Madres De Plaza De Mayo

On March 24, 1976, 9 months before the date set for general elections in Argentina, a military coup d'état [Page 887]overthrew the national government under the pretext of restoring order to the country. The military government implemented an authoritarian and repressive response to the struggle led by popular sectors. Thus Argentina entered the bloodiest era of its history. Terror was installed in society through what was called the dirty war, based on the abduction, torture, and death of militant workers, students, professionals, intellectuals, youth in the military service, housewives, journalists, and others. Thirty thousand people disappeared and were murdered, and thousands of people went into exile. Those children who were arrested together with their parents or born in clandestine detention centers were abducted by the armed forces.

The mothers of the abducted children became aware of each other's existence as they pilgrimaged to the places where they sought information about their sons and daughters. These places included the Ministry of Home Affairs, police precincts, jails, and branches of the Catholic Church. Eventually, in April 1977, under the leadership of Azucena Villaflor de Vincenti, the founder of the movement, they went to the Plaza de Mayo to demand information about their children's fate. Soon afterward, the Thursday silent demonstrations in Plaza de Mayo started. Between December 8 and December 10, 1977, three of the founding mothers, Azucena Villaflor de De Vicenti, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, and María Ponce del Bianco, were abducted, tortured at the Navy School of Mechanics, and thrown—still alive—into the Río de la Plata during a “death flight.” This was a practice consisting in throwing the “disappeared” into the Río de la Plata from military airplanes or helicopters. Their bodies washed up on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean and they were buried anonymously. After the fall of the dictatorship, a forensic team exhumed and identified the bodies as those of the three founding mothers.

In 1986, the movement split into two movements: Madres de Plaza de Mayo and Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Línea Fundadora [Founding Line]. Both became political actors. They stand for the exercise of social motherhood: entering the public sphere in order to search for all disappeared sons and daughters and to demand justice. They continue to act as defenders of the interests of the most vulnerable social sectors. They have chosen to continue the fight begun by their children. In fact, Hebe Bonafini, who led the group that split off, claimed that they were the first mothers in history to whom their children gave birth.