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ARGENTINA: Children of Exile – Strangers Still

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, Sep 4 2008 (IPS) - While perpetrators of human rights violations during Argentina’s 1976-1983 military dictatorship have begun to be sent to prison, a new study has shed light on a less conspicuous aspect of the regime’s legacy: the problems faced by the children of former exiles who are struggling to integrate into Argentine society.

“To be a child of parents who decided to escape from state terrorism is in itself already a heavy burden, but to be a child of returnees is even harder – especially for one not born in this country – because he or she had no choice in the matter,” says the study.

“El retorno de los hijos del exilio” (roughly, The Return of the Children of Exile), published in book form in Buenos Aires in August, investigates a subject that has been neglected in studies of migration and social impacts during the dictatorship.

“Little enough was known about the conditions experienced by exiles who returned, but there was absolutely nothing known about their immediate family,” sociologist Roberto Aruj, one of the book’s authors, told IPS.

Aruj attributes this gap of knowledge to the social and political context. “Argentine society has a debt to the processes” of exile and return, he said. In his view, “a great deal about that period is kept hidden,” there are few memories of what went on, and there is “discrimination” against those who were persecuted during the 1970s and returned after the fall of the military regime.

At present there are several trials under way of those responsible for crimes committed during the dictatorship, and nearly every month new convictions and sentences are announced in connection with cases of torture, murders and especially forced disappearances. There are over 10,000 documented cases of people who were “disappeared,” although human rights organisations put the number at about 30,000.


“One of the consequences of the crimes for which members of the military are being tried today was the exile of people, with all that it implied for their children, who had to leave or return without ever having any part in the decisions,” the author said.

With co-author Estela González, Aruj conducted some 40 interviews with the children of exiles who now live in Argentina. “Some of the children are still afraid that what happened to their parents might also happen to them, and many of them refused to take part in the study,” the sociologist said.

Only 18 percent of the interviewees said it was their “own decision” to return to Argentina. The young people said they suffer from a sense of rootlessness and failure to adapt, and many said they hide the true reasons for their migration abroad. The respondents were all under 37.

“These young people, who are trying to integrate into a society that is not actually their own but that they have inherited, feel the defeat that weighs upon their families has influenced and marked them with characteristics that they must hide in order to avoid going into explanations about their private lives,” the book says.

“Many children of returned exiles say they have not been discriminated against,” the book says. However, “the majority, according to the interviews, say that whenever they are asked, they tell people that they were raised abroad because their parents went there to study,” it says.

The authors remark that there were no “concrete, effective programmes” to help families settle in when they returned from exile. Bureaucratic procedures to validate educational qualifications earned in a foreign country or to obtain documents took a long time, and there were no employment or housing provisions to help these people, who had left everything from one day to the next when they fled the country.

The book contains no new statistics about the number of people who were forced to go into exile, but it quotes several sources that estimate that nearly half a million people left Argentina for other Latin American countries, the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, especially Spain, between 1970, when the state began using repressive measures on a mass scale, and 1985.

In contrast, there are no figures for the number of people who returned after the dictatorship.

“The children of returned Argentine exiles are a new immigrant community,” says the book. They are not immigrants in the usual sense, nor are they returnees. As a group, they share a common history of migration, and a place that is paradoxically familiar and hostile at the same time, it says.

Many exiles took their small children with them, and other children were born while their parents were in exile abroad. When the parents decided to return to Argentina after the reinstatement of democracy, their children were already mostly teenagers or young people, and they were generally unable to wield any influence over their parents’ decisions.

Among the consequences of going into exile and returning to Argentina, the authors highlight the break-up of families. The interviews indicated that the parents of 77 percent of the children of the exile have separated or divorced. Half the couples split up during their exile, and half after their return.

Another finding was that sometimes the entire family unit did not return. Some families tried to do so, but then one member would go back to the host country where they had lived.

In 31 percent of the cases studied, the father of the family remained in the country of exile, or returned there after living a while in Argentina. In eight percent of the cases this was true of the mother, and in three percent, one of the children.

“Going ‘home’ was just another forced migration for many children of exile,” said Aruj, a professor at the state University of Buenos Aires. They were born or raised abroad, and after adapting to their own uprooting or that of their parents, they had to drop everything and return to Argentina on someone else’s say-so.

The writers of the study explain that in Argentina, legal nationality is based on “jus soli” (the right of citizenship derived from being born on the country’s soil). However, in several of the European countries where exiles settled, it is based on “jus sanguinis” (derived from the bloodline, or parentage).

Thus there were children in exile who “were left stateless,” the authors say.

Sweden granted Swedish nationality to the children of Argentine exiles who were born there, but this was an exception to its own laws.

In the interviews, 17 percent of the children of former exiles said they had “no nationality.” Thirteen percent said they had “dual nationality,” Argentine and that of the host country they had lived in. Five percent said they were nationals of their country of exile, and three percent defined themselves as “Latin American.”

 
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