Join us for a glass of wine and to celebrate the launch of this intense and important book looking at the daring and at times dangerous work of CLAMOR, and hear from the author and guests.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the dictatorships in South American countries attempted to hide the atrocities they committed –  enforced disappearances, torture,  assassinations – from the international community. They terrorised populations into silence, censored the media, threatened and murdered journalists, and forcibly disappeared, incarcerated or killed their opponents.

But they failed. Thanks to the courageous work of survivors, journalists, human rights organisations, exiles, and family members, the atrocities were documented and denounced.  

The group CLAMOR, based in Brazil, was among the first to investigate, publicize and denounce state terrorism in the Southern Cone dictatorships; including the secret cross-border Operation Condor which targeted exiles in their country of refuge. Journalist Jan Rocha was one of the founding members of CLAMOR. Her book CLAMOR: The Search for the disappeared of the South American dictatorships, now published in English by the Latin America Bureau (LAB), provides an eyewitness account of the struggle to find out what had happened to the disappeared, especially the hundreds of babies and children who had gone missing during the years of terror. Members of the Argentinian juntas were later condemned for the "systematic plan to steal babies and children"  and a parallel can be drawn with the indictment of President Putin by the ICC for the abduction of Ukrainian children. Both situations involved the use of children as political tools.   

TALKS

Jan Rocha - Book author, former BBC and The Guardian correspondent in Brazil. Jan Rocha will briefly speak about writing the book and the work of CLAMOR.

Jenny Pearce - Research Professor at the London School of Economics (LSE), specialist in Latin America. Jenny Pearce will give the context of the Cold War and Operación Condor in Latin America.

Marcela López Levy - Consultant and expert in human rights in Argentina (‘Argentina Under the Kirchners’, ‘We Are Millions: Neo-liberalism and New Forms of Political Action in Argentina’) will draw parallels with the abducted children of Ukraine, the use of children as weapons of war, and children held on the US-Mexico border.

Chaired by David Treece, former head of the Department of Portuguese and Brazilian Studies at King's College London.

Book published by Practical Action.

Event organised by Latin America Bureau (LAB) and Brazil Matters.