The desaparecidos talk through the power of the pen.

“It was not easy for journalists then; it is not easy today, to report the truth,” according to award-winning Argentine poet Juan Gelman, whose son and daughter-in-law disappeared when Argentina was ruled by a military junta.

Gelman said journalists were among members of the intelligentsia who helped him find his granddaughter, two decades after her parents were abducted and believed killed during Argentina’s Dirty War.

He granted an interview hours before gracing a poetry-reading session organized by the Instituto Cervantes, as part of its weeklong activities for International Book Day.

Gelman, himself a journalist for Buenos Aires newspaper Pagina 12 for a long time, said colleagues in the profession across the world wrote about his search for his granddaughter, Macarena.

“A contact in the Vatican, while I was exiled in Rome, told me somebody in Uruguay recognizes a woman who looks like me; she based it on a photograph of me on the local paper.”

Notably, Gelman said the search for his granddaughter coincided with a search for his son and daughter-in-law who were among hundreds and thousands of desaparecidos during the Argentine Dirty War.

Called Guerra Sucia in Spanish, it refers to the state-sponsored violence against Argentine citizenry after Isabel Martinez de Peron issued in 1975 her so-called “annihilation decrees” to stem growing anti-government sentiments.

Some 30,000 Argentinians were estimated to have been detained, tortured and hidden in 340 concentration camps up to 1983.

The Philippines share a similar history. According to the desaparecidos.org, over 1,600 people were made to disappear since then President Ferdinand E. Marcos declared Martial Law in 1972 up to his ouster in 1986.

Gelman’s son and 20-year-old daughter-in-law who was seven months pregnant were abducted in 1976, the year Guerra Sucia was declared.

“I was in Rome then when they informed me of my son’s ‘misfortune.’ That’s what the government called it: ‘misfortune.’”

Gelman regarded journalists, artists and cultural workers as among those very influential in stopping this “period of terror” for Argentina.

“There were information coming from everywhere,” Gelman said. Hence, he and his wife sat every night to discuss the veracity of the information. “We tried to do the patch work; if this information was useful to us.”

They also made a list of people “who abducted my son and daughter-in-law” and retraced the steps this team took.

Through this they were able to learn that his daughter-in-law was made to deliver a child before she was also killed. That’s when they said they launched an international campaign to search for his grandchild.

The campaign, he said, involved more than a hundred poets, writers, musicians, artists and fellow journalists in 122 countries.

Gelman said these people sent signed letters and petitions to then-Uruguay president and also former journalist Julio María Sanguinetti.

“Of course, he [Sanguinetti] denied [that one of the abducting team members Hugo Campos Hermida] had my granddaughter.” But news coverage of Gelman’s quest in the local media got the attention of Hermida’s neighbors.

Gelman and Macarena were reunited in 2000, three years after the campaign was launched.

“Journalists who don’t do bad live in very dangerous times today. For example, more journalists were killed in Mexico than those killed [covering the war] in Iraq, because they chose to tell the truth about the [illegal] drug trade.”

Gelman, awarded Spain’s most prestigious prize for writers, the Miguel de Cervantes Prize–considered the Nobel Prize for Literature—said performing such role, of telling the truth, “remains in the territory of the journalist’s conscience. The best thing is to investigate what is really happening.”