Forty-seven years ago, before her hair turned white and she or he had no need of a wheelchair to march around Argentina’s most iconic square, Nora Cortiñas made a promise to her son who disappeared: She would seek for him until her last breath.
Her commitment sums up the driving force of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, a human rights organization created by women whose children were kidnapped by the military dictatorship that ruled Argentina from 1976 to 1983.
With time, their fight became a logo of hope and resistance. Their wounds are shared by hundreds who protest every 12 months, on March 24, to recollect the start of the bloodiest period of their country’s history.
“They represent the fearless fight of numerous women who, in any respect costs, sought the tools to deliver a message,” said Carlos Álvarez, 26, during a recent protest against Argentine President Javier Milei. “None of my relatives disappeared, and I still empathize with their struggle.”
Milei, a right-wing populist who took power in 2023, has minimized the severity of the repression through the dictatorship, alleging that human rights organizations’ claim of 30,000 disappearances during that period is fake.
Long before Milei, when the military ruled, moms like Cortiñas were discredited as “crazy” and “terrorists,” but their quest to learn what happened to their children never ceased.
Week after week, since April 1977, Mothers of Plaza de Mayo have gathered on the square that provided the group with its name. Together with Argentines who hurt with injustices of their very own, they meet each Thursday, at 3:30 p.m., and circle around Plaza de Mayo’s pyramid.
“The story of my life is the story of all Mothers of Plaza de Mayo,” said Cortiñas, who will soon turn 94. “We don’t know anything about our kids. A disappearance means you don’t know anything; there isn’t any solution to explain it.”
Her eldest son, Gustavo, was 24 when he disappeared on his solution to work. An admirer of Evita Perón, he was a militant of Montoneros, a Peronist guerrilla organization whose members were targeted by the military within the Seventies.
“When they took my son, on April 15, 1977, I went out to search for him and I encountered other moms whose children had also been kidnapped,” Cortiñas said.
Filled with uncertainty, Cortiñas and other moms held their first gatherings at an area church where the bishop offered nothing but disdain. Frustrated, one in every of them said: “Enough, we’d like to realize visibility.”
They headed to Plaza de Mayo, where the presidential office is situated, and where police unexpectedly provoked their symbolic march across the square.
A state of emergency was in place, stopping Argentines from gathering, so cops screamed at them: “Move, ladies, move!”
And so, in pairs, crying silently without knowing that they’d come back every Thursday for the remainder of their lives, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo walked.
THE STORY BEHIND THEIR WHITE SCARVES
By October 1977, when Mothers of Plaza de Mayo decided to hitch a pilgrimage to the town of Luján, most of them felt let down by the Catholic Church.
Though they sought the church’s help and luxury, a lot of their once trusted priests told them to go home and pray.
To gain exposure, one mother suggested carrying a pole with a blue or red cloth, but one other replied that it wouldn’t be visible. “Let’s use one in every of our kids’s diapers to cover our heads,” one other mother said. “We all keep no less than one in every of them, right?” And all of them did.
After the pilgrimage, while other parishioners prayed for the pope, the sick and the exact same priests who turned their back on them, the moms prayed for the disappeared.
Cortiñas treasures the headband she wore that day. She has had 4 or five scarves since then, together with her son’s name embroidered in blue thread.
“It makes me very proud, knowing they bear Gustavo’s name,” Cortiñas said. “He was a fighter, one in every of those that are vital nowadays to vary the world.”
Cortiñas never leaves her home without her white scarf. She mostly wears it through the Thursday march at Plaza de Mayo, but she at all times keeps it inside her handbag, next to an image of Gustavo that she hangs from her neck at public events.
The scarves have multiplied over 4 a long time. They will be seen on murals, tiles, pins and protest signs.
“I see them, and I feel hope,” said Luz Solvez, 36, on a recent day in Buenos Aires. “It is a logo that summarizes a part of our history. All the cruelty, how horrible it was, but additionally how they (the Mothers) took it on the side of justice as an alternative of revenge.”
A couple of years ago, Graciela Franco’s daughter asked her to get similar tattoos. Franco wanted it “to be something truly meaningful.” Now, mother and daughter have a row of scarves on their forearms.
Since 2017, Franco has worked with ceramist Carolina Umansky on a project called “ 30 Thousand Scarves for Memory,” which honors the 30,000 individuals who disappeared through the dictatorship.
They have produced and given away 400 ceramic tiles with images of scarves to symbolize the Mothers’ fight and the necessity for historic memory. Their hope is that the tiles be placed in plain sight, particularly at entrances to homes.
“The idea is that they permanently generate a matter,” Umansky said. “That anyone who looks at them asks: Why is that this scarf on this house?”
A MOTHER WILL NEVER LOSE HOPE
Taty Almeida’s feels as if her old self — the one before her son Alejandro, 20, went missing — is gone. His disappearance so profoundly modified her that it’s as if she’s been reborn in her despair and seek for him.
“Alejandro gave birth to me,” Almeida, 93, said. “I’m comfortable to have given birth to my three children, but Ale gave birth to me.”
She was unaware of her son’s militant connections when he vanished in June 1975. She was a deeply Catholic woman, raised by an Argentine general, who wrongfully blamed the Peronists for his disappearance.
“I couldn’t think that my acquaintances (the military) were the culprits,” Almeida said. “I went to them, but never got any help.”
For 4 years, she searched for her son on her own. It wasn’t until 1979 that she found the courage to approach the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
With her background, she anxious they’d think she was a spy. But once contained in the house that they used as a headquarters, nobody asked her political affiliation, religion or personal views. Just the one query all aching moms were asked: “Who are you missing?”
“When they touched essentially the most precious thing a lady has, a toddler, we went out like crazy, as they called us, to scream, to boost questions, to search for our kids,” Almeida said.
Her faith is just not lost but modified. Though she now not attends Mass and is aware of the complicity that the Catholic Church played through the dictatorship, she still believes in God.
After 48 years of searching, she wears her white scarf to all protests and shares her story with journalists and younger generations, who she trusts will take the lead once the Mothers are all gone.
“I’m sure that Alejandro could be very pleased with me,” Almeida said. “That gives me strength.”
She wonders what he would seem like today. Perhaps now, at age 69, would his curly hair have turned gray? Would he wear glasses? Would he have given her grandchildren?
“I at all times say that Alejandro is present, but no. He is gone.”
Even so, she says, there’ll at all times be hope and the fight doesn’t end.
Argentine forensic anthropologists are identifying increasingly more stays of people that disappeared through the dictatorship. If they were to seek out Alejandro’s stays, she could finally grieve, bring him flowers, pray to him.
“I don’t want to depart without first, no less than, having the ability to touch Alejandro’s bones.”
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