The Grandmothers Who Defied a Dictatorship to Find Their Grandchildren with Haley Cohen Gilliland

0:01This is an ad, but it is an ad to give you something. So not clear to me that's a real ad. Anyway, Madison and I have written a new book called Everybody Has Something to Hide. And we want to make you a special offer as a listener to our podcast. So if you are in the United States, I'm sorry, we can't offer this outside the United States. that's Amazon's rules, not ours. But if you're in the United States and you want a copy of the Kindle version of this book, actually, there is only a Kindle version. There is no paper version. If you send an email to

0:44everybodyhassomethingtohideatgmail.com we will send you a Kindle gift of the book. Yes, everybodyhassomethingtohideatgmail.com U.S. only. And if for some reason you cannot use the link, just forward it to somebody else in the U.S. who might want to use it. And if all else fails, the book is only 99 cents. And we guarantee you it is worth 99 cents. Thanks. I would come back to the idea that the grandmothers were this group of women that had just no traditional markers of power. They were powerless by all definitions, but they recognized that by working together and through relentless work, because they started this work in 1977, it is 2026, they are still at it, that they could help to topple one of the most brutal dictatorships in world history, and that they could outlast the evil ideology that was espoused during that period in order to achieve their mission, which in this case was finding and reuniting with their grandchildren.

2:00Good morning, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. Welcome to another episode of the Remarkable People podcast. We have a very remarkable person with a remarkable story that is in a remarkable book. It is something I'd never heard of, And I've been to Argentina and all this history that preceded my visit, I had no idea. So let me give you a quick introduction. Her name is Haley Cohen Gilliland, and she's a journalist. She's a nonfiction writer. She's director of the Yale Journalism Initiative. And I read her book. And Haley, I got to tell you, I wish I could write a book like that. Man, that is a magnificent piece of research.

2:43So congratulations. Her work blends. It's like investigative reporting. It's literary narrative centered usually on moral courage and the intersection of personal stories and history and geopolitical events. Her new book is called A Flower Traveled in My Blood, The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children. That's quite the subtitle, Haley. I mean, you really got it covered. So welcome to Remarkable People, Haley. Thank you so much for having me, Guy. I'm thrilled to be here and have really enjoyed listening to the show. Oh, I am completely serious.

3:25When I read a book like yours, I say, Guy, how come you can't write a book like that? That is such a magnificent collection of research. The first question I have for you is the metaphor of the flower in the title. So a flower can be taken many ways, most of them positive. So why did you pick the flower for the title? So if you open the book on the first couple of pages, the epigraph, so the poem at the front of the book, is a poem by an Argentine poet named Juan Helman. And Helman wrote this poem actually long before the events that are described in the book, long before the Argentine coup of 1976.

4:10but his words really seem to resonate with the topic that I wanted to explore. So the poem starts, a bird lived in me, well, it's in Spanish, but the English translation is a bird lived in me, a flower traveled in my blood. And so much of the story that we're about to talk about revolves around how this group of women who had no traditional markers of power, didn't have money, didn't have political influence, banded together and working as a collective, they were able to leverage the tools of the law and science in particular in order to find their grandchildren who had been stolen from them by the military during this coup period.

4:56And so the flower to me, it can actually take on several different meanings, but I think the most salient one, is a reference to how the grandmothers harnessed the power of genetics in order to find their stolen grandchildren, because they recognized that there was something innate in their grandchildren that traveled within them, even though they had been stolen and displaced to families that weren't meant to be theirs, and that they could use that inherent genetic material in order to identify and reunite with them. We will come to a discussion about DNA and markers because I found that very interesting.

5:34For one thing, the person who did that, Mary Claire King, in your book, her picture is in front of a Macintosh. So I said, oh, she's got to be a good person right there. She's in front of a Macintosh. So give us the gist of this story. Give us the overview so we understand what we're all going to talk about here. Yes. So my book, A Flower Traveled in My Blood, is about the abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, who are this incredible group of grandmothers who banded together during Argentina's 1976 to 1983 dictatorship at a time of just absolute carnage in Argentina, where the military was disappearing, Argentines left and right and in droves.

