This piece recounts one of the most brutal operations of the dictatorship: the 1976 attack on the “House of Rabbits” in La Plata, a Montoneros safe house that doubled as the printing site for the underground newspaper Evita. The military launched a full assault—ground forces, bombing, the works—killing Diana Teruggi and several militants while her three-month-old daughter, Clara Anahí, was secretly hidden in a bathtub. Soldiers found the baby and handed her over to police. She was never seen again.
Diana’s mother-in-law, Chicha Mariani, immediately began searching for her granddaughter, only to be met with silence, fear, and doors closing everywhere. Her search eventually led her to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the women who marched each week demanding answers for their disappeared children. Out of that space, Mariani and others formed the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, the group dedicated specifically to locating the hundreds of babies taken by the regime. This story sits at the center of how Argentine society began to confront the dictatorship’s kidnapping and identity-theft system—through persistence, memory, and the refusal to stop looking.
MATIAS JOFRE 