Mothers during the Argentine dictatorship of 1976-1983 searching for their children who had been abducted by the military. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Madres de Plaza de Mayo) developed into a unique women’s movement of nonviolent resistance to tyranny.
The repression carried out by the Argentine military, which seized power on March 24, 1976, developed into a state terrorist plan targeting civilians. Men and women of all ages were abducted by security forces in clandestine operations and taken to one of the 360 hidden detention centers in the country. Usually tortured, victims were often killed in extrajudicial executions and buried in collective, unmarked graves or thrown to the sea from airplanes while still alive. Almost 10,000 people are officially reported as desaparecidos ("disappeared"), although human rights organizations estimate the real figure reaches 30,000.
Driven by anguish about the unknown fate of their children, the mothers of the disappeared–together with other relatives and human rights supporters–stood as the only civilian resistance to the military. Their denunciations contributed to the international discrediting of the regime and eventually to its fall. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo did not manage to find their children. Instead, they provided a model of resistance against authoritarian dictatorship and greatly contributed to the reconstruction of Argentine civil society.
The mothers of the disappeared had met each other while trying to determine the whereabouts of their sons and daughters. As the mothers realized that abductions of their children followed similar patterns that amounted to a systematic plan, they decided to act together, uniting their efforts and making one claim out of their many personal sufferings. Because the higher authorities refused to grant them an audience, they gathered in front of the seat of the government at the Plaza de Mayo.
When they first demonstrated on April 30, 1977, there were only fourteen mothers. Ignored by passersby in central Buenos Aires and unacknowledged by the local press, they kept meeting every week, defying police intimidation. As policemen ordered them to keep moving, hoping to get them away from the square, the mothers began to walk in twos around the pyramid in the center of the Plaza de Mayo. Thus began their tradition of circling around this monument. They also began to wear white scarves, originally their children’s diapers, as a way of recognizing each other in public. Although branded by the military as terrorists or madwomen, they were generally middle-class housewives without any previous political experience. They gradually acquired consciousness of their resources and skills and increasingly politicized their action. The enormous risk these women took is illustrated by the fact that some of the Mothers themselves disappeared. Among them was the first president of the movement, Azucena Villaflor de Devicenzi, as well as two French nuns who supported the group, who were abducted after a church meeting in December 1977. Despite this, their movement soon counted some 150 members and had grown to comprise several thousand by the end of the dictatorship in 1983.
The prohibition and persecution of political parties, social organizations, and workers’ unions had left the victims and their relatives in a situation of helplessness and isolation. Fear of state terrorism on one side and public indifference or even mild complicity with the military by broad sectors of Argentine society on the other left the Mothers standing alone against the regime. In the early phase of the movement, their only support came from a few engaged human rights activists and foreign journalists, who helped to make their struggle known abroad. Commitment to human rights by some U.S. State Department officials in the Carter administration, together with pressure exerted by exiled Argentines and a growing international network of humanitarian help, contributed to reverse the isolation of the Mothers. The visit of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in September 1979 backed their credibility by registering thousands of reports of serious human rights violations. The Mothers received further international recognition when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Argentine pacifist Adolfo Perez Esquivel in 1980. In his acceptance speech, he mentioned the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Even if they had evidence of their children’s murders, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo refused to consider them dead as long as the state did not account for and take responsibility for their deaths. When the military passed a law declaring all disappeared dead in 1979, they refused its benefits and insisted in calling their children desaparecidos. Together with other human rights organizations, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo played a decisive role during the transition to democracy in Argentina, managing to place the problem of the missing persons on the agenda of the newly elected government. They were disappointed, however, that the trial of the military chiefs in 1985, ordered by President Raul Alfon-sin (1983-1989), dealt with only the senior members of the junta and did not divulge information about what happened to their children. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo transformed themselves into a political group seeking a just and fair-minded society, maintaining their claim of justice for the military’s crimes while adopting a broader definition of their plea for human rights.
Internal dissent about their role in post-dictatorship Argentina led in 1986 to the split of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo into two groups. The groups differed in their willingness to cooperate with the state, in their involvement in wider social or political causes, and in the way they wished the disappeared to be commemorated or even defined. The Asociacion Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Association of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo) led by the charismatic Hebe Pastor de Bonafini, was opposed to the search for and identification of the corpses of the missing; it rejected any cooperation with the state. Considering themselves "revolutionary mothers," members of the Asociacion thought commemoration should consist of appropriating the political goals of their children and fighting for the ideals of social justice. They founded the Universidad Popular de las Madres (Popular University of the Mothers), where courses such as popular education, history, and political thought were taught.
The other group, Madres de Plaza de Mayo—Linea Fundadora (Founding Line), also stress the singularity of the category of the desaparecido but accepted a wider range of commemorative practices, including individual memorials. They cooperated with other human rights organizations and with official institutions in the identification of corpses and former detention centers and were active in the projected creation of a Museo del Nunca Mas (the Never Again Museum) as well as the construction of a memorial including the names of all the disappeared. Both groups continue to demonstrate every Thursday at 3.30 p.m. in the Plaza de Mayo.
The struggle of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo has been recognized worldwide as a leading example of pacific resistance to dictatorship and has had a significant moral impact in Argentine society. Among feminist scholars, however, there is controversy about the extent to which the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo meant to challenge patriarchal structures (Taylor 1997, 193-207). Some authors think that their struggle, although worthwhile and encouraging for other oppressed women, was based on a traditional understanding of motherhood and reinforced the role of women as suffering, self-sacrificing housewives, leaving the patriarchal values of Argentine society intact. Other authors, such as Marguerite Bouvard (1994), think instead that these women called into question the very notion of motherhood, politicizing its otherwise merely biological definition. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo consider themselves born by their own children, that is, that through searching for them, they were born anew into political consciousness. They decided to "socialize" their motherhood, stating that every disappeared person is the child of every mother. Such conceptualizations, according to Bouvard, go beyond all traditional definitions and revolutionize the notion of motherhood.
The original group also led to the formation of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, made up of women who had not only children but also grandchildren among the missing. They started demonstrating together with the other mothers but soon discovered that they shared the more specific goal of finding their abducted grandchildren. These children had been kidnapped with their parents or were born in captivity in clandestine detention centers, where their pregnant mothers were kept alive until delivery and killed shortly after giving birth. These infants were given up for adoption, often to families of military or police personnel, and because their true identities were hidden from them, they grew up not knowing their past. The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo dedicated themselves to the investigation of their whereabouts, the use of DNA testing to find their kin, and the restitution of their identity. By 2004, 79 out of an estimated 500 kidnapped children, who were now young adults, had been identified, and most were able to recover their true history and establish contact with their biological families.