6:19The most commonly accepted estimate is that the military ended up disappearing 30 ,000 people during that time. And among those who were disappeared were 500 women who happened to be pregnant at that time or to have young children and babies at that time. And so essentially what the military would do, because they were trying to purge the country of anyone whose ideas they found subversive, and I put subversive in quotes for those who are listening and not watching, was they would round people up in unmarked cars, often wearing masks. The resonances are a little bit too eerie for comfort and take them to these clandestine detention centers where they were tortured for information and then quietly killed.

7:07And this is what happened with the pregnant women as well, with the caveat that the military waited for the women to give birth to their children first and then stole their children and in many cases placed them with military and police families to be raised under false identities, and then quietly killed those mothers who had just given birth. And so my book focuses on this phenomenon, but also it's more focused on the grandmothers who, at immense risk to themselves while all these horrific things were going on, banded together in order to find those stolen babies, their stolen grandchildren.

7:44Did the genesis of this book occur when you were working for The Economist when you were in Argentina? You get off the plane, you're working for The Economist, and next thing you know, you're writing about the dirty wards. How does that transition happen? The genesis was sort of diffuse. It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment because I moved to Argentina in 2011 on what was meant to be a one-year research fellowship. And that was the point at which I learned this story. I moved down with a basic working knowledge of what had happened during the dictatorship. I knew that tens of thousands of Argentines had been disappeared, but I actually hadn't heard of the abuelas.

8:25And I didn't know that among those stolen during this time were babies. And so I was immediately, as most people are, I think, upon learning this story for the first time, just flabbergasted that this had happened, that this had happened so recently, and that I hadn't heard about it. And so I immediately became really obsessed with researching the grandmothers and just spent an inordinate amount of time reading about them, watching documentaries about them, trying to learn as much as I could about them. But then, as you mentioned, I ended up getting a job with The Economist and two things happened.

9:02One was that I ended up living in Argentina for four years, which was amazing. It was the most fun period of my professional life. But the longer I lived in Argentina, the more I got lulled into this, what ended up being a very false sense that everybody in the world already knew this story because in Argentina, the abuelas are iconic. Everybody knows who they are. Most people know this history, although that's changing a little bit with the younger generations. And so I just got lulled into the sense that everybody already knew this story and I wouldn't be able to necessarily add value by telling it yet again.

9:41And so that was when the seeds of this project were planted, but it really wasn't until moving back to the States years later and actually becoming pregnant myself for the first time that their story really came flooding back to me in a very intense and visceral way. And so I started talking to friends about it, many of whom studied history as I did in college, and nobody knew that this had happened. And that was what reassured me that there was a real value in bringing this story to an audience that might not otherwise be familiar with it. So how many years did it take to write this book? It's 2026 now.

10:23It just came out. Yeah. So I would say I moved to Argentina in 2011. I lived there from 2011 to 2015. And that time definitely informed the research that went into this book. But I officially started working on this book in February of 2021. And so it took almost five years. It took about four and a half years of research and writing. And it was a very, very intense process, but also an incredibly gratifying one. How did you get the grandmothers to open up to you? You must have conducted a lot of interviews, right? I did. This book is a fusion of a lot of archival research. I can talk about some of the archives that I used and some of the other researchers who I'm so grateful to because they put their research out there for public consumption and original reporting.

11:13As much as I could, I spoke to every surviving grandmother and spent as much time with them as I could. I spoke to many of the grandchildren who had been recovered by the grandmothers. So it's a real fusion of historical research and then current reporting. I spent a huge amount of time with Dr. Mary Claire King, who we already mentioned. She was incredibly generous with her time. And the largest challenge with the grandmothers was that by the time I officially started this project in 2021, many had passed away. And those who continued to work with the abuelas were in their, I think the youngest woman was in her mid 80s, which I thought of as she was a total spring chicken, because comparatively, the main subject of my book, Rosa Roysenblatt was 102 when I started this project.

