RIGHTS-ARGENTINA: The ‘Madres’ of Civil Resistance

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 2 2002 (IPS) - The Madres (Mothers) de Plaza de Mayo, who met for the first time in Argentina 25 years ago, have never found their sons and daughters, who were abducted by agents of the 1976-83 military dictatorship.

But they have served as an inspiration to a growing number of organisations that have turned to civil resistance in the middle of the worst crisis in Argentine history.

Once-prosperous Argentina, Latin America’s number three economy, is caught up in an unprecedented economic and financial collapse. Unemployment has soared to over 20 percent, and poverty to nearly 50 percent. In late December, the country had five different presidents in less than two weeks.

Against that backdrop, movements resorting to passive resistance, which have taken the Madres as a model in their struggle, are mushrooming.

“Caceroleos” (pot-and-pan-banging protests), roadblocks, neighbourhood assemblies and “escraches” (in which demonstrators publicly “out” corrupt or inept politicians) are the main forms of protest employed by groups that revere the Madres as pioneers.

At the height of the dictatorship, the Madres spontaneously began to meet in the Plaza de Mayo, the square outside the government palace, to demand that their sons and daughters who were taken away by the security forces be returned to their families alive.

That did not occur, but the Madres’ spirit and their 25-year struggle have helped motivate people to try to do something about their troubles.

Staging roadblocks is one form of protest that became frequent in the mid-1990s, when unemployment began to climb. Since then, the poor, the unemployed and public employees periodically throw up blockades across streets and highways, for an entire day or even longer.

The caceroleos, a spontaneous reaction to the four-year recession, began on Dec 19, the day before then-president Fernando de la Rúa was forced by protests, food riots and looting to step down.

The banging on pots and pans was first heard from inside people’s homes, then on street corners, and finally in the Plaza de Mayo, which has been the site of the largest demonstrations in the history of Argentina.

In turn, the caceroleos gave rise in December to the movement of assemblies, in which local residents meet on street corners or plazas in their neighbourhoods, and send delegates to a weekly “multi-neighbourhood” meeting.

Account-holders, who for five months have held protests outside banks demanding the release of their frozen deposits, began to model their actions on the “escraches”, which were originally demonstrations to “out” former torturers or officials of the de facto regime, held outside their homes.

The escraches were devised by Hijos, a human rights group made up of the sons and daughters of people who went missing during the dictatorship. The group’s members identify the home of a former “repressor” and inform his neighbours of his past, while organising a protest outside his home.

People whose savings have been partially frozen since early December to prevent a stampede of money from the banks began to hold protests in January in downtown Buenos Aires, banging pots and pans and gluing posters or painting graffiti on the banks, which they accuse of swindling savers.

The Madres de Plaza de Mayo are proud to observe the proliferation of movements, in which they are often invited to participate.

But the 14 mothers of missing sons and daughters who decided to meet on Apr 30, 1977 near the pyramid in the Plaza de Mayo, outside the seat of government, were very much alone, said Josefina de Noia, whose daughter, a young psychologist, was taken away in 1976 and never heard from again.

De Noia was the first to arrive at the Plaza de Mayo that day. Although the regime had been in power for just a year, thousands of supposed “subversives” and opponents of the dictatorship had already “disappeared.”

“We met there to go together to the government palace. But since it was Saturday and no one was there, we decided to return the following Friday,” said the elderly activist.

By Friday, the number of women meeting to exchange information about the fate of their missing children had climbed to 30. The police demanded that they “circulate,” because meetings in public spaces were banned by the state of siege.

So the Madres began to walk around the pyramid slowly, in pairs and arm in arm, every week.

The police often threw them out of the square, and the Madres would take refuge in nearby churches. Two of them were abducted themselves, and remain missing. Nora Cortiñas, another of the movement’s founders, was arrested six times.

The restoration of democracy in 1983 brought both good and bad news. At first, the political parties and trade unions praised the Madres’ struggle, and the former members of the ruling junta were tried, convicted and thrown behind bars.

But amnesty laws were passed protecting from legal action those who were merely “following orders,” and the former commanders of the dictatorship were pardoned by president Carlos Menem (1989- 99).

In the meantime, the Madres split into two groups. The faction led by Hebe de Bonafini began to work with leftist parties, while the “Madres de la Línea Fundadora” (Mothers of the Founding Line) created a more horizontal movement, without strong leadership roles, focused mainly on simply offering their testimony.

Three years ago, de Bonafini’s movement opened a Popular University that gives courses in human rights, political economy, art, filmmaking and social psychology. It also holds the country’s biggest archive on human rights violations.

According to official reports, around 11,000 people were tortured and “disappeared” during the dictatorship, although the Madres and other human rights groups put the number at twice that or more. None of the “desaparecidos” or missing people have ever been found alive.

But the Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo, who began to organise to search for their grandchildren – babies who were born to their daughters or daughters-in-law in captivity, or small children who were abducted along with their parents – have found 70 of them.

“We were not able to rescue any of our missing sons and daughters. But we continued ahead with our struggle, even though we were afraid, and continued learning from our experience,” said María Adela Gard, another of the women who took part in the first of the gatherings in the Plaza de Mayo, which were held weekly for 25 years.

Since then, the presence of the Madres provides living testimony in every protest by workers, students or human rights activists, and in solidarity concerts, roadblocks, caceroleos or demonstrations outside the homes of military coup leaders or torturers.

“They were the spearhead of a struggle that began shortly after the 1976 coup d’etat, and they are still fighting,” road blockade picket Jorge Nuñez, a member of the Congress of Argentine Workers in La Matanza, the poorest and most populous suburb of Buenos Aires, told IPS.

“They give us strength,” explained Nuñez. “Their chins didn’t tremble when they had to take to the streets under the military regime, and they have always transmitted great confidence to us, especially to those who are suffering the brunt of the poverty and fear, and who don’t even have the energy to fight.”

Gladys Quinteros, a schoolteacher, also thought about the Madres de Plaza de Mayo when she decided to go on her own to a square in her greater Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Merlo the night before the de la Rúa government fell.

Quinteros felt that by going to the Merlo city square, as thousands of people in the capital were heading to the Plaza de Mayo, she would symbolically join the protest demanding that de la Rúa resign.

“At that time I was alone, with my daughter and an Argentine flag. I thought about the Madres, and I started to walk, by myself, around the flagpole in the middle of the square,” she told IPS.

The following week, dozens of neighbours accompanied her in the first of what became weekly neighbourhood assemblies in Merlo.

When the demonstrators numbered in the hundreds, a group of thugs appeared one day and beat them with sticks until they dispersed. But the week after, thousands showed up at the neighbourhood assembly, including a small group of Madres wearing their trademark white headscarves.

The Madres began to wear white scarves on their heads, tied at the throat, to symbolise the cloth diapers that their children wore as babies. The names of their sons or daughters are embroidered around the edge of the scarves.