The secret police killed his parents. Then one of them adopted him

When Guillermo Gómez (above) was a boy, in the mid-1980s, he was lying in bed next to his mother at their home in Buenos Aires, when she asked him a strange question: “What would you do if one of these days, when I’m working, a woman comes along and tells you she’s your mother? Would you run away with her?” Guillermo didn’t understand. How could he have another mother? Tears welled in his eyes. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whimpered. “You’re my mother.”

Teodora, was a short, heavy-set woman with an explosive temper, but she’d always been devoted to her son, working long hours as a housemaid and cleaner to pay the bills. Guillermo thought of the two as an unbeatable team. “United against the world,” as he put it, but united especially against his father, Francisco.

A chain-smoker with a receding hairline, Francisco Gómez never went anywhere without his revolver. He worked as an intelligence officer in the Argentine Air Force, though Guillermo had no idea what his job entailed. When he wasn’t at work, Gómez was mercilessly cruel to his wife, berating her and subjecting her to frequent beatings, some so severe that she ended up in hospital. “There was one time he hit her with a shotgun, then said he’d shoot her in the head,” Guillermo said.

When Guillermo was about five, an increasingly terrified Teodora resolved to escape with her son. They clambered over the house’s fence and sought refuge with a neighbour, who reported Gómez to the police for domestic abuse. But after the air force intervened, according to Guillermo, the police chose not to press charges and the case file vanished. Gómez forced his wife and son back to the house, after which the beatings continued.

“We spent the next five years constantly running away from him,” Guillermo said. He and Teodora managed to escape on a number of further occasions, hiding out in neighbourhoods in and around Buenos Aires. At one point, they even moved to San Luis, a city 500 miles away. Each time, Gómez managed to find them, and drag them back to the family home.

Despite his father’s cruelty, Guillermo longed for his approval, desperately hanging on to any sign of affection or small act of kindness. During the rare moments when his parents weren’t fighting, Guillermo found joy in his father’s occasional visits to his school, when Gómez would bring a handful of sweets for him and his friends. On cold winter mornings, his father would sometimes warm the boy’s socks on the stove. Even so, the ceaseless cycle of running and living in fear eventually became unbearable. When Guillermo was eight, Teodora filed for divorce, and Gómez gradually faded from Guillermo’s life.

Guillermo was upset and confused by his father’s apparent lack of interest in him. “I could never fathom why parting ways with Teodora meant severing the bond between us,” he said. As a teenager he began to wonder whether Gómez was his real father. The two looked nothing alike. Guillermo’s skin was considerably lighter, and he was much taller. One day Guillermo confronted his mother: “Did you cheat on dad with another man?” Teodora was furious. “I believe she hurled something at me,” said Guillermo.

He stopped asking questions. Then, in 2000, when Guillermo was 21 and working at a fast-food outlet on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, he was approached by two women he didn’t recognise. One was carrying a baby. To his surprise, the other woman addressed him by his full name, asking him to spare a moment. Guillermo, a little uneasy, replied that he was busy, but the woman was undeterred. She wrote something on a piece of paper, tucked it into a book and handed it to him.

The book was called “Missing as Children, Found as Youths” and it was published by Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), an organisation dedicated to locating the children of Argentina’s “disappeared” (desaparecidos) – the people murdered by the military regime that ruled the country for seven years beginning in 1976. Inside the book was a message which read: “I’m Mariana Eva Pérez, the daughter of desaparecidos and I’m searching for my long-lost brother. I think you might be him.”

Guillermo looked up – the woman was still in the restaurant. He apologised for his initial suspicion, but said he couldn’t be her brother. He fumbled for his ID to prove his name and date of birth. Mariana smiled knowingly and gestured towards the book. Guillermo flicked through pages and pages of pictures of missing persons until he stumbled upon black-and-white photographs of a couple who bore an uncanny resemblance to him.

Like Guillermo, the man had thick eyebrows, a ski-jump nose, large ears and straight, dark hair. The caption revealed that the couple had been abducted by the Argentine Air Force in October 1978. A month later, the woman gave birth to a baby in a detention centre. November 1978: the month Guillermo was born.