12:05And so that was a real challenge just in terms of spending lots of time with these women who at this point in their life were not always feeling their best every day. But I would say one thing that was so heartening throughout the entire process was that these interviews were difficult, as you can imagine, because I was asking these women who were in their 90s and, in Rosa's case, 100s, to relive the most traumatic, difficult moments of their life. And I felt quite guilty about that. I'm not always able to put on an unemotional reporter's hat. And And so I felt quite guilty about it and would sometimes apologize to these women for making them relive these moments.

12:51And without exception, all of the women said, no, thank you for telling this story because we want it to be known as widely as possible. And it's not known as widely as it should be outside of Argentina. And it's possible that there are lots of grandchildren who at this point are outside of Argentina. Argentina as a country has gone through lots of periods of intense economic and political turmoil. And so there have been these periods of intense migration out of Argentina, especially when it comes to young people. And the grandmothers have found at least one grandchild in the United States. And so they were very heartened by the prospect of spreading the story even further outside of the bounds of Argentina.

13:48you're listening to remarkable people with guy kawasaki people listening to this they may be wondering why is it the grandparent generation why is the grandmothers and correct me if i'm wrong but basically it's because all the parents were killed you couldn't go talk to the parents You had to go one generation backwards, right? Exactly. Yes. So in this case, the mothers and fathers of these babies who were stolen were in almost all cases disappeared. And so it was the grandmothers who were left with this incredibly challenging and dangerous mission to find them. And another point that I find interesting, you didn't ask this question, but I'm just going to bring it up, is why it was grandmothers and where were the grandfathers?

14:35The grandmother's movement was really dominated by women. And there are a couple of explanations for why that is, some of which I find more compelling than others. The practical explanation is just that Argentina in the 1970s and 80s was a traditional patriarchal society. And so for the most part, the men had to continue to work to support their families and to pay bills. And so that meant that the grandmothers who had largely left their careers in order to raise their families were the ones who were left with just time in order to do this really intensive investigation. But the more compelling reason, I think, is that the grandmothers recognized that as women of a certain age, at the point when their grandchildren were taken, they were mostly in their 50s and 60s, they were going to be underestimated and overlooked by the military, and they could use that to their great advantage.

15:33And over the course of the book, I really try to describe how the grandmothers leaned into this cultural camouflage of sorts. So for instance, they would have these surreptitious meetings at cafes at the beginning of their movement before they had a headquarters, and they would bring knitting needles to place next to their coffee cups to just play up the idea that they were harmless little grannies. or in one case, they had to smuggle sensitive documents back from Brazil. And the way that they did that was to buy a box of chocolates, eat all the chocolates from the chocolate truffles, and then crumple up their notes and put them in wrappers so that when they went through the airport checkpoint and a military officer was revising the contents of their bags, they just looked like little old grannies who were bringing chocolates home to their grandkids, and they were quickly waved through.

16:24So they really leaned into the fact that they were underestimated and overlooked as an advantage. Can you tell me like psychologically or philosophically, do they look upon themselves as heroes, as do-gooders, or they're just grandparents who are concerned about their grandchildren? What's their mindset here? Yeah, I hesitate to put words in their mouth without being able to pose that exact question to them. But I think from just talking to many of the Abuelas and from reading so many of their interviews that they'd done before I was able to talk to them, they would argue that they had no other choice.

17:07This was not a decision they made. It was a compulsion to find out the truth of what had happened to their children, to fight for that truth to be made public, and then to find their stolen grandchildren. And that's a little bit of another way in which the flower metaphor, I think, comes up for me, because the grandmothers talked about just this sense of primal maternal and grandmaternal love that compelled them through immense fear and immense danger. because it wasn't that they were fearless. They have talked often about how scared they were. There was a kind of sister movement, the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

17:53And very early on in that movement, three of those women were disappeared. One in broad daylight from in front of her apartment or close by and two from a church. They were dragged from a church and taken away. And so the grandmothers were intimately aware of how dangerous their work was, but they felt as though they were powered by a greater force than fear. And that was the primal desire to find and reconnect with their stolen grandchildren. So based on the research that you did, do you think that heroes like them, and I do consider them heroes, do you think they are born or they're made? That's such a good question.

