Haley Cohen Gilliland > Quotes

“What the Abuelas needed to find their stolen grandchildren was already within them: Their mitochondrial DNA contained the story of every mother that had come before them”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“I think that the only thing that distinguishes the activist from the coward,” he later explained, “is the fact that the coward permits the fear to paralyze him and the activist in spite of his fear knows what his duty is and he goes about it.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“The junta had tried to make thousands of people disappear, and to erase the identities of their offspring. But mtDNA was like an indelible ID tag that every mother seals in her children’s cells. What the Abuelas needed to find their stolen grandchildren was already within them: Their mitochondrial DNA contained the story of every mother that had come before them, and every child they had borne—no matter where in the world they had been taken. A flower that traveled in their blood.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“Almost without exception, each of us carries mtDNA that is an identical copy of our mother’s, whose mtDNA is a carbon copy of her mother’s, and so on. In fact, any two people who are related by an unbroken maternal lineage, including siblings, cousins, and even second cousins, should share an identical mitochondrial DNA sequence.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“Dozens of young people gathered out front of the hospital with signs that read: “Magnacco: Torturer and Thief of Lives.” They shouted, painted swastikas on the doors in red spray paint, and generally made as much of a ruckus as they could. From there they marched about thirty minutes to do the same thing outside the doctor’s apartment building. Before long, Magnacco was forced to resign from Sanatorio Mitre and his neighbors had asked him to move.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“King praised the power of mitochondrial DNA with the fervor—and language—of an evangelical preacher. “God put this method on earth specifically for the Abuelas,”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“The EAAF, which owes its creation to the Abuelas’ tireless lobbying, has helped to identify human rights victims in the Philippines, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the former Yugoslavia, and more than thirty other countries, including, most recently, Ukraine. Mary-Claire King herself posits that she and the Abuelas were among the pioneers of genetic genealogy, the combination of traditional genealogical methods like the sketching of family trees with genetic testing to infer family relationships. It is now a large industry populated by companies like Living DNA and Ancestry.com. The Abuelas can also feasibly claim to have spearheaded the use of forensic genetics—the application of genetics to criminal investigations—in a human rights context.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“Patricia’s response was unwavering: “Those who leave the country are cowards.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“Indeed, apart from the Third World Priests who worked in the villas, much of the country’s Catholic leadership supported—or silently tolerated—the junta, viewing its violence as an unfortunate consequence of Videla’s mission to defend Argentina’s “Western, Christian” values.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“To do science is to try to improve the lives of people.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“Prior to the Abuelas’ pioneering work with Mary-Claire King, Víctor Penchaszadeh, the BNDG team, and other scientists, genetic science was more commonly associated with the violation of human rights rather than their defense. Eugenics, the abominable practice by which countries like the United States, Sweden, Hungary, Italy, and Germany enlisted scientists to “perfect” their societies by forcibly sterilizing people from certain racial backgrounds or with intellectual challenges, had given the field a deservedly terrible reputation in the human rights world. With the Index of Grandpaternity, the Abuelas redeemed the image of genetics and inspired similar work across the globe.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“They repeated this process for all 147 samples and, based on the differences in their mtDNA sequences, estimated how long one would need to look back to find a common ancestor. They looked back further and further, and the giant genetic tree they were drawing got narrower and narrower. Eventually Wilson and his students realized that the mtDNA sequences of all 147 individuals, who came from all over the world, could be mapped back to a single mtDNA sequence that belonged to a woman in Africa 200,000 years ago—and by extension, so could everyone else, from Buenos Aires to Beijing. The implication was not that she was the only woman on earth—there would have been other men and women who lived at the same time—but at some point the descendants of those other women stopped having daughters and their mitochondrial DNA died off, just as a last name might in a traditional patriarchal family without sons.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“Everywhere around us were people who were vulnerable to being sent off to a war that we all opposed,” she would later recall. King began not just participating in protests, but also helping to organize them.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“In November 1975, the dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay had quietly committed to a transnational crusade against “leftists, communists, and Marxists” that became known as Operation Condor, after the carrion-eating bird that soars high above the Andes. Brazil had joined the following year and Ecuador and Peru signed on in 1978. For decades, several of the regimes had received backing from the United States, which saw them as allies in the Cold War campaign against communism.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“When rumors of the potential coup in Argentina had begun to rattle around diplomatic circles, some in the American government “discreetly and through third parties” suggested that the military dictatorship be formally recognized. Once the junta took over, the US Congress approved a request from Kissinger to send it $49 million in military assistance. Even as news of torture, rape, and kidnappings began to emerge, the secretary of state was unflaggingly sanguine. “We want you to succeed,” Kissinger told an Argentine official a few months after the coup. “If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly.” It would eventually become clear that Kissinger and other top officials were fully aware of what the military was up to in Argentina and throughout the Condor countries. In fact, the United States had helped author the playbook they followed.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children

“H.I.J.O.S. began staging escraches, public shamings in which members camped outside the homes and offices of suspected dictatorship-era criminals, shouting about the offenses they were accused of, singing songs comparing them to Nazis, throwing paint at the walls, and even reenacting rape scenes.”
― Haley Cohen Gilliland, A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children