Buenos Aires – After nearly three decades of gathering every Thursday in this capital’s main square to walk in a circle around a monument to demand information on their missing children and punishment for torturers and killers, Argentina’s Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, many of them nearing 80, are giving their tired feet a rest.
The women are ending a chapter in the struggle for human rights in this South American nation Thursday with their last “resistance march.”
After a 24-hour march around the statue-topped obelisk across from the seat of the Argentine government, the last of the protests that began in 1977 will conclude Thursday evening.
For 1,500 consecutive Thursdays, the Mothers have met at the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential palace to demand justice for those whose rights were violated.
The head of the Association of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafini, is expected to deliver an address to explain why the protests, a symbol of resistance to Argentina’s military dictatorship and against a succession of democratically elected administrations that failed to live up to the expectations of human rights groups, are ending.
De Bonafini has said that the protests were ending because the women “no longer have an enemy in the presidential palace,” since President Nestor Kirchner has “opened the doors and has done things that no one expected,” such as scrapping the laws that granted immunity to soldiers involved in kidnappings, torture and killings.
“It’s not that the Mothers changed. It is that we are in a new political time in the country and in Latin America,” De Bonafini said.
The march coming to a conclusion Thursday was backed by other human rights groups and leftist organizations, as well as by artists who have been performing since the early morning hours on stages set up in the square.
Maria de Dominguez, one of the women taking part in the march, told EFE that her experiences over the past 29 years have been “very satisfying at times, but very painful.”
“We have suffered a lot over the years without knowing what happened to our children. But just like we lost our loved ones, we have gained many others, who are the ones who fight with us,” Dominguez said.
The veteran rights activist, now 74, traveled to the capital for the march from the city of Mendoza, some 1,000 kilometers (about 620 miles) from Buenos Aires.
“The fight is never enough and the sacrifice is never enough for our children,” Dominguez said, but many of the women are “very old and some are sick.”
Some 200 people marched behind the Mothers, most of them young people like Manuel Faisa, a 22-year-old drama student who said the most important thing to remember was “the perseverance of these women, the most difficult thing to keep doing.”
“Sometimes you have the drive, a passion, but making it into a way of life to protect and convey the memory is very difficult. I’m an example,” Faisa said.
The decision to end the weekly protests sparked a debate with other human rights groups.
The president of the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Estela Carloto, said that even though “it’s ending in a positive light, it’s necessary to continue demanding. No one knows where the 30,000 disappeared are, all the killers are not in prison and we have not found the 500 stolen children yet.”
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo-Founding Line, a group that represents some of the mothers, held its own resistance march last month at which they placed in the square the ashes of group founder Azucena Villaflor, who was kidnapped and killed by the military regime.
In July 2005, a team of forensic anthropologists identified the remains of Villaflor and two other members of her group, Maria Eugenia Ponce and Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, in the cemetery in the town of General Lavalle, some 300 kilometers (185 miles) south of Buenos Aires.
In April 1977, while waiting to meet with the secretary of an army chaplain, the then-53-year-old Villaflor uttered the words that months later would lead to her death.
“Alone we’re not going to achieve anything. Why not go together to the Plaza de Mayo? