Mennonite Weekly Review

Ever since I read Anna Karenina, I’ve wondered about Tolstoy’s assertion: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Kathleen Kern, of Rochester, N.Y., serves with Christian Peacemaker Teams.

Most happy families I know have idiosyncrasies that separate them from other happy families. Among unhappy families, I see common patterns of pain woven from mental illness, poor parental role models, selfishness or an unwillingness to listen and empathize.

In my work with Christian Peacemaker Teams, I have seen how political oppression experienced by everyone in a region can cause dysfunction in families. Under other circumstances, these families would flourish. The oppression exacerbates all their worst flaws.

I thought of this role that politics plays in family dynamics last month when an Argentinean court sentenced Osvaldo Rivas, 65, and María Cristina Gómez Pinto, 60, the adoptive parents of Maria Eugenia Sampallo, to eight and seven years in prison, respectively, for kidnapping. Enrique Berthier — a former army captain who gave the infant Sampallo to the couple — received 10 years.

Sampallo had brought charges against her adoptive parents after discovering in 2001 that her birth parents had been among the 30,000 people who “disappeared” in the 1970s and 1980s because of their opposition to the military junta running Argentina, or simply because they were related to the opponents.

The military removed as many as 500 babies from their imprisoned mothers and handed them over to childless couples friendly to the regime. In some cases, the babies’ adoptive fathers may have been the same men who tortured and killed their parents.

An organization of mothers of “the disappeared” began monitoring supporters of the regime who appeared with babies when the women had not been pregnant.

With advances in DNA testing, these grandmothers have been able to connect 88 children with their birth parents — presumably murdered, because their families never heard from them again after the army took them away.

Sampallo held a news conference before the court handed down its verdict in which she held up black-and-white photographs of Rivas and Gomez Pinto, declaring, “These are not my parents; they are my kidnappers.” Then she held up a photo of her biological father and mother: “These are my parents.”

As I suspected, when I read more about Sampallo’s upbringing, I learned that it had been stormy. Her mother would tell her, “If it wasn’t for me, you would have ended up in a ditch,” or “Only a child of a guerrilla could be so rebellious.” Other adoptees with happier upbringings did not want to testify against their parents, preferring to believe their parents had not known where they had come from, or because they wished to spare their parents punishment.

Still, I wonder about these happier families, with parents who believed it was acceptable for fellow citizens to be tortured and killed because of their political opinions. They believed it was acceptable for babies to be taken away from their pregnant mothers, who then “disappeared.” How could that not bleed into and taint their family lives?