Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo



The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo) is an association of Argentine mothers whose children were "disappeared" during the Dirty War of the military dictatorship, between 1976 and 1983. They organized while trying to learn what had happened to their children, and began to march in 1977 at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, in front of the Casa Rosada presidential palace, in public defiance of the government's state terrorism intended to silence all opposition.

Origins of the movement
The Mothers' association was formed by women who had met each other while trying to find their missing sons and daughters. Many of the disappeared were believed to have been abducted by agents of the Argentine government during the years known as the Dirty War (1976–1983); the "disappeared" were often tortured and killed before their bodies were disposed of in rural areas or unmarked graves. The 14 founders of the group were Azucena Villaflor de De Vincenti, Berta Braverman, Haydée García Buelas; María Adela Gard de Antokoletz, Julia, María Mercedes and Cándida Gard (four sisters); Delicia González, Pepa Noia, Mirta Baravalle, Kety Neuhaus, Raquel Arcushin, and Senora De Caimi. They started demonstrations on the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the Casa Rosada presidential palace, on 30 April 1977.

In that period, many people were highly fearful of attracting the government's attention, as it was exterminating the opposition. Taking strength together by marching in public, with some coverage by the press, by the following year, hundreds of women participated, gathering in the Plaza for weekly demonstrations. They made signs with photos of their children and brandished their children's names. The government tried to marginalize and trivialize their work by calling them "las locas" (the madwomen).

Together with the number of disappeared, the movement grew and gained international attention during the years of the Dirty War. The mothers cultivated international attention, seeking to build pressure by other governments against the Argentine dictatorship by publicizing the many stories of the "disappeared". In 1978, when Argentina’s hosted the World Cup, the Mothers' demonstrations at the Plaza were covered by the international press corps in town for the sporting event. Villaflor had been searching for one of her sons and her daughter-in-law for six months. The government arranged for her to be taken to the ESMA concentration camp on 8 December 1978.

The military has admitted that over 9,000 of those kidnapped are still unaccounted for, but the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo say that the number of missing is closer to 30,000. Most are presumed dead. An estimated 500 of the missing are the children born in concentration camps or prison to pregnant 'disappeared' women; the babies were given in illegal adoptions to military families and others associated with the regime. Their mothers were generally believed killed. The numbers are hard to determine due to the secrecy surrounding the abductions.

During this period, Azucena Villaflor, Esther Careaga and María Eugenia Bianco, three of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, were also "disappeared". After the fall of the military regime, a civilian government commission held in 1984 put the number of disappeared at close to 11,000. Human rights groups and the Mothers believe the figure is much higher, because the military and security forces destroyed records before ceding power to a democratic government.

Unidentified bodies continue to be found related to those years. For instance, in January 2005, the body of a French nun was exhumed without an identity. Léonie Duquet, a supporter of the Mothers, had "disappeared" during the years of the military dictatorship and was feared dead. Her disappearance had increased international outrage towards the Argentine military government. DNA tests concluded on August 30, 2005, confirmed that the body exhumed in January was that of Duquet.

In mid-2005, a forensics team also identified the remains of Azucena Villaflor, Esther Careaga and María Eugenia Bianco, all pioneer Mothers of the Plaza. Villaflor's ashes were buried at the foot of the May Pyramid in the Plaza on 8 December 2005.

Divisions and radicalization
In later years, the association grew and became more persistent, demanding answers from the government as to the fates and locations of their missing children. After the military gave up its authority to a civilian government in 1983, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo pressed the new government to help find answers to the kidnappings that took place in the Dirty War years.

Beginning in 1984, teams assisted by the American geneticist Mary King began to use DNA testing to identify remains, when bodies were found.

The government conducted a national commission to collect testimony about the "disappeared", hearing from hundreds of witnesses. In 1985, it began prosecution of men indicted for crimes, beginning with the Trial of the Juntas, in which several high-ranking military officers were convicted and sentenced. The military threatened a coup to prevent widening of prosecutions, and in 1986, Congress passed Ley de Punto Final, to end the prosecutions.

In 1986, the Mothers association split into two factions. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – Founding Line focuses on legislation to help in recovering remains and bringing ex-officials to justice.

