BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (AP) — The search is finally over for Abel Madariaga, whose pregnant wife was kidnapped by Argentine security forces 32 years ago.

After decades of doubt and loneliness, of searching faces in the street in hopes they might be related, Madariaga has found his son.

“I never stopped thinking I would find him,” the 59-year-old father said, squeezing his son’s arm during a packed news conference yesterday.

“For the first time, I know who I was. Who I am,” the young man said, still marvelling at his new identity: Francisco Madariaga Quintela, a name he only learned last week.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo rights group believes about 400 children were stolen at birth from women who were kidnapped and killed as part of the 1976-1983 dictatorship’s “dirty war” against political dissidents, which killed as many as 30,000 people.

Madariaga and his wife, Silvia Quintela, were members of the Montoneros, a leftist group targeted for elimination by government death squads. He last saw his wife — a 28-year-old surgeon who treated the poor in a Buenos Aires suburb — being pushed into a Ford Falcon by army officers dressed as civilians as she walked to a train on January 17, 1977.

Madariaga managed to flee into exile to avoid the same fate. Ever since, he has made finding the children of those who disappeared his life’s cause.

As it turned out, Quintela gave birth to the son the couple had planned to name Francisco in July 1977 while imprisoned in one of Argentina’s largest and most notorious clandestine torture centres, the Campo de Mayo in suburban Buenos Aires. Surviving prisoners later reported that the newborn was taken from her the next day, and she disappeared shortly thereafter.