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14 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 123 (2001)
Righting Child Custody Wrongs: The Children of the Disappeard in Argentina

handle is hein.journals/hhrj14 and id is 129 raw text is: Righting Child Custody Wrongs: The Children of the Disappeared in Argentina Laura Oren* I. INTRODUCTION Martha Fineman has said that family law decisions are inescapably po- litical.' Nowhere is this better and more literally illustrated than in Argen- tina, where, in the aftermath of the dictatorship from 1976 to 1983, courts considered the fate of the kidnapped children of the disappeared. The politics of the Dirty War conducted by the juntas included disappearing perceived opponents of the military regime and systematically kidnapping their young children, often selling or giving them for adoption to military and police families. When the biological families of these children finally located them, sometimes years later, the relatives attempted to reclaim them. Courts then faced the troubling question of what to do: whether to return the children to the families of origin from which they were stolen, or to leave them with the parents who were raising them illegally. In order to understand this di- lemma and the disputed solutions proposed in the best interest of the child, it is necessary to consider the entire context of what happened in Argentina during the nightmare years of the dictatorship. Between 1976 and 1983, Argentine military and police forces disappeared as many as 30,0002 of their own people, whom they perceived as subver- * Professor of Law, University of Houston Law Center. Ph.D., Yale University; 1974; J.D., University of Houston Law Center, 1980. This Article was written with the assistance of Carmen Carranza, Alejan- dro Nila, and Arturo Fernandez. I wish to thank the Ford Foundation, Dr. Rolando E. Gilaldino, Maria Jos6 Guembe, Mario Lopez-Garelli, Raquel Poitevien, Juan Mendez, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, all of whom provided research sources. Thanks also to Jonathan Pratter, Jonathan Miller, Jordan Faust, Harriet Richman, and Helen Boyce. This Article is an outgrowth of a paper originally delivered at the North American Regional Conference on Parent and Child in North America on June 15, 1996. It was made possible by the financial assistance of the University of Houston Law Foundation. It is dedicated to the Abueas de Plaza de Mayo and to my children, Leah and Sam Oren- Palmer. 1. Martha Albertson Fineman, Legal Stories, Change, and Incentives-Reinforcing the Law of the Father, 37 N.Y.L. SCH. L. REv. 227, 229 (1992). 2. In 1984, NuNcA MlvAs, the official report of the Commission on the Disappeared (CONADEP) con- servatively estimated the disappearances at 9000. NutNcA Ms: THE REPORT OF THE ARGENTINE NA-

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