Rosa Roisinblit, a founding member and honorary president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo who spent decades searching for children stolen under Argentina’s military dictatorship, has died at the age of 106, the organisation said.
The campaign group praised Roisinblit’s dedication and the “love with which she searched for the grandsons and granddaughters until the very end,” in a statement released after her death. Roisinblit had been a visible figure in the movement that sought to find and identify children taken from detained opponents during the 1976-83 “Dirty War.”
Born in 1919 in Moisés Ville, a settlement of Jewish immigrants in central Argentina, Roisinblit trained and worked as an obstetrician. She moved to Buenos Aires in 1949 and married in 1951. After the 1976 military coup, the junta launched a campaign to eliminate political opposition; tens of thousands were killed or forcibly disappeared and many children of detained activists were taken and put up for adoption.
Roisinblit’s own family was directly affected. Her daughter Patricia, son-in-law José Pérez Rojo and 15-month-old granddaughter Mariana were kidnapped in 1978. Patricia and José, who were left-wing activists, were detained at the Navy mechanics school known as ESMA, the largest clandestine detention and torture centre in Buenos Aires. Patricia was kept alive long enough to give birth in a basement; the couple’s bodies were never found. Mariana was later returned to Roisinblit, who raised her, while Patricia’s newborn son was given to an air-force intelligence officer and raised by adoptive parents.
Roisinblit joined the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo after her family’s abduction, serving as treasurer for six years and later as vice-president from 1989 until 2022. The group worked to identify children taken during the dictatorship and to bring perpetrators to justice; it has used genealogical research and DNA testing to reunite families. An estimated 500 babies were taken during the junta’s rule; the Grandmothers and allied organisations have helped reunite roughly 140 children with their biological families, while hundreds remain missing.
Her grandson, identified in 2000 after DNA testing, had been given the name Guillermo Francisco Gómez by his adoptive parents, Francisco Gómez and Teodora Jofre. He was reunited with Roisinblit and his sister Mariana following the tests. In 2016, a court sentenced Francisco Gómez to life imprisonment over the abduction, and Teodora Jofre received a three-year sentence. That same year, military figures including former air force head Omar Graffigna and intelligence officer Luis Trillo were sentenced to 25 years for the abduction and torture of Patricia and José; both were among hundreds of soldiers and commanders later prosecuted for human rights abuses.
Roisinblit attended trials and public hearings into the crimes of the dictatorship well into her 90s. At 96 she was present in a courtroom for one of the convictions related to her family’s case. In 2017 she told the AFP news agency, “This wound never heals... But to say I'm stopping? No, I'll never stop.”
Her grandson, who works as a human rights lawyer and with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, posted on the social platform X that his grandmother had died and said he took comfort in the thought that she was “reunited with my mom and with her great love, my grandfather Benjamín.” Roisinblit is also survived by her daughter Mariana Eva Pérez, a writer, playwright and academic.
Argentina’s reckoning with the legacy of the dictatorship has included long-running investigations, trials and a sustained effort by relatives’ groups to secure truth and justice. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo have been central to those efforts since their founding, and Roisinblit’s work with the organisation made her one of the movement’s most enduring figures.
In its statement, the group expressed gratitude for Roisinblit’s decades of work. Her death marks the passing of one of the last of the generation of relatives who first took to the streets in search of answers about the fate of their missing loved ones during one of Argentina’s darkest periods.