In the weeks and months that followed, Guillermo would come to understand why Teodora had asked him about his second mum; that his sister had been robbed from him; that his life for the past two decades had been a lie. Soon there would come a revelation that was even more remarkable: Gómez, the father who had shown him so little love, had not only been an impostor. He was one of the men personally responsible for the deaths of Guillermo’s real parents.

When Guillermo first met Mariana, he knew little about the history of state terror under Argentina’s military junta from 1976 to 1983. During this period, an estimated 10,000-30,000 people were abducted and killed in a systematic campaign of violence and repression against suspected left-wing activists, their sympathisers and anyone else considered a threat to the regime. The families of the “disappeared” were never told outright what had happened, leaving them hopeful that their loved ones might still be alive. In reality, many were sent on “death flights” – loaded onto an aircraft, drugged, then thrown into the Atlantic or the Río de la Plata.

Those political prisoners who gave birth in detention often had their infants abducted by the regime – the Abuelas estimate this was the case for some 500 children, though only 137 have been identified to date. The babies were then distributed to families loyal to the regime, who raised them as their own and left the children ignorant of their origins. The abductions were seen by the junta as a kind of moral imperative. As Fabricio Laino, an Argentine historian of the dictatorship, told me, “They wanted to believe they were saving the babies from their subversive parents.”

By 1983, however, the government had grown weak. The country was plagued by hyperinflation and rising unemployment, and had been embarrassed by its recent defeat at the hands of Britain in the Falklands war. The rest of the world had isolated the regime, accusing it of violating human rights. In response to mounting tensions, the government agreed to allow free elections, leading to the presidency of Raúl Alfonsín and the beginning of a new, democratic era in Argentina.

For many years, the dictatorship’s darkest aspects remained absent from public discussion and education. Although Alfonsín took steps to punish the leaders of the junta, subsequent governments were more reluctant. Faced with military unrest and the desire to stabilise a young democracy, they often prioritised diplomacy over justice. In the 1990s Alfonsín’s successor, Carlos Menem, emphasised the need for “national reconciliation” and pardoned the junta’s commanders and their allies.

It wasn’t until the 2000s that prosecutors made serious efforts to prosecute those suspected of violating human rights. Schoolchildren were taught about the “disappeared” for the first time. Even so, certain elements on the Argentine right continue to deny some of the junta’s worst offences. Javier Milei, the “anarcho-capitalist” who was recently elected president, has dismissed the highest estimate of the number of people who were disappeared as an exaggeration.

The campaign to recognise the horrors of the past was kept alive by groups like the Abuelas – the advocacy organisation that published the book given to Guillermo. The Abuelas had been founded in 1977 by relatives of the missing, and over the years had embarked on a national effort to inform the public about the kidnapping and disappearance of children under the junta.

Only a few hours after meeting Mariana, Guillermo met her again at the Abuelas’ headquarters. The employees there told him that Mariana and his biological grandparents, Rosa Roisinblit and Argentina Rojo, had been searching for him for years. Recently they had received two anonymous tip-offs, naming Guillermo and his biological parents and alleging that Francisco Gómez, a civilian who worked for the air force, had a child of a disappeared medical student “in his possession”.

If Guillermo were willing to provide a DNA sample, the Abuelas said they could determine whether he matched with one of his presumptive grandmothers. There and then, Guillermo pricked his thumb, squeezed five drops of blood onto some blotting paper, and watched as the sample was packed up to be sent to a lab in America.

Not long before this extraordinary revelation, Gómez had begun to creep back into Guillermo’s life, regularly inviting him out to dinners. At one of these dinners a few weeks after meeting the Abuelas, Guillermo confronted Gómez. He told him about Mariana’s visit, and asked him point blank if he were really his biological father. “Gómez went pale,” Guillermo told me. Mariana must be confused, he said, or spreading rumours. She might have mistaken Guillermo for someone else.

Over the next few weeks, Gómez demanded to know more about Mariana and what exactly she had claimed. Guillermo asked him again: was he really his father? Of course, said Gómez, how could he keep asking such a terrible question? Then, on the way to another one of their dinners, Guillermo found his nerve. He pulled the car over and demanded to know the truth. At last, Gómez broke down and began to weep. It was true, he admitted. Guillermo was the son of left-wing militants. Mariana was his sister.

