I came home in July 1972 to start field work for my doctoral thesis. At once, I found myself in the whirl of activism in which my wife had invested a great part of her time and energy. We were staying in my parents-in-law's home while they rented a house where Karina's father, Renato Constantino, could finish the first volume of his history book in quiet seclusion. Two months later, martial law was proclaimed. The arresting party that came at dawn of Sept. 23 took RC, my brother-in-law, when they could not find his father. A few days later, the team came back for the elder Renato and placed him under house arrest. Another arresting team looked for Karina at her office in UP, but failed to find her. Having been away for three years, I was not on the military's radar screen.
The threat of arrest forced us to move residence a number of times within a year. It was during this period that our daughter Kara was conceived, making her the only one of our four children to be consciously planned. I had assumed that the military might treat Karina more leniently if they knew she was with child. Later, I would find out that in Latin America, dictatorial regimes did not treat pregnant women activists any differently. They detained them and took their babies away at birth, and put them up for adoption.
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