Editor’s note: Some of the written quotes featured in this article were edited for clarity.
This Monday and Wednesday, Tufts will be hosting a speaker event with Hector Rombola and Marcela Solsona Sintora, who are with the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo organization. The speaker event will be at the Olin Center from 3–4:30 p.m. on Monday and 5–5:45 p.m. on Tuesday.
APM is a human rights organization that works to identify and reunite those affected by Argentina’s military dictatorship with their biological families. The dictatorship occurred between 1976 and 1983 and resulted in the disappearance of an estimated 22,000 to 30,000 people, many of whose status is still unknown.
Even if one is unfamiliar with 20th century Argentine history, there are still plenty of takeaways from this speaker series.
“This talk is going to give … [a lesson about] the repression that took place in the 1970s,” Barbara Corbett, a lecturer in the history department, said.
The event was organized by senior Shai Tratt, who interned with APM while studying abroad in Argentina last year. His work largely involved expanding the biographical archives that the organization is building to reunite families.
“[APM] takes photos sent in by family members of the disappeared and saves them in their database,” he said. “The idea with these biographical familial archives is so that when the grandchild has their identity restored, even if none of their biological family members are still alive, they can still look at these photos and reconnect with their identity.”
Tratt said he “felt an obligation as an American to learn more and to be involved with the work that a witness does.”
APM was created during the dictatorship by mothers with disappeared daughters, concerned for their children and future grandchildren.
“Some of these mothers realized that several of their daughters had disappeared while pregnant. Were those babies born? Where were they? Some of these mothers soon realized that they may need to find their grandchildren and they would likely be alive,” Rombola wrote.
After learning she was affected by this military regime, Sintora, a grandchild of one of the mothers who was taken, wrote to the Daily that she “[feels] even more committed to recounting what happened and telling my story, one among many others.”
To understand why the Abuelas, or grandmothers, were so effective, Corbett explained the unique strategy of resistance known as ‘political motherhood.’
“This is a military dictatorship. You couldn’t speak out,” Corbett explained. “Yet [these women] were the most threatening things because they pointed out the absolute hypocrisy of the military regime by not allowing these women to fulfill their conservative roles as mothers.”
Since the military regime claimed to value the ‘traditional family’ and ‘Catholic motherhood,’ the women of the Plaza de Mayo used those exact roles as a shield.
While Sintora considered her childhood to be “very normal,” she did not understand that she was adopted until she became an adult.
“After the DNA test, [my mother] also confessed that when I was about 5 years old, between 1982 and 1983, and news reports about missing babies started, they assumed, with a fair degree of certainty, that I might be one of those babies,” Sintora wrote.
Corbett stressed the importance of Sintora sharing her story and educating broader communities.
“She’s a living testament, a witness … so for her to come and speak to my students, it puts them in immediate contact with this. This is a living history,” Corbett said. “To see it and hear about it from someone who has lived through it and was a victim of these events, [and] not just a victim, but then a triumphant resister and survivor of these events, I think it’s an inspirational tale.”
Tratt agreed with this, saying, “I really do think it’s important to have a grandchild come and speak and not have it be something on Zoom. … It’s a testament to the fact that the work that Abuelas does is very current and has a real impact on the lives of people who are breathing and around right now.”
However, Sintora shared her hesitations about speaking out, as it seemed a daunting task.
“In the beginning, I didn’t want to do it. My first response was a negative one … but the time went on, and it became to be a need for myself, and the moment I decided that I had to do it was when I was [a] mother,” she wrote.
Today, Sintora reflects on how finding her biological parents has changed her life.
“In fact my life is the same … but now is complete with the true story of my origins. And [nowadays] I can’t imagine my life without this: my brothers, my father, the history of my mother, my nephews, all this make me today a stronger and completed person,” Sintora wrote.
Tratt emphasized that APM’s work is far from over.
“[APM estimates] that there’s [currently] 500 grandchildren who [have] disappeared in this fashion, and they found roughly 130,” he said.
“The last grandchild was found in July 2025,” Rombola wrote.
Rombola strongly believes that “perseverance does pay off when love is the fuel. APM has been looking for their grandchildren and advancing the concept of the Right to Identity against many enemies for almost 50 years.”
“What happened in Argentina is not atypical, in fact it could happen in any country … and it is,” Rombola wrote.
For Sintora, this urgency is deeply personal. She highlights that “the only way to avoid [and] repeat horrors of the past, is knowing the history, especially knowing its consequences.”
“I hope that many people that are right [now] in the same situation I was 7 years ago … understand the importance of knowing the truth,” Sintora wrote.
