The Grandmothers of the Placo de Mayo
Eventually, after the fall of the government, the Commission on the Disappearances of Persons found 9,000 documented cases of disappearances. Correcting for underreporting and the lack of documentation, it's estimated that about 15,000 persons were "disappeared." Well, as these cases began to build up, older women, grandmothers, typically, of young men and women in their 20s and 30s began to get together in the main square, the Placo de Mayo in Buenos Aires, and began to talk, as support groups for one another, looking for their lost children. They began to talk -- and they began to march -- and they began to protest.
And as they protested, people came to the square and shared with them stories and the stories said, we've heard of cases of children appearing in military families that were previously childless, and the wife wasn't pregnant.  They would occasionally have stories from people released from prison saying that their friend had been seen alive in prison and had given birth. Midwives and obstetricians were at times kidnapped and blindfolded from the streets of Buenos Aires, taken to military prisons, forced to help in the delivery of children, then blindfolded and put back on the streets. Sometimes during the delivery, a woman might say to such a midwife or obstetrician, "My name is so-and-so. Please tell my mother." And in once case that has been documented, the midwife did this favor, and she was later killed for it.
Phony birth certificates began showing up at the schools a few years later, and registrars quietly told the grandmothers at the Placo de Mayo - or told someone who told the grandmothers - and the grandmothers took notes. By 1983, when the Falklands war led to the fall of the military junta, the grandmothers contacted the AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and asked for help in identifying and proving that these were their children, and they demanded that genetics be used to do it. They got in touch with Mary Claire King, a professor at the University of California Berkeley - a true hero to me - a friend and colleague, whose work I am describing.
Mary Claire King worked with the grandmothers of the Placo de Mayo to begin "searching for two generations." She began to try to get court orders for some of the children taken into military families, to do some sort of genetic typing and show that, indeed, they belonged to these biological grandparents, rather than to the alleged adoptive parents.
Tracking Maternal Mitochondrial DNA
Originally, simple HLA typing was used, typing of cell surface markers, but this was not terribly powerful in these cases. DNA fingerprinting of the sort I described before was used, but for technical reasons I won't go into, was not as powerful. More powerful, unique sequences of DNA would be needed. And so Dr. King's group turned to looking at a particular bit of DNA called the mitochondrial DNA.
It exists in a little organelle - a little package outside the nucleus of the cell. It's a small bit of DNA, and what's important about it is that you get it from your mother. It's only passed on in the egg, not the sperm. And so mom passes it on to all her kids and every female passes it on to all of her kids. If I can read snippets of unique, variable sequence mitochondrial DNA, I can trace maternal lineage.
  
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