Mirta Barragán was six months pregnant when Argentina's military regime imprisoned her and her husband, Leonardo Sampallo, in December 1977 as left-leaning dissidents. They were never seen again, but the regime sent their daughter to be brought up with another family which hid her real identity and her parents' demise.

Now 30 years old, Maria Eugenia Sampallo Barragán is pressing charges against her adoptive parents, who face up to 25 years in prison for falsifying adoption documents and concealing her past.

Ms Sampallo is one of hundreds of people who were snatched from their parents or born in captivity during the country's 1976-83 dictatorship, but she is the first to face her adopted parents in court. The verdict is expected on April 4.

Speaking outside the courthouse after her testimony, Ms Sampallo said that her case was important for everyone, “for all of society, and for the rest of the children in my condition”.

Ms Sampallo learnt about her biological parents seven years ago via DNA tests arranged by the human rights group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.

Since the dictatorship, the Grandmothers have located 88 people like Ms Sampallo, children of their own sons and daughters who disappeared. As part of its “Process of National Reorganisation”, the Argentine military captured tens of thousands of people suspected of being subversives, and as many as 30,000 died.

The junta also decided to “rehabilitate” their enemies' children by placing them with families that supported the dictatorship.

The military's plan was especially twisted because in many cases the children were given to the families of men who may have participated, directly or indirectly, in the torture and deaths of their parents.

The Grandmothers say that the military captured up to 500 children, or they were born in captivity. During the dictatorship the group kept note of women who suddenly appeared with babies without being pregnant, and began investigations that, with recent advances in DNA technology, have begun to get results.

The cases of abducted children have proved essential to bringing the dictatorship's architects and executioners to justice, despite the general amnesty for military and police officers imposed by the first post-dictatorship Government. The amnesty, jurists contended, did not include the theft of babies.

Now hundreds of regime officers face charges of crimes against humanity. Ms Sampallo began her own search in 1986 when her adoptive parents, Osvaldo Rivas and Cristina Gómez Pinto, sent her to a psychologist who told her that her biological parents had died in an accident.

As she grew older the story changed several times. Years passed, the couple separated and tensions at home grew worse.

“My mother said that I was ungrateful for what they had done for me and that if not for them I would have been tossed in the gutter,” Ms Sampallo told the court, which is trying the couple and Enrique Berthier, a family friend.

In 1989 the Grandmothers arrived. The first blood test proved negative, but Ms Sampallo knew that her place was not with her “parents”. She left home at 19 not wanting any relationship with them and found her way to the National Commission for Identity Rights (Conadi). This time the test was positive, and in 2002 she met her surviving family members.

Because Ms Sampallo ended her relationship with her adoptive parents before learning the truth she is faring better than others who find it difficult to accept that the people who raised them may have been complicit in their biological parents' deaths.

Ms Sampallo said that Estelao Carlotto, the head Grandmother, was an example of courage for the other children stolen by the military regime.

The Dirty War

— Approximately 30,000 Argentinians disappeared during the Dirty War, a campaign of violence and intimidation by a series of governments

— The collapse of the alliance between left and right factions in the Peronist movement is seen as the catalyst of the trouble. A paranoid conservative Argentinian group backed the army in taking extreme action to control the Left

— Most disappearances occurred under the military regimes that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983, after the overthrow of Isabel Perón by Jorge Rafael Videla, then head of Argentina's army

— Democracy was swept away and the military became increasingly violent. It regarded a “cleansing” of Argentine society as necessary to the country’s survival

— Liberals, trade unionists, and others suspected of less than wholehearted support for the regime were rounded up. After their interrogation and murder, their bodies were never returned

Sources: desaparecidos.org ; nuncamas.org; National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons

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