Maria Eugenia Sampallo

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maria Eugenia Sampallo (born on an unknown date in 1978)^[1] is an Argentinian known for being the first person to take a couple who illegally adopted her as a baby to court for kidnapping her when her parents disappeared along with thousands of others in a military purge of radicals, known as the Dirty War. On April 4, 2008 the couple who adopted her were sentenced to 8 and 7 years in prison.

[edit] Details

Her mother, Mirta Mabel Barragan, was arrested along with her father, Leonardo Ruben Sampallo, in December 1977 when her mother was 6 months pregnant with Sampallo. Her grandmother then spent 24 years looking for her. In 2001 DNA tests indicated that they were her parents so she pressed a prosecution against Osvaldo Rivas and Maria Cristina Gomez, who illegally adopted her, along with Army Captain Enrique Berthier, who furnished the couple with the baby, whom it is assumed was born in a detention centre.^[2] There have been criticisms of the leniency of the sentence.