The Corrientes man who was the victim of child exploitation and whose identity was hidden from him: “I want to find my mother”

It’s a dream, which he takes for a sign, that made him Roberto Marcelo Gomez (51) start a reseach. He realized that he was not complete, that his own puzzle was missing pieces and that it was nothing less than knowing his past, his story… his identity. At the age of 16, he learned what he suspected so much: the woman who raised him was not his real mother. And neither did his father. Or maybe yes, he still doubts it.

It was the man who raised him who told him one day that he had doubts: “She’s not your mother! Can’t you see how he treats you?” But he never told her if he was her father, or how he came into the family. He died in 1987 without telling her the biggest secret. Later , an aunt confirmed it.

You can’t talk about it with affection. But not because of what he knew, what he doubts and tries to solve, but because he feels that in addition to taking his mother away from him, those who raised him lied to him all his life. life and took away his childhood: “I didn’t have a happy childhood: I have been a victim of child exploitation and child abuse. They made me work since I was 7 years old, I was more in the street than at home… I suffered bad treatment, a lot of beatings”, he laments, speaking of the woman who raised him, White, a nurse who “had everything at hand, if she wanted to steal a baby she could do it”, she doubts; and of albertthe cobbler or “his spouse”, as he calls it.

In his research there are no claims but needs. “I just want to know what a mother’s embrace is like, what it’s like to comb her hair, to hold her hands, to caress the wrinkles in her face… That’s all I want. And if she’s gone, I want to know how she was, what she thought, have a picture of her… I’m not interested in asking questions, I just want to give her my love or bring flowers to his grave,” she implores.

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sad childhood

“They say I was born on May 3, 1971 in Goya, Corrientes, in a house in Piragine Niveyro street, between Chile and Peru, according to my birth certificate. The house where I lived,” he says. Unfolding the story, he discovered that the adoptive mother had indeed been pregnant, but of a girl and that she said that during the delivery (accompanied by a midwife) twins were born.

He grew up in Corrientes, where he presumes his mother is from, and at almost 20 he moved to the San Martín neighborhood of Buenos Aires, but whenever he can he returns to Goya and walk from one end of the San Ramón to the other. neighborhood, “where I think I could find my mother”.

“We moved from the house where I was born to a bigger one with fruit trees. There, the four children were alone, sometimes the one I knew because my maternal grandmother took care of us; The school was three blocks away, and when I was 5, I walked back and forth on my own; Shopping, carrying water in buckets from a public tap was my job… A few years later we moved again, they changed my school to primary school and I ended up there -down with a lot of effort because at the age of 7 I started working with him (the man who raised him). He made me open the company, he was responsible at that age for the salaries of his employees: I had to bring him the money, ”he says.

With pain, remember that Despite his birthday, supposedly, with his sister, it was not celebrated. “I saw how they organized their little party, the table with the cake, everything and nothing for me. When I asked them why, they told me that I didn’t need it. The other brothers m “treated the same way: badly or ignored me. That was not all. They made me wait until everyone had finished eating so they could feed me with what was left…”.

He also sadly recalls that “she used to tell the other kids in the neighborhood not to play with me because I was a ‘thug’ (misbehaving child). They only made me work like when they asked me to fill a rusty 200 liter bucket with unusable water afterwards and I had to go every day to load it into 5 liter buckets… “.

Everything that happened at home had repercussions at school. “He had bad grades and bad behavior. No one told me what was right and what was wrong. They didn’t teach me to share, to be tolerant, to respect, to love, to be a partner. I’ve slept anywhere, between wires, on chairs, anywhere but a bed…and over the years I started to wonder why there was such a difference between them and me.”

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The suspicions

All this mistreatment and the differences between him and his brothers led him to suspect if Blanca was really his mother. “At the end of seventh grade, a friend of my father’s, to call it something, took me to work on the truck and it was like a vacation for me. Despite the 12-year porter job, I I traveled to all the provinces, I saw places and it took me away from the wounded life I had,” he recalls.

He came back in the late summer of 1984 when he went alone to enroll in high school and seeing himself there only brought up the same questions in his mind: why so many differences.

“One day I asked an aunt and He told me the person he called mom wasn’t, my heart sank. This aunt told me she was sad for me, for the kind of life they gave me, that’s why she told me, but she didn’t say much about more. When I inquired they told me that Alberto was my biological father, but I also doubted that was true because if it was, he couldn’t have allowed the woman to call me a this way,” he said anxiously.

What different people told him that he was able to put together to make his story is the result of “an extramarital affair” and that Blanca agreed to raise him to “get revenge on me for this infidelity.”

“They only said that, but that they couldn’t tell me who my mother was, that my real grandparents were from a middle-class family and that the fact that she got pregnant was a disgrace , and that they gave him the choice between the baby and the family, the comfort… They said she wanted to continue with her pregnancy and left me in the hospital so someone could take care of me.. My supposed biological father, Alberto, said something similar to me, but he never said that it was the product of infidelity, or who my mother was because, for him, having abandoned me was something unforgivable…”.

Despite this part of the story that he is still trying to clarify, what hurts him the most is that it was appropriated and there were people who tampered with his birth certificate, which includes the names of two witnesses.

After his military service, he moved to Buenos Aires, met his wife, they founded a family and he resumed his studies. “I finished high school when I was almost 30, I studied to be an electrician and I devote myself to installing Splits, these days it works well,” he says, proudly saying that his son and daughter-in-law help her. in his quest to discover his true identity.

the path of truth

It wasn’t until a few years ago that he began to feel the need to meet his mother. “I felt that I had already done everything expected in life: I had married, I had children, I had planted a tree, I had my house, my cars, I was working well. , I had material things that I never dreamed of, but I felt an emptiness. . I was not well, and one night I had a nightmare, I think… because I woke up screaming: Mom!… ‘I want to find my mom!’, I told my wife and that’s how I started looking for her, in 2015. I discovered Goya wherever I could and I continue to do so, “he says. .

He questioned Blanca again. “Knowing that I could denounce her, She’s not telling me the truth and I know she knows who my mom is.”, he explains and recounts a moment when he was excited: in 2015 he came to a family because Blanca herself had lied to him again, telling him that she was finally going to reveal the truth and gave him a name and an address as his biological home from his mother, he went there and learned that the woman had died a few years ago. He found his children who received him with emotion, thinking he was the brother they thought was stillborn. “We did a DNA test and it came back negative”.

Today, the woman is over 80 years old and “despite the two strokes she had, her mind is working very well”, according to Roberto. I suspect whatever has always happened with nurses and midwives taking babies, there are a lot of cases in Corrientes,” he said.

“What happened to me has nothing to do with the missing, because it was a few years before. Rather, it has to do with those networks that stole and sold babies, with those midwives and nurses who took babies from their mothers,” he points out and says that due to the severity of the first stage of his life, he also dedicates himself to solidarity tasks and attends two soup kitchens in his native Goya, where he arrives laden with toys and food for the boys and girls each time he returns to paper the town asking help finding his story.

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