Cuando la apropiación fue adopción. Sentidos, prácticas y reclamos en torno al robo de niños

Abstract

The children’s appropriation perpetrated by the last military dictatorship has been an exceptional event and, as such has been reported and characterized. Nevertheless, this kind of characterization can lead to be construed as a not problematized reading of these facts, isolating them from the relationships’ context where they were carried out. As from the analysis of two cases of disappeared children which were given in adoption, it is our object in this article to get in depth into a reading’s key which allows to deal with the connection of these facts with bureaucratic routines, practices and procedures of the judicial system which, we understand, may be conceptualized as conditions of a possibility for the development of those criminal practices. Illegal practices which have combined both clandestine as well as pseudo-legal forms and which were plotted on a network of previously existing social relationships and senses as regards the abandonment of children and their adoption.