In addition, together with Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the Mothers have identified 256 missing children who were generally adopted soon after being born to mothers in prison or camps who were later "disappeared". Seven of the identified children have died. Thirty-one of the children were returned to their biological families. In 13 cases, the adoptive and biological families agreed to raise the children jointly. Other cases are in court in custody battles.

In the course of their struggle, many of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo began to identify with their children's political ideals and have worked to carry them forward. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association faction, led by Hebe de Bonafini, takes a more political approach. These women believe that their children were disappeared, and that most were likely tortured and murdered. They have refused any financial compensation offered by the government for the loss of their children. Many said that they would not recognize the deaths (and stop demonstrating) until the government admitted its fault and connection to the Dirty War and the disappearances.

A scholar of the movement, Marguerite Guzman Bouvard, wrote that the association faction wanted "a complete transformation of Argentine political culture" and "envisions a socialist system free of the domination of special interests". The Mothers association is backed by younger militants who support a Cuban-style revolution in Argentina. In the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, Bonafini defended the actions of the airline hijackers, calling them "courageous", stating that many people "had been avenged", and connecting their ideals with the cause of the guerrilla groups in 1970s Argentina. Speaking for the Mothers, she rejected the investigations of alleged Iranian involvement in the 1994 AMIA Bombing (the terrorist attack on the AMIA Jewish community center), saying the Argentine government was serving U.S. interests.

In 2003, Congress repealed the Pardon Laws, and in 2005 the Argentine Supreme Court ruled them unconstitutional. The government re-opened prosecution of war crimes, and former high-ranking military and security officers have been convicted and sentenced in new cases, including for the stealing of babies of the disappeared. The first major figure, Miguel Etcholatz, was convicted and sentenced in 2006.

Final March of Resistance
On 26 January 2006, members of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo Association announced what they said was their final annual March of Resistance at the Plaza de Mayo, saying "the enemy isn't in the Government House anymore." They acknowledged the significance of President Néstor Kirchner's success in having the Full Stop Law (Ley de Punto Final) and the Law of Due Obedience repealed and declared unconstitutional. They said they would continued weekly Thursday marches in pursuit of action on other social causes.

The Founding Line faction announced that it would continue both the Thursday marches and the annual marches to commemorate the long struggle of resistance to the Dirty War.

Social involvement and political controversies
The Association remained close to Kirchnerism. They established a newspaper (La Voz de las Madres), a radio station, and a university (Popular University of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo).

The association manages a federally funded housing program, Sueños Compartidos ("Shared Dreams"), which it founded in 2008. By 2011, Sueños Compartidos had completed 5,600 housing units earmarked for slum residents, and numerous other facilities in six provinces and the city of Buenos Aires.

Its growing budgets, which totaled around US$300 million allocated between 2008 and 2011 (of which $190 million had been spent), came under scrutiny. There was controversy when the Chief Financial Officer of Sueños Compartidos, Sergio Schoklender, and his brother Pablo (the firm's attorney) were alleged to have embezzled funds. The Schoklender brothers were convicted in 1981 for the murder of their parents and served 15 years in prison. After gaining Bonafini's confidence, they had managed the project's finances with little oversight from the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo or the program's licensor, the Secretary of Public Works. Their friendship ended in June 2011 after Bonafini learned of irregularities in their handling of the group's finances. Following an investigation ordered by Federal Judge Norberto Oyarbide, the Secretary of Public Works canceled the Sueños Compartidos contract in August 2011. The outstanding projects were transferred to the Undersecretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Significance of voice
The public and collaborative nature of the activism engaged in by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is in stark contrast and opposition to the oppression and silence of the government. Many victims dealt with the stress by "retreating into private worlds and turning inward. As they became separated from each other, their lives were controlled by the terror that influenced every thought, action and feeling". The response of isolation by these individuals allowed the government to maintain a level of control through fear. When the Mothers began to talk to each other and tell their stories, it represented a major break in the habits of isolation. These discussions did not only combat the desired silence and isolation of the government, rather, stories of other mothers and grandmothers served as inspiration for other women to begin searching for their missing children and helped to grow the movement.