Soon, the results of the DNA test arrived, confirming the identity of Guillermo’s parents. Their names were Patricia Roisinblit and José Manuel Pérez Rojo.

Guillermo and Mariana quickly established a strong bond; they’d talk for hours in cafés and in parks, trying to conjure up the shared past that had been robbed from them. They compared their lives and ambitions, their likes and dislikes, desperate to find things in common. Did Mariana use glasses? Was Guillermo allergic to anything? Did they share any chronic pains? Like Guillermo, Mariana had always longed for a sibling, even writing poems to this imagined figure as a child. Sometimes the intensity of her desire scared Guillermo; he feared he’d never live up to her fantasy.

Guillermo also got to know his other relatives, including his grandmothers. Argentina, his father’s mother, was a sweet woman who couldn’t stop marvelling at the similarities between her son and grandson: “She was like the perfect granny from films,” Guillermo told me. Rosa, on his mother’s side, wasn’t as demonstrative with her emotions, “but it didn’t mean she loved me any less.”

They told him more about his parents. His mother, Patricia, had grown up in Boedo, a middle-class neighbourhood in Buenos Aires. She had a passion for painting, the films of Ingmar Bergman, Argentine rock music and the work of Mario Benedetti, an Uruguayan writer. While studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires, Patricia joined the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, a Marxist organisation, and the Montoneros, a leftist militant group notorious during the 1970s for bombings and political assassinations.

Patricia helped out at one of the group’s medical clinics, attending to injured fighters. It was there that she crossed paths with José Manuel Pérez Rojo, the leader of a Montoneros cell who also owned a bookshop and toy store. The pair fell in love. A Beatles enthusiast and skilled pianist, José came from a middle-class family with an abusive father. He found another family in the revolutionary cause. His cousin, Graciela Tobar, recalls once seeing a large bag filled with guns in the back seat of his car, and hearing recordings of José speaking at a Montoneros rally.

The couple tried to strike a balance between their political militancy and the demands of an everyday middle-class life. José looked after his shops while Patricia studied for a medical degree. In 1977, a year after the military coup, she gave birth to the couple’s first child, Mariana. Comrades and family members described José as “solid and sweet”, an involved father. “I always felt that José was more into his family than he was into being a revolutionary,” Tobar told me.

But their dreams of a stable, suburban lifestyle were short-lived. On October 6th 1978, intelligence officers from the Argentine Air Force abducted José from his toy shop. Shortly afterwards, Patricia, who was eight months pregnant, was seized from their third-floor apartment along with Mariana, who was just over a year old. The family was taken to the suburban home of Marcelo Moreyra, José’s 18-year-old nephew. Five agents, carrying Mariana in a wicker basket, banged on the front door. When Marcelo answered, he spotted José, forced over the bonnet of a truck by another officer; in the back seat of another car, he could see Patricia. The two of them desperately began pleading with Marcelo to take care of their daughter. Stunned, Marcelo realised that the baby in the basket was his cousin, and that the officers were in the process of kidnapping his aunt and uncle. He quickly agreed to take Mariana. The men handed her over, then sped off into the night with her parents.

According to what Guillermo’s family would learn from other abductees, José and Patricia were taken to a large but otherwise unremarkable white house on a quiet street in Buenos Aires. The building was home to the Regional de Inteligencia de Buenos Aires (RIBA), the regional headquarters for the air force’s intelligence arm. Patricia was handcuffed to a desk while José, in another room, was beaten and prodded with a picana, a long wooden wand that delivers a high-voltage shock. Patricia could hear his screams.

One of her captors was Gómez. He would later swear to Guillermo that the air-force intelligence officers did not harm Patricia while she was pregnant, and that he treated her well, secretly providing her with milk and the occasional hard-boiled egg. He sometimes took her for walks in the garden, he said – a special privilege.

When she was nine months pregnant, Patricia was transferred to a naval college with a grand neoclassical façade in central Buenos Aires. She was taken to a small attic room in a grubby building on the grounds, where she was chained to her bed and forced to eat stale bread and rotten meat. When Patricia went into labour, she was transferred to the infirmary in the basement, where she gave birth to a boy she named Rodolfo Fernando Pérez Roisinblit. A few days later, he was taken from her.

