Mothers of Plaza de Mayo: Resisting Disappearance and Erasure
By Kirthi Jayakumar
All through the years between 1977 and 2006, people were forcibly disappeared under the military dictatorship in Argentina. Between 1970 and 1980 alone, over 30,000 individuals became “desaparecidos,” or “the disappeared” (Meade, 2016). These people were entirely erased from public record with no traces whatsoever in these records of ever having been arrested or having had charges against them. The desaparecidos were believed to have been abducted by agents of the Argentine dictatorship during the Dirty War (from 1976 to 1983) – and those whose location was found had been tortured and killed, and their bodies had been disposed of in rural areas or unmarked graves (Partnoy, 2007).
Resisting this mass erasure and holding the government accountable for the forced disappearance of several people, the Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo or the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo stepped up. They organized to gather and assemble, hold vigils, and to attempt to understand what had happened to their adult children in the 1970s and 1980s. What started as a gathering became a movement that ultimately led to the government making amends.
The beginnings
The first mobilization of this group was on April 30, 1977, when Azucena Villaflor de De Vincenti, Berta Braverman, Haydee Garcia Buelas, Maria Adela Gard de Antokoletz, Julia, Maria Mercedes, Candida Gard, Delicia Gonzalez, Pepa Noia, Mirta Acuña de Baravalle, Kety Neuhaus, Raquel Arcushin, and Senora De Caimi walked to the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. Each of these women had at least one adult child who had been taken by the military government. However, any memory of them, and their arrest and charges against them were entirely absent in all government records.
The women walked in public – right across the street from the presidential office building, la Casa Rosada, linking arms in pairs, as though on a stroll (Hunter, 2019). This was a great risk at the time as public protests were prohibited. Their choice of venue was to ensure that they were noticed by the government and that they could gain information on their children’s whereabouts. Following this, they made it a practice to assemble every Thursday.
Slowly, more and more women joined them each Thursday. With time, the Mothers set up an international campaign to resist the spread of propaganda by the military regime, drawing global attention in the process (Meade, 2016). A year after its founding, hundreds of women mobilized each week, and marched every Thursday. They found strength in each other, drew press attention, and continued to show up. The women wore white headscarves that were embroidered with the names and dates of birth of their disappeared children (Hunter, 2019).
A powerful global movement
The mothers recognized that if they needed to shift the needle on their protests, they would have to rely on support from outside. They looked for allies through the media, and made it a point to make their protest prominent at every turn. For example, during the 1978 Football World Cup in Argentina, the mothers demonstrated at the Plaza, and were covered by international media outlets that were in the country for the event (Meade, 2016).
The mothers also drew support from French nationals Leonie Duquet and Alice Domon, both nuns, who were also sadly taken during the Dirty War and forcibly disappeared. This disappearance also drew international ire, as the UN stepped in to demand an investigation of human rights abuses in Argentina. However, the Argentinian government denied responsibility for them (Meade, 2016).
Meeting with repression
As the women’s movement steadily gained strength, the military government responded with some brutality. At first, the government labelled the women “las locas,” meaning “the mad women” (Meade, 2016). However, with time, given that their sustained efforts drew international attention, the women began to rely on international avenues to pressure the government into accountability, and the government responded with brutality.
On December 10, 1977, the women published a newspaper advertisement carrying the names of their missing children. That night, one of the founders of the movement, Azucena Villaflor, was kidnapped from her home and taken to a torture centre. Following this, she was taken on a “death flight” over the ocean, where she – along with other abductees – was drugged, stripped, and either flung into the sea or thrown overboard. Two other founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Esther Careaga and Maria Eugenia Bianco, were forcibly disappeared, too.
In 1983, some of the former military officers began to reveal information on some of the regime’s human rights violations. The military ultimately admitted that over 9,000 abducted people remained unaccounted for, but the mothers maintain that as many as 30,000 are missing – most of whom, it appears, are presumed dead. In 2005, DNA identification was performed across many mass graves, and human remains were exhumed, and then cremated or buried. Several of the movement’s prominent supporters’ remains were never found.
Persisting for change
The Mothers never gave up their pressure on the government even after the military authority gave way for a civilian government in 1983 (McDonnell, 2006). From 1984 onward, they relied on the support of American geneticist Mary-Claire King to use DNA testing to identify remains in the areas where the bodies of the disappeared were found. This led to the creation of a massive body of evidence. The government then held a national commission to collect testimonies on the disappeared, and this process drew in hundreds of witnesses. In 1985, prosecution of the men indicted for crimes began. The military threatened a coup to resist prosecution, and the Ley de Punto Final (Pardon Laws), a new law, was adopted in 1986 to put the prosecution on hold.
However, in 2003, the Pardon Laws were repealed, and in 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. The prosecution of war crimes resumed, and several military and security officers were convicted and sentenced (Femenia & Gil, 1987).
The group announced its final annual March of Resistance at the Plaza de Mayo on January 26, 2006, saying that the enemy wasn’t in the Government House anymore. The women continue to organize and struggle for human rights in Latin America and beyond (Koepsel, 2011).
References
Femenía, N. A., & Gil, C. A. (1987). Argentina's Mothers of Plaza de Mayo: the mourning process from junta to democracy. Feminist Studies, 13(1), 9-18.
Hunter, Clare (2019). Threads of life: A history of the world through the eye of a needle. London: Sceptre.
Koepsel, Rachel (2011). "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo: First Responders for Human Rights." https://www.du.edu/korbel/criic/humanitarianbriefs/rachelkoepsel.pdf
McDonnell, P. J. (2006). Argentines Remember a Mother Who Joined the ‘Dis appeared,’. Los Angeles Times.
Meade, Teresa A. (19 January 2016). A history of modern Latin America: 1800 to the present (Second ed.). Chichester, West Sussex.
Partnoy, Alicia (March 2007). "Textual Strategies to Resist Disappearance and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo". CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 9 (1).
