Mexico 'Dirty War' Tale Ends Happily, Victim Found

By Lorraine Orlandi
Jan 3, 9:16 AM (ET)

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Aleida Gallangos met her brother in Washington last week
for the first time since he was kidnapped by Mexican police 30 years ago,
closing one chapter in the annals of Mexico's "dirty war" on a rare joyous note.

Lucio Antonio Gallangos is the first of 532 victims of forced disappearance
documented by Mexico's rights watchdog to be found alive, thanks mainly to his
sister, who had searched for him since learning her own identity a few years
ago.

"He's the image of my uncles, my uncle Manuel and my uncle Fernando," Aleida
Gallangos, 31, said after meeting the stranger who is her closest link to
parents she cannot remember.

She is among dirty war survivors in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America
piecing together personal histories and broken families as new governments shed
light on decades-old atrocities.

Gallangos traced her brother with the help of adoption records, the Yellow
Pages, a network of Latino immigrants in Washington, D.C. and a kind-hearted
doorman there.

When she found her brother she told him his own story: Lucio Antonio was almost
4 in 1975 when federal agents took him, his parents and uncle -- suspected
leftists guerrillas -- after a shootout between rebels and police in Mexico
City.

Shot in the leg, Lucio Antonio was placed in an orphanage and adopted by a
Mexican couple. His parents were never found. Gallangos wanted him to know they
had not abandoned him.

It was a shock to the 33-year-old man known as Juan Carlos Hernandez, who went
to the United States 10 years ago. Now he struggles to reconcile two separate
personal histories.

"I must assimilate this, that I come from other parents," he said in a telephone
interview. "I spent a lifetime with one family. I am part of (Gallangos') story
but my life is different.

"When I was three they turned my life upside down, and now it's happened again,"
he said. But the revelations of his past make him more grateful for the
sacrifices of his adoptive parents.

"I want them to know, the people who took the life of a 3-year-old boy, that
something good came out of it," he said.

He and his sister Gallangos said they sure of their blood tie, although he said
he would take a DNA test to confirm it.

REVELATIONS

Gallangos, a soft-spoken and determined factory worker studying industrial
engineering in Ciudad Juarez, was 2 when her family fell apart at the height of
a Cold-War-era clampdown on leftists. Hundreds of Mexicans died or disappeared
from the 1960s to the 1980s at the hands of state security forces.

A family friend rescued her from the gun battle and took her to a relative, who
raised her under a new name. Meanwhile, Gallangos' paternal grandmother searched
for the two sons, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren who vanished in 1975.

President Vicente Fox took office in 2000 and ended seven decades of
single-party rule, opening long-secret documents about the dirty war to public
scrutiny. Gallangos and her grandmother met through a magazine article on the
"disappeared," the missing victims of dirty wars.

Since then, Gallangos' life has been an emotional see-saw.

In February she found the file of a boy who came to an orphanage in June 1975,
who called himself Tony and whose photo showed a strong resemblance to her
father.

But when she contacted the family who adopted him they balked, fearing the truth
would hurt or estrange him. Through phone directories Gallangos found his
adoptive sisters in Washington.

She went there on a hunch and a sympathetic apartment house doorman tipped her
off to the workplace of one sister, while area press publicized her story.

On Christmas Eve her brother called her and heard her revelations.

"He told me: 'You were looking for someone. I was waiting for no one. Twelve
hours ago I was someone else,'" Gallangos said, swallowing tears.

"I found the person I was seeking, someone hard-working, sensitive, open," she
said. "I see the pain in his face. Now we have some healing to do."