In 1986 Dr. Rita Arditti, an Argentinean college professor living in the United States, learned about the work of the Association of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina while reading Botín de Guerra by Julio E. Nosiglia. Shortly thereafter she met Grandmothers Chicha Mariani and Nelida Navajas while they were giving talks in Boston. Deeply moved by the Grandmothers’ search for disappeared grandchildren who were abducted or born in captivity during the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina between 1976 and 1983, she set about learning about them with great empathy and passion. She read whatever she could find and regularly visited their office in Buenos Aires.
In 1993, with the wholehearted support of the Grandmothers, she decided to write a book about them in English since the vast majority of information about them was available only in Spanish. The book, Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina (1999) was published in both English and Spanish.
Most of the interviews were conducted in the 1990s and were incorporated into the book.
All interviews are in Spanish, and Spanish-language transcriptions. English translations of this interviews are not yet available.
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