When Guillermo Gómez was a boy, in the mid-1980s, he was lying in bed next to his mother at their home in Buenos Aires, when she asked him a strange question: “What would you do if one of these days, when I’m working, a woman comes along and tells you she’s your mother? Would you run away with her?” Guillermo didn’t understand. How could he have another mother? Tears welled in his eyes. “I’m not going anywhere,” he whimpered. “You’re my mother.”

Teodora, was a short, heavy-set woman with an explosive temper, but she’d always been devoted to her son, working long hours as a housemaid and cleaner to pay the bills. Guillermo thought of the two as an unbeatable team. “United against the world,” as he put it, but united especially against his father, Francisco.

A chain-smoker with a receding hairline, Francisco Gómez never went anywhere without his revolver. He worked as an intelligence officer in the Argentine Air Force, though Guillermo had no idea what his job entailed. When he wasn’t at work, Gómez was mercilessly cruel to his wife, berating her and subjecting her to frequent beatings, some so severe that she ended up in hospital. “There was one time he hit her with a shotgun, then said he’d shoot her in the head,” Guillermo said.

When Guillermo was about five, an increasingly terrified Teodora resolved to escape with her son. They clambered over the house’s fence and sought refuge with a neighbour, who reported Gómez to the police for domestic abuse. But after the air force intervened, according to Guillermo, the police chose not to press charges and the case file vanished. Gómez forced his wife and son back to the house, after which the beatings continued.

“We spent the next five years constantly running away from him,” Guillermo said. He and Teodora managed to escape on a number of further occasions, hiding out in neighbourhoods in and around Buenos Aires. At one point, they even moved to San Luis, a city 500 miles away. Each time, Gómez managed to find them, and drag them back to the family home.

Despite his father’s cruelty, Guillermo longed for his approval, desperately hanging on to any sign of affection or small act of kindness. During the rare moments when his parents weren’t fighting, Guillermo found joy in his father’s occasional visits to his school, when Gómez would bring a handful of sweets for him and his friends. On cold winter mornings, his father would sometimes warm the boy’s socks on the stove. Even so, the ceaseless cycle of running and living in fear eventually became unbearable. When Guillermo was eight, Teodora filed for divorce, and Gómez gradually faded from Guillermo’s life.

Guillermo was upset and confused by his father’s apparent lack of interest in him. “I could never fathom why parting ways with Teodora meant severing the bond between us,” he said. As a teenager he began to wonder whether Gómez was his real father. The two looked nothing alike. Guillermo’s skin was considerably lighter, and he was much taller. One day Guillermo confronted his mother: “Did you cheat on dad with another man?” Teodora was furious. “I believe she hurled something at me,” said Guillermo.“I’m Mariana Eva Pérez, the daughter of desaparecidos and I’m searching for my long-lost brother. I think you might be him”

He stopped asking questions. Then, in 2000, when Guillermo was 21 and working at a fast-food outlet on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, he was approached by two women he didn’t recognise. One was carrying a baby. To his surprise, the other woman addressed him by his full name, asking him to spare a moment. Guillermo, a little uneasy, replied that he was busy, but the woman was undeterred. She wrote something on a piece of paper, tucked it into a book and handed it to him.

The book was called “Missing as Children, Found as Youths” and it was published by Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo (Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), an organisation dedicated to locating the children of Argentina’s “disappeared” (desaparecidos) – the people murdered by the military regime that ruled the country for seven years beginning in 1976. Inside the book was a message which read: “I’m Mariana Eva Pérez, the daughter of desaparecidos and I’m searching for my long-lost brother. I think you might be him.”

Guillermo looked up – the woman was still in the restaurant. He apologised for his initial suspicion, but said he couldn’t be her brother. He fumbled for his id to prove his name and date of birth. Mariana smiled knowingly and gestured towards the book. Guillermo flicked through pages and pages of pictures of missing persons until he stumbled upon black-and-white photographs of a couple who bore an uncanny resemblance to him.

Like Guillermo, the man had thick eyebrows, a ski-jump nose, large ears and straight, dark hair. The caption revealed that the couple had been abducted by the Argentine Air Force in October 1978. A month later, the woman gave birth to a baby in a detention centre. November 1978: the month Guillermo was born.

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