The child was rechristened and given a falsified birth certificate. His new name would be Guillermo Francisco Gómez and his parents were listed as Francisco Gómez and Teodora Jofré. An official who worked at the RIBA would later testify that Patricia had then been sent on a death flight. No one knows what happened to José.

Guillermo, who still lived with Teodora, was confused and overwhelmed by what his relatives told him. Memories from his childhood took on new meanings. Gómez had taken him several times to the RIBA, where he had played with an unloaded revolver. Now he knew those were the same rooms where his mother had been held captive. He lay awake at night imagining the moment that government agents, Gómez among them, wrested him from his biological mother. He thought, “The day I was born was the day I signed my mum’s death sentence.”

In 2001, as a result of the Abuelas’ investigation into Guillermo’s origins, Gómez and Teodora were charged with the crimes of unlawfully retaining and concealing a minor, as well as falsifying a public document. Guillermo would have been happy for the authorities to lock Gómez up and “throw the key into the sea”, he said, but his feelings about Teodora were more complicated. “I just couldn’t see her as the offender and me as the victim,” he told me. He would often lie awake at night, staring at a ring Teodora gave him that bore his adopted name.

Increasingly troubled, Guillermo grew resentful of his blood relatives’ efforts to find him in the first place. “What good is it to be the child of the disappeared?” he asked Mariana, who refused to speak to me for this article. “I am the child of two people I will never know. I have no grave to visit and leave flowers at, no date to mourn them. Why did you search for me?” In an interview with an Argentine newspaper, he was quoted as saying: “I want to continue being Guillermo Francisco Gómez. I want to continue being the son of my parents and not of two people I never met.”

Confined to house arrest before the trial, Teodora (who also did not want to be interviewed for this article) fell into a deep depression. She maintained that she had been unaware of Guillermo’s origins and just wanted to provide him with a loving and nurturing family. She claimed she thought that the adoption was legal, and that her husband and his superiors had managed everything. Guillermo believed her. Worried about her well-being, he scrambled to get her the antidepressants she needed. He became, in effect, “the prison guard to my own kidnapper”.

Guillermo also made regular trips to see Gómez, who was awaiting trial at an air-force base. The conditions were surprisingly sumptuous: he had a spacious room with a TV, fridge, phone and a large bed. His guards – former colleagues – brought him alcohol, and he was allowed to have barbecues, even host prostitutes. “He lived like a VIP prisoner,” said Guillermo. During their visits, Gómez was often drunk. “It’s your fault I’m in prison,” he told Guillermo. “It’s your fault that [Teodora] and I are no longer together.” During what would become their last meeting, Gómez snapped: he told Guillermo that when he got out of prison, he’d put a bullet in his head. He’d kill his grandmothers and sister, too. Why wait until he was released, asked Guillermo. Why not do it now? The prison guards intervened before things could escalate. “That day, I realised I should never have gone there in the first place,” he told me.

By late 2003, over two years after the arrest of the people he once thought were his parents, Guillermo’s relationship with Teodora had grown strained. “For two and half years I had put her needs in front of my own,” he said. Mariana, along with his partner of some years, Cintia, urged him finally to move on. He could begin, they suggested, by reclaiming his true name.

Ever since Guillermo had learned about his origins, he had been hesitant to make such a change – it would feel like a betrayal of Teodora. And yet, of course, he was the one who had been betrayed: “Guillermo Gómez” was a lie. On September 21st 2004 he officially became Guillermo Rodolfo Fernando Pérez Roisinblit, opting to retain his adoptive first name. “I preferred not to dwell on the past or constantly explain my story to people I knew,” he told me. “I also just didn’t like the name Rodolfo.”

