Digging Into
Argentina’s
Dirty War
A family works together
to tell the story of so many
families torn apart
PHOTOS COURTESY SEARCHFORIDENTITYDOCUMENTARY.COM
Buenos Aires City Councilman Juan
Cabandié was well into his 20s when he learned
that the people who raised him were not his real
parents, who had been among the estimated
30,000 people who disappeared during Argentina’s
so-called Dirty War.
Bethany Parker ’10,
Cabandié’s father was abducted on Nov. 23,
1977. His mother, five months pregnant, was
kidnapped later the same day and taken to the
Navy Mechanics School, a detention center
known by its Spanish acronym, La ESMA. It had
a “maternity ward” for the women who were
pregnant when they were abducted by Argentina’s
military regime. Cabandié was born there in
March 1978. He spent 20 days with his mother
before he was taken away.
above, and Brynne
Tuggle ’06, right, were
inspired to produce a
documentary about the
children of the disappeared in Argentina
after a trip to the country with their father,
Charlie Tuggle, left, a
professor of broadcast
journalism at UNC.
Cabandié is one of an estimated 500 children
given up for adoption after their mothers were
abducted during seven years of state-sponsored
violence in Argentina in the late 1970s and early
’80s. Cabandié also is one of 104 “children” who
have been found and whose story is the central
theme of a UNC documentary about the 35-
year crusade of Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo,
or the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Las
Abuelas banded together in September 1977 to
find their missing grandchildren, most born
between 1975 and 1980.
Cabandié — now 33 — was 26 when he
learned his true identity.
“There are no traces of my mom,” he says in
the documentary, “the same as every pregnant
woman and most of the people who went
through that detention center. … I was raised
with a family involved with state terrorism, a
family where the man said to be my father, my
fake father, was a member of the intelligence
service of the Federal Police.”
Cabandié’s story was the impetus for the
UNC documentary, which has been two years
in the making. Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo and
the Search for Identity came about after Brynne
Tuggle ’06 and Bethany Parker ’10 and their
“It’s opened my eyes to see that there is so
much we take for granted and don’t even think
about,” Parker said. “Knowing my identity; it’s
part of who I am. I’ve been raised knowing my
identity. I’d never thought of it as a human
right, because I’ve never not had it.”
father, UNC journalism professor Charlie
Tuggle, and mother, Tracey Tuggle, took a trip
to Argentina in the summer of 2009. Parker was
a rising senior broadcast student in the School
of Journalism and Mass Communication, which
Brynne Tuggle also attended. Her father, who
runs the student-produced newscast Carolina
Week, suggested she follow up on an award-winning series of stories about Las Abuelas two
of his students produced in 2002.
Brynne Tuggle said they didn’t know exactly
what they were getting into when they embarked
on the documentary. But, she said, they feel so
strongly about it and its central theme — the
right to identity — that “I can honestly say we
have never wavered in our belief that we want
to be a part of telling this story.”
Parker ended up with an award-winning
series of her own, one that featured Cabandié,
Las Abuelas President Estela B. de Carlotto and
Carina Cortese ’09, a drama and philosophy
major of Argentine descent who was doing her
honors thesis on the Dirty War.
Cortese’s thesis was a one-woman play,
After-Images of the Disappeared, which won the
2009 award for Best Undergraduate
The documentary has evolved into a collaboration involving a core group of six people, an
extended family of 20 and an estimated tally of
$30,000, including donations from three UNC
entities — the journalism school, the University
Research Council and the Institute for the
Americas. They’ve produced a 23-minute rough
cut to seek donors and potential distributors for
an eventual hour-long documentary.
Presentation in the Humanities and became a
driving force behind the Tuggle family’s decision to make the documentary.
Cabandié “was the beginning of realizing what
we had with this story,” Brynne Tuggle said, and
Cortese “finalized that realization in our minds.”
“I felt like this was something we were supposed to do as a family, and then it grew into a
little bigger family,” Charlie Tuggle said. “It’s
very much a UNC project, a journalism school
project, a Tuggle family project.”
Producing the documentary has left one
indelible impression after another with each of
the Tuggles.
In the past two years, the documentary team
has interviewed 40 people, including five of the
found grandchildren, several of their real family
members and three former U.S. State
Department officials. One of those, Hodding
Carter III, a professor of leadership and public
policy at UNC, was spokesman for the U.S.