There was sufficient transparency due to the women choosing to congregate in the central business district of Buenos Aires, which is the financial and political capital of Argentina. They moved into a physically male-dominated space and ultimately redefined the meaning of an open social space. Furthermore, many of these women were coming to the urban business districts of Buenos Aires from rural parts of Argentina. The Mothers’ movement represented connections between various spheres of life that remained isolated under the dictatorship. It represented connections between the public and private, domestic and public, rural and urban. The voices of the Mothers and Grandmothers have been recorded in many books, magazines, websites and other publications. The continued exposure of the stories of these families, told by the matriarchs of the family, helps to extend the critical public nature of the movement through time and space. Recording these dialogues is critical for awareness of injustices in the future. Not only will there always be a record of the human rights violations that occurred in Argentina's Dirty War, but there will also be a record of the power of group communication and collaboration.

Mothers' movement and other social movements
Furthermore, it maintained a sense of a feminist movement that is in contrast with some traditional understandings of the feminist movement in other countries. Some consider the feminist movement to represent the need for women to move into the roles of society traditionally occupied by men. The Mothers and Grandmothers, however, aided in the expansion of the feminist movement to embrace the values of motherhood. The traditional role of the woman in Argentina was in the household. She was the mother: the nurturer, the protector, the educator of the family and the children. As the Mothers came together in the Plaza de Mayo, they were moving their role into the public eye. The women took responsibility for dealing with their grief by taking any actions they could. Women began to gain experience in organizing and political processes. However, the group was not interested in "challenging the gender system and the sexual division of labor, the …[Mothers] were committed to the preservation of life; and they demanded the right as "traditional" women to secure the survival of their families" (Arditti 80). As Rita Arditti says in her book: "In… [joining together], the Mothers were creating a new form of political participation, outside the traditional party structures and based on the values of love and caring. Motherhood allowed them to build a bond and shape a movement without men". Men were quietly involved in support of the movement. Their quiet support further allowed the women to move into the public arena. Through this process, the women "transformed themselves from ‘traditional’ women defined by their relationships with men (mothers, wives, daughters) into public protesters working on behalf of the whole society".(Arditti 97).

Not only did the Mothers and Grandmothers, somewhat inadvertently, participate in what some would call a feminist movement, the Mothers and Grandmothers also received support from groups across the world fighting for social justice. This helped transform the actions of the Mothers and Grandmothers working to search for their lost family into a broader fight against human rights violations. In Arditti's "Searching For Life", she quotes a woman, Nélida de Navajas: "One of the most beautiful things that came out of my work with the Grandmothers was learning that there was so much interest and solidarity from people in other parts of the world. It was an extraordinarily positive experience.  We have had support from the women's movement, from the CHA (Comité Homosexual Argentino), even the transsexual groups". The implications of the actions of the Mothers extend beyond the need for the Mothers to find their lost children. It has since been revealed that many of the children who were kidnapped that survived were given to and raised by military families within the government. The Mothers and Grandmothers were acting in response to their need to find their children. However, when the truth about the family history of these adopted children becomes public, many of these children were devastated that their past was not what they thought it was.

Grandmothers
The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) is an organization which has the aim of finding the "stolen" babies, whose mothers were killed during the "Dirty War". Its president is Estela Barnes de Carlotto. As of 2008, their efforts have resulted in finding 97 grandchildren.

Awards and prizes

 * In 1992, all members of the Mothers' association were awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought.
 * In 1997, María Adela Gard de Antokoletz was awarded the Gleitsman International Activist Award by the Gleitsman Foundation.
 * In 1999, the organization was awarded the United Nations Prize for Peace Education.
 * On 10 December 2003, the Grandmothers' president, Estela Barnes de Carlotto, was awarded the United Nations Prize in the Field of Human Rights.

Representation in other media

 * The Official Story is a film related to the "stolen babies" cases.
 * Cautiva is another film related to the "stolen babies" cases.
 * An opera entitled Las Madres de la Plaza (2008) premiered in Leffler Chapel at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. It was written in a collaboration of students, staff, and faculty of the school, headed up by James Haines and John Rohrkemper.