Children of the disappeared (LATAM dictatorships)

The children of the disappeared —direct descendants of victims disappeared during Latin American military dictatorships (Argentina 1976-1983, Chile 1973-1990, Uruguay 1973-1985, Brazil 1964-1985, El Salvador, Guatemala, Peru with Sendero Luminoso, Colombia with paramilitary violence)— constitute a specific category documented in clinical literature on political transgenerational trauma.

Specificity of trauma: forced disappearance produces an impossible grief —neither confirmed death nor real hope—. Children grow up without the person and without the body, without a death certificate, without a place for mourning, with the aggressor (the State) unpunished. Classical Psychogenealogy speaks of 'impossible griefs' as leaving deeper imprints than clearly named deaths.

Documented patterns (Argentine literature is especially extensive due to the work of Pilar Calveiro, organizations like H.I.J.O.S., Madres and Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo): fractured identity (especially in appropriated children, raised with false identities by families of repressors), chronic anniversary depression on dates of disappearance, compulsive search for information, difficulty with authority figures, attraction to human rights issues as a vocation, intense political activism or the opposite pole (defensive depoliticization).

Identity recovery: the Argentine case has the particularity of the restituted children —children appropriated at birth by military personnel and restituted to their biological families in adulthood after genetic testing, thanks to the work of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo—. The transition from a false identity to the true one is one of the most complex clinical processes documented in contemporary psychology.

Importance for Constelando: Daniela and Constellation facilitators in Spanish-speaking countries frequently accompany direct descendants or grandchildren of dictatorship victims. Recognizing the specificity of political trauma in the family tree —not reducing it to 'generic family trauma'— is ethically and clinically important.