State Terror and the Destruction of Families for Reproductive “Management” in Three Argentine Films

Abstract

“Reproductive Justice,” as defined by Loretta J. Ross and Rickie Solinger (2017), includes the rights to have children and to be a parent. During the last Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983) and for a few years before, the military and its paramilitary allies decided that certain women and families should not remain together because they thought the children would become subversives like their parents. To prevent this, extra-judicial forces stole newborns and young children to “manage” the future of Argentina. The mothers were usually killed. The fictional films studied here represent visually three distinct groups of victims. The Official Story (Historia oficial, dir. Luis Puenzo, 1985) narrates the coming to consciousness of a mother who thinks she has adopted a child and later learns that her child likely had been “appropriated,” that is, removed from her biological family by force. Clandestine Childhood (Infancia clandestina, dir. Benjamín Ávila, 2011) portrays from an older child’s point-of-view the theft of his baby sister and disappearance of his parents. Third, Captive (Cautiva, dir. Gastón Biraben, 2003) represents an adolescent’s disorienting discovery that she had been taken from her biological parents to be given to allies of the regime. These widely available films share an empathy with the parents’ loss of a child and with children’s loss of biological parents, an emphasis on the importance of reproductive justice and parenting, and a resistance to the dictatorship’s narrative of silence and fear.