Ernestina Herrera de Noble, center, owner of Grupo Clarín, Argentina's largest media conglomerate, and her adopted children Felipe Noble Herrera, left, and Marcela
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Abuelas forced the court to act on May 28, aided by a law passed in November that allows judges to order compulsory DNA testing for individuals who refuse to submit to it. Carlotto told the press, "The state has to go all the way to discover the truth." After the BNDG announced in early July that the May 28 sample was unusable, Carlotto alleged that the siblings knew beforehand that their clothes would be seized. Her contention was backed up soon after by Fernandez's government, which openly accused the siblings of having purposely thwarted the DNA testing. Cabinet Chief Anibal Fernandez claimed they had "hired lawyers and geneticists who made other people wear their clothes first so there would be DNA traces" from them.
Lawyers for the siblings released a statement denying that Marcela and Felipe had contaminated their clothes with DNA from other people. The statement laid the blame for the failed DNA test on the government: "It is a moral aberration that the government accuses the alleged victims [of spoiling the DNA test] without proof." Marcela and Felipe, the statement continued, "are the object of an unprecedented political persecution." The judge in the case, Sandra Arroyo Salgado, is expected to order a new test but may first call the siblings to court to try to persuade them to surrender blood samples voluntarily.
The humiliating police procedure, however, has led to a loud public outcry in favor of the Noble Herrera siblings. In an editorial, the conservative daily La Nacion said, "The case of Marcela and Felipe Noble is a clear example of the trampling of human rights in the name of human rights." And the siblings have not been silent about their ordeal. "We have never had any concrete indication we could be the children of desaparecidos," Marcela and Felipe said in a statement earlier this year. "Our mother is the director of Clarín, a newspaper that has to bear a very strong campaign of official attacks, and we fear we have become a pawn in this war. But apart from that, our mother is simply our mother, the person who, in one of the greatest possible acts of love, chose us as her children 34 years ago. She always told us the truth. As far back as we can remember, she told us we are adopted," said Marcela in a recent prepared statement.
Questions about the children's birth parents have followed Noble for years. "I have often spoken with my children about the possibility that they and their parents may have been the victims of illegal repression," Noble said in an open letter she published in December 2002, when she was arrested briefly on charges that she had knowingly adopted the children of desaparecidos, which she has consistently denied. Those charges were eventually dropped for lack of evidence. "The adoption was an act of love and joy. It is a bond that unites the three of us forever," said Noble in her letter.
The adoption procedures nonetheless seem to have been, at the very least, fortuitous. Noble claims that Marcela was left in a cardboard box on the doorstep of her San Isidro home in 1976, and court records from that time named a next-door neighbor and a gardener as witnesses. But a court investigation tied to her December 2002 arrest failed to substantiate these witnesses. As for Felipe, Noble was granted his adoption by San Isidro judge Ofelia Hejt on the same day as Marcela's arrival in 1976, when a young mother walked in to hand over a baby boy to the court for adoption.
According to Abuelas, a likely match for Marcela is Matilde Lanuscou, born on March 30, 1976, who was thought to have perished with her family in a September 1976 gunfight in San Isidro. But during an investigation after the end of the junta, Matilde's coffin was found to contain only baby clothes and a pacifier. Abuelas also believes that Felipe may be the son of Maria Gualdero, a member of a revolutionary group who was 20 years old and nine months pregnant when she vanished after a police raid in Buenos Aires on June 8, 1976.
Despite the rough treatment of Marcela and Felipe, Abuelas is convinced that compulsory testing is a necessary evil with an ultimately beneficial result, pointing to a recent, similarly fraught case. For a long time, Alejandro Sandoval Fontana, 32, had refused to submit to a DNA test that he feared would incriminate the man he had always considered his real father — Victor Rei, a military police officer — even after Rei was arrested and put on trial. "I became a 'no' man, total denial. I couldn't accept the truth," says Sandoval. When Rei got advance warning from friends in the security services that court officials were making a surprise raid on his house to take Sandoval's toothbrush and other personal items for DNA testing, Sandoval moved quickly to protect the man he considered his father. "I grabbed Rei's toothbrush, brushed our dog's teeth with it and supplanted it for my own toothbrush, I did the same with Rei's comb — I combed the dog with it and put it where I usually kept my own comb," Sandoval says.
The court eventually realized it had been fooled, and a new surprise raid on the Rei home sequestered Sandoval's personal items, resulting in a DNA match with desaparecidos Pedro Sandoval and Liliana Fontana. Sandoval was born at the Campo de Mayo death camp, and after his parents were murdered, he was raised by Rei. Following thre positive DNA match, Sandoval chose to embrace his real grandparents and uncles; he has cut all links with Rei and Rei's wife. Victor Rei was eventually sentenced to 16 years in prison for Sandoval's abduction.
Sandoval has advice for the Noble siblings: "Take your time, but try to understand that, apart from the person who raised you, there is a family waiting for you, and we will still be here waiting when you are ready." Marcela and Felipe, however, are not only facing the possibility of giving up the woman they have always called Mother but complicating the politics of their motherland as well.