A further investigation by the CONADI revealed that Wherli was already aware that she was not a genetic match to Mariani’s granddaughter. She had previously undergone the same rigorous procedure when she presented herself to the Córdoba branch of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo as Clara Anahi in November 2014. The case had been referred to the CONADI, a DNA test was done on March 13, 2015, and on June 25, 2015, Wherli received the official results: negative. So the fraud indeed confirmed a truth: that the protocols followed by the CONADI and the BNDG are incontrovertible. There is no doubt that hundreds of children were in fact appropriated from parents who were targets of state repression. The cruelty of this fraud is nearly incomprehensible. Chicha Mariani was 92 at the time the false Clara Anahi presented herself. She died two years later without ever having located her granddaughter.

Roffé does not use a lot of rhyme in her poetry, yet this brief poem hinges on the one at its center: extraño/engaño, strange/scam. In a poem with so few words, it was essential to maintain this rhyme, and I managed to do so with odd/fraud, which at least retains their sonic relationship. The sonic and visual closeness of the two words in Spanish suggests how easily something false might be mistaken for something true, especially when desperately hoped for, without rigorous verification procedures in place. It also suggests how a common understanding of the truth can be easily subverted in the absence of a collective memory process.

Roffé utilizes similar wordplay in the title of the book, Diario ínfimo; it plays on the phrase diario íntimo, or “secret diary,” and by changing only one letter, turns it into “tiny diary.” I have tried to replicate that by playing on “dear diary” with Mere Diary as the English title. The book title is ironic: While the poems cover a period of only seven months rather than a full year, characterized by short lines and spare language, the diary is deeply engaged with the time in which it was written and beyond, with other works of art, with the wider world, and with the human condition. It is an expansive and inviting work that opens the world to readers.

It is widely suspected that the fraud to which Chicha Mariani was subjected was committed in an attempt to undermine the work of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo by allies of the Macri administration, which sought to minimize the crimes of the military dictatorship and subvert the national process of memory, including by casting doubt on the number of people who were disappeared (estimated at 30,000). This effort to rewrite history and reverse the national process of justice and memory continues even more forcefully under the government of Javier Milei. The current vice president, Victoria Villarruel, built her career on defending military personnel accused of crimes against humanity, some her own family members. In June, the Milei administration revoked the CONADI’s authority to access state records to investigate the appropriation of children, and in August, it closed the UEI, the CONADI’s special unit for the investigation of the disappearance of children, potentially imperiling current and future investigations. The search for Clara Anahi and many other grandchildren is ongoing; the remains of her parents have also yet to be identified. Roffé’s poem remains tragically relevant.