
The results stunned her. She showed a 99.99% genetic link to a complete stranger, her grandma, who had been the one requesting the DNA test.
Slowly, her entire life unraveled as one big lie. “I felt like ‘Alice in Wonderland’ through the looking glass — almost everything I’d been told about my identity was false and turned on its head,” she said.
Poblete Hlaczik’s actual parents had been kidnapped when she was 8 months old during Argentina’s military dictatorship. Poblete Hlaczik’s whole identity — her name and birth date were changed, and her birth certificate was falsified. She was given to a couple who lied to her about her identity, claiming she was biologically theirs.
And now, this older woman who — irrefutably — was her grandma wanted to meet her.
Her grandma is part of an impactful human rights organization
But this wasn’t any grandma. This was the woman who’d go on to be the vice president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo — a group of grandmothers searching for their vanished grandchildren.
It has become one of the world’s most remarkable and impactful human rights organizations. Its president, Estela de Carlotto, is 94. Its vice president, Buscarita Roa — Poblete Hlaczik’s paternal grandmother — is 87.
Last month, the group announced it discovered the 139th grandchild in its search, continuing its long quest to reunite families broken up by the military dictatorship’s abduction plan.
It’s widely estimated that up to 30,000 people considered political threats were “disappeared,” meaning they were detained, tortured, or killed. These people were considered “political threats” to the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983.
Initially, Poblete Hlaczik was unsure, confused, and afraid
“I’d been raised in a bubble,” Poblete Hlaczik said. “I didn’t know what’d happened in Argentina.”
She said she had earlier “creeping doubts” due to the advanced age of her appropriators but pushed them to the back of her mind.
Poblete Hlaczik said she initially kept “an affectionate relationship” with the military couple even after discovering the truth. “Even though they’d admitted stealing me, I worried about what’d happen to them; I felt they were my parents — and they were old,” she said.
Things changed in 2008 when Poblete Hlaczik had her first of two children (now 16 and 12).
“Becoming a mother, I realized what it really meant to have a child taken from you, and lie to that child daily for two decades, and hide that child from an older family member frantically looking for me,” she said, adding that she didn’t want her child to confuse the people who raised her as family.
The last straw came when the couple said they didn’t regret ridding Argentina of its “ideological opponents.” Poblete Hlaczik then cut all contact, changed her name, and reverted to celebrate her actual birthday.
The grandmother never gave up
Under a doily, in a prominent position, sits a photo of one of her seven sons and his wife in their early 20s: Poblete Hlaczik’s real parents. They’ve never been seen since.
“Any mother’s love is a force,” Roa said of her search for her granddaughter. “They’d have to kill me before I gave up.”
After her son disappeared, she’d heard some grandmothers held vigils at the famous Plaza de Mayo every Thursday to share information, demand answers, and protest. They’d wear headscarves on their heads — for visibility and to symbolize missing children.
Soldiers fired water cannons at them, but they didn’t budge. “We’d lost our fear. They dismissed us as silly crybaby housewives who’d get tired,” Roa said. “I wasn’t tired then — and I’m not tired now.”
Being underestimated meant they could achieve more than their military opponents had prepared for.
Roa hasn’t stopped now that she’s found her granddaughter, and now the Abuelas have played an integral part in bringing the perpetrators to justice in Argentina’s courts, a process that continues to jail people today.
“When they said we’ll never stop,” Poblete Hlaczik said, stroking her smiling grandmother’s hand, “they meant it.”
“When we find a grandchild, they’re the grandchild of all of us,” Roa said. The search continues; in December, the Argentine government estimated that 300 children were still missing.
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