A year later, Gómez and Teodora were found guilty. Gómez was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison, Teodora to three years and one month. Guillermo was free to embark on a new phase of his life. He secured a job at the Ministry of Social Development, working to improve housing conditions in Argentina’s poorest regions. Like other children kidnapped during the junta years, he also received compensation from the government for what had happened to him. (Guillermo refused to give me an exact number, but told me that he would pay it all back – “ten times the amount even” – to have lived a normal life.) That same year he married Cintia and bought a house. Soon after, Cintia gave birth to their first child. “When I hugged Ignacio,” said Guillermo, “I hugged him the way I’d have wanted my father to hug me.”

Then, in 2007, Gómez was released from prison. The news sent Guillermo into a panic. He and his family lived just a few miles from Gómez’s home. Fearing retribution, he changed his official address to Teodora’s house and put everything he could in his wife’s name. “Every time I ever tried to escape him, Gómez found me,” Guillermo said. “This time I didn’t want to be found.”

Guillermo’s fear lasted six long years, at which point Gómez was again detained by the police, this time for the illegal detention and imprisonment of Guillermo’s parents. Three years later, in 2016, Guillermo finally took the witness stand. In front of the courtroom, he opened up about the beatings and lies that had clouded his youth. He accused Gómez not only of stealing his biological father from him, “but of failing even to fulfil the role of the father figure he’d assumed.”

The only way Gómez could redeem himself, even partially, said Guillermo, was by disclosing the location where Patricia and José were buried. Guillermo begged him, tears streaming down his face: “I need to know where my parents are so that I can move on from this constant mourning.” But Gómez remained silent, staring at the floor to avoid Guillermo’s gaze. “There wasn’t even an apology,” Guillermo told me.

Gómez denied everything. He told the court he was a gardener and handyman in the air force, not the sophisticated intelligence agent the prosecution was making him out to be. He said he had no idea that Guillermo was the son of so-called dissidents, and that his boss had organised the adoption: “I thought the child had been abandoned,” he said. “He was a gift...and all I had to do was sign the birth certificate.”

The prosecution’s evidence, however, suggested otherwise. In his testimony, Guillermo related how Gómez confessed that he had been Patricia’s captor. Air-force records confirmed that Gómez had worked as a caretaker and cleaning supervisor at the RIBA between 1977 and 1994 but implied he had also taken on intelligence work. He received bonuses for “risky assignments” and, around the time Guillermo was adopted, was praised by a superior for the “broad collaboration he provided beyond his specific duties”.

In the end, Gómez was convicted and sentenced to 12 more years behind bars for his participation in the kidnapping and illegal imprisonment of Guillermo’s parents. Four years later, he died. “I’m not happy about any death,” Guillermo wrote on Twitter at the time. “Do I feel sadness? I don’t know yet. What I do feel is helplessness because he took with him the truth about what was done to my parents.”

In the summer of 2022 I visited Guillermo at his modest red-brick house on the corner of a sleepy, tree-lined street in suburban Buenos Aires. He invited me in for coffee and we sat at a long wooden table in the dim light of his living room. Guillermo, tall and solidly built, slumped in his chair.

He told me he cherished his life and the family he had built – in fact, he said, he wouldn’t alter a single aspect of it. If any detail of his past were different, he might never have met his wife, had his children. Attempting to reconcile his present with his past had been cathartic, he said. Changing his name didn’t mean the eradication of Guillermo Gómez, it just meant he’d had to reconstruct himself. “I am my story,” he told me, “but I’ve had to break myself down to build myself up on new foundations.”

Guillermo told me his relationship with his sister had deteriorated over the years – there had just been too much pressure to live up to the other’s expectations. But what bothered him the most was his feeling of suspended mourning. The many unanswered questions surrounding his parents’ death still weighed on him. How and when did they die? What were they like? “I had to create them in my head based on other people’s memories,” he told me.

As Guillermo looked down into the dregs of his coffee, I noticed two faded photographs of his biological parents perched on a nearby bookcase. Catching me staring, he confessed that he spoke to them sometimes, wishing them good morning and good night. He had expressed frustration to them when he and his wife were struggling to conceive their third child, and thanked them when it finally happened. He imagined how they might respond, as he often imagined how their love for him might feel. ■

Matthew Bremner is a freelance writer. He previously wrote for 1843 magazine about the perils of border crossings in Arizona.

PORTRAITS: ALEJANDRO KIRCHUK

Additional Images: Getty