Argentine man finds 'missing family'

By Peter Greste BBC correspondent in Buenos Aires

An Argentine man has been reunited with his biological family, 27 years after the former military dictatorship murdered his parents and passed him on to be raised as an adopted child.

Horacio was five months old when his mother was murdered

Horacio Pietragalla Corti says he still loves his adoptive parents and is delighted to have made contact with his biological family.

His story is perhaps one of the happiest of dozens of Argentine children who were raised by the very regime that murdered their parents.

His father, also Horacio, was killed in 1975 and his mother, Liliana, died the following year. Both were murdered during the purges of some 30,000 left-wing opponents of the dictatorship.

The government official who took the baby Horacio soon after he was born gave him to his cleaning lady to raise.

But over the years, Horacio realised something was amiss and he approached the Commission for Identity Rights - an authority set up specifically to deal with the children of the disappeared.

Many women are still trying to locate their missing grandchildren

A DNA test eventually matched him to his biological family and the 27-year-old man was reunited with his real cousins, uncles and aunts.

Often for the children of the disappeared, the truth about the role their adoptive families may have played in the death of their biological parents is too painful to bear.

Many have rejected requests for DNA tests by those who claim to be their real families.

But a delighted Horacio told a news conference that the twisted ideology of the state had deprived him of the right to his identity, and he called on others who doubt their origins to discover who they really are.