“I Am Not a Victim”: Evelin Bauer Pegoraro and an Identity in Dispute

A doorbell rings on a Saturday afternoon in 1999, breaking into the ordinary life of a middle-class home in Mar del Plata. For Evelin Bauer Pegoraro, that moment became the beginning of a long confrontation with identity, family and justice.

Pegoraro lived with Policarpo Luis Vázquez, a former Navy noncommissioned officer and former counterintelligence official at the Mar del Plata Naval Base, and Ana María Ferrá, a former civilian Marina employee. The couple had raised her from infancy and registered her as their biological daughter, although she had been appropriated.

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The doorbell was a very graphic literary figure that could represent what I had experienced in that situation. I think that was the point, trying to bring the reader into everyday life. Lives are always extraordinary, but I needed and wanted to make it very ordinary, very normal.

Her book, Who Is There, tells the story in the first person. It challenges the usual account of identity restitution: learning that one is the child of disappeared people, while rejecting the idea that DNA must become legal evidence against the person who raised her.

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I think it was the first thing I wrote when I sat down to write. The writing process was quite long. The goal was always to share this: I want someone to read it and know what I lived through.

Pegoraro says her refusal to undergo DNA testing did not mean she denied her origins. “My refusal to take the DNA test did not, at that point, mean that I was unaware of my origins. What I did not want was for them to force me to condemn my father.”

Her grandmothers, Inocencia Luca de Pegoraro and Angélica Chimeno de Bauer, filed the case against Vázquez and Ferrá in 1999. Pegoraro’s children later read the book on the Atlantic coast and asked questions that cut through the language of court records, including why she had not done something to prevent their grandfather from going to prison. She wrote about the experience to place an extraordinary and painful story inside everyday life, and to explain how she built an understanding of herself on her own terms.

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My refusal to take the DNA test did not, at that point, mean that I was unaware of my origins. What I did not want was for them to force me to condemn my father.