Motherland
The Plaza de Mayo, city center of Buenos Aires, has served as the backdrop to numerous dramatic turning points in Argentina’s history. It was the site of massive demonstrations by laborers in 1945, demanding the release from prison of Juan Perón. Ten years later, it was the site of a massacre perpetrated by the Argentine military in an attempted coup d’etat. Military and democratic leaders have addressed the Plaza from the balcony of the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s presidential palace, throughout the country’s centuries-long history.
Eva Perón embraces her husband Juan on August 22nd, 1951, overlooking the Plaza de Mayo.
Today, the Plaza de Mayo is host to another ongoing historic event. Every Thursday since April 30th, 1977, a crowd of women assembles in the Plaza with white scarves tied about their heads. Embroidered on every scarf is the name and birthdate of a child who would be a full-grown adult today – if only their mother could be told where they are, and if they are alive.
Aparicion con vida – “located alive”.
These are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organization founded during El Proceso, The Process, short for the National Reorganization Process – official name of the military dictatorship that governed Argentina from 1976 to 1983. While in power, the reigning junta waged what became known as the Dirty War – a campaign of state terror against Argentine citizens in the name of national security. In those seven years, between nine and thirty thousand people were murdered or disappeared by government agents.
Lt. General Jorge Rafael Videla swearing himself in as Argentine President after the 1976 coup d’etat.
Just a year after the Process began, mothers began to peacefully demonstrate in the Plaza in defiance of the regime’s laws against public assembly. Over the course of the junta’s rule, members of the movement were subjected to the same atrocities as their disappeared kin – including its co-founders María Ponce de Bianco, Azucena Villaflor de De Vicenti, and Esther Ballestrino de Careaga. Nonetheless, the undeterred Mothers continued to demonstrate at the height of the dictatorship, leading to the first March of Resistance in December 1980, a continuous 24-hour walk around the Plaza. Years later, with the restoration of democracy and the prosecution of the junta for war crimes, the newly founded Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team found the matriarchs’ bodies to have been disposed of in a death flight over the Atlantic Ocean.
The Mothers still demonstrate peacefully in the Plaza every Thursday, as judicial and forensic proceedings continue to unravel the horror of the Dirty War. In November 2022, Hebe de Bonafini, leader of the movement, passed away at age 93. The trial of the military junta was recently dramatized in the film Argentina, 1985, and features real-life Mothers of the Plaza.