18:34I think they're both. I think that the circumstances, in Argentina forced these women, once again, filled them with this primal desire in order to find their grandchildren and allowed these heroic impulses to come to the surface. But there were plenty of people who didn't have that same impulse and went through the dictatorship, restraining themselves from doing any sort of investigation out of fear. So I think the grandmothers who did end up working together probably did have something innate that was in within each of them and the circumstances unlocked that but it's such a tough question it's a very good question so what happens to the grandchildren so the grandchildren probably thought that the parents were their parents but they really weren't their parents And now with testing and stuff, you discover I was stolen and I was given to whatever.

19:39So now, I mean, talk about shaking your roots and destroying your world. So what was the reaction of kids as they found out that their heritage is not quite what they were brought up with? It was extremely difficult. So the book traces the path of the first restitutions. So when the grandmothers first recovered their grandchildren starting in 1979, and it goes up until the present day. So this is a continuous mission. The abuelas are still doing this work, and they are now supported by many of the grandchildren that they have found in doing this work. But about 140 grandchildren of an estimated 500 have been found.

20:24So there's a lot more work to do. And this is an ongoing mission, and I just want to say that. I think when the grandmothers began this mission in the mid-1970s, mid to late 1970s, they imagined that finding their grandchildren was going to be the most formidable challenge that they faced. And very early on, they were confronted with the reality that actually what came after that was often quite complicated. So when they were finding grandchildren who were still minors, who were under 18, often they had to be involved in very intense and vitriolic custody battles over reclaiming those grandchildren.

21:07because many of the grandchildren, though not all, ended up in the hands of military and police officers who were not only aware of what had happened during the dictatorship, but sometimes were complicit. And these families often fought really hard to hold on to these babies and children that they had stolen. And so the grandmothers got embroiled in these incredibly fierce custody battles when the grandchildren were still minors. Then when the grandchildren became legal adults, the challenge became different. And that was that, as you mentioned, many of these grandchildren grew up with a completely false idea of who their family was and what their identity was that was based on a foundation of abject lies.

21:56And when they were confronted with the truth, it was incredibly hard to process. I mean, imagine being in the position of being raised by a set of parents with siblings. And sometimes their childhoods were not unhappy. Some of these children grew up in fairly idyllic situations and they were treated well by these appropriative parents and didn't have an unhappy existence. And then to be told when you're 18 or 19 or 20, actually your parents aren't your parents. Maybe your siblings aren't your siblings and the people that you thought were your parents might have been involved in the murder and disappearance of your actual parents.

22:40That's incredibly hard to wrap one's head around. And so when the grandchildren became adults, the grandmothers dealt with a lot of having to walk the grandchildren that they found through these incredibly complex psychological dynamics of finding out that their identities were a lie. And so that was really, really challenging. I have to ask you this question. A journalist encounters something like this. There's this theory about journalistic neutralism, and you got to present both sides. But when you encounter something like this, is that like that idealistic desire to show both sides? It's just total bullshit.

23:23There is no both sides, right? There's only one-sidedness. So how do you handle this as a journalist? It's a great question. I thought about this a lot. I think for me, both sides is not the same thing as neutral, because I think neutral means doing the most rigorous research that you possibly can, and then relating for readers where that evidence led you. And that often will not be an equal balance between two sides. And so the way that I thought about this was I just tried to do the most rigorous investigation that I possibly could. I tried to document where everything came from in the book.

24:09So one of the parts of the book that I'm actually proudest of, I don't know if you got to them, but is the end note section, which is almost 80 pages long and a real bear to organize. But I think for me, it just meant trying to get as close to, especially when I was researching historical events that I was not party to personally. I was not there. I was not born in the 1970s. It just meant doing an inordinate amount of research to try to get as close to what actually happened as possible and then to relate that. So that's what it means in practice for me. As a West Coast liberal, I live in a bubble, obviously.

24:49And when I read a story like this, I say, how can this happen? But then if you really think about it, in America, there were Native American boarding schools. In Australia, there was a whole lost generation. In Canada, there was a whole stolen generation. We're talking Australia, a Canada and U.S. So now obviously it's different because the parents weren't disappeared necessarily in all these countries, but surely there's parallels. Can you wrap your mind around the parallels of what people are capable of doing? Yeah, I mean, those are a couple of examples. I think in the modern day, we could talk about Ukraine and Russia.

25:28And this also historically happened in Germany during World War II, in Chile during the same dictatorship period, In those cases, the parents weren't always killed or disappeared, as you mentioned, but it is not a phenomenon that is confined to Argentina by any means. And I think it speaks to the depths that humans can sink to when they dehumanize the other. So to put it in the context of the case of Argentina, the military took power with a very broad and sinister plan, which was to essentially purge the country of anyone with these ideas that it deemed subversive. And included in that definition was not just left-wing revolutionaries who had risen up in resistance to the military, but also journalists, artists, poets, nuns who ministered to the poor, priests who ministered to the poor, lawyers who represented the disappeared.

26:32And I think the military began to think of those people as subhuman. And when that happens, I think humans are capable of really, truly awful things. I was struck by some parallels, but maybe I'm cherry picking things. People are abducted by these mysterious military police forces with masks. And it is not exactly search warrants and all this kind of stuff. And in the middle of this, there's this big divergence, this big distraction called the World Cup. Hmm. What country is having a World Cup next year? Am I grasping at straws? Do you have some concerns? I mean, you know, would you tell someone who is Hispanic and maybe here on a work visa who's pregnant, you better get your DNA tested because you just never know.

27:22Am I being paranoid? or? I'm always wary to draw direct parallels between things that happened in history, especially in different places to the current. And I think to remind you in Argentina, we were talking about a regime that their preferred manner of disappearing people was to sedate them, strip them naked, and then throw them out of planes over rivers and oceans. And thankfully, we're not seeing anything approximating that today, but the parallels are impossible to ignore and incredibly eerie. You mentioned the masked officers in unmarked cars, just the general erosion of due process. I think the alarming rise of political violence, you know, that we've seen all of these are very, very frightening echoes of things that happened in Argentina in the 1970s.

28:19So yes, I definitely think that it is valid to be extremely concerned. Do I know that we are going exactly where Argentina went back then? No, in part just because as a journalist, I tend to look at the past and the current and not really try to make predictions about the future. But yeah, I think the parallels are incredibly salient and scary. So let me put you on the spot again. Okay. Let's pretend that I am the organizer of TEDx Minneapolis. And I hear this podcast, I buy your book, I read your book. I said, she would be great for TEDx Minneapolis. So now you are invited to TEDx Minneapolis, you accept the speaking engagement.

29:09You have 18 minutes at TEDx Minneapolis. What would you tell them based on this book and your experience? I think I would come back to the idea that the grandmothers were this group of women that had just no traditional markers of power. They were powerless by all definitions, but they recognized that by working together and through relentless work, because they started this work in 1977, it is 2026, they are still at it, that they could help to topple one of the most brutal dictatorships in world history, and that they could outlast the evil ideology that was espoused during that period in order to achieve their mission, which in this case was finding and reuniting with their grandchildren.

30:10So I think I would just talk about the power of collective action. And I think the hopeful note that I would be able to add specifically around Minneapolis, And I'm stealing this actually from a bookseller in Minneapolis who read the book and then spoke to a publication called Lit Hub about the book. She was speaking about how resonant it felt to read this book about Argentina in Minneapolis in 2026, but that one of the things that was really heartening to her was that people in Minneapolis seemed to be running towards the danger, which was true of the grandmothers in Argentina, but it was not true of the grand majority of the rest of civil society.

30:56The terror was so all-encompassing and engulfed the country to such an extent that there were many people who either willfully or accidentally just ignored what was going on during that time because the consequences of putting themselves in the crosshairs of the military were too great. So this bookseller in Minneapolis just mentioned that it had been very heartening and encouraging for her to see Minneapolis residents continue to run toward danger while working together and in resisting what's happening. If anybody listening is from Minneapolis, and if you know whoever is the organizer of TEDx Minneapolis, man, there is not a better guess for TEDx Minneapolis 2026 than Haley, my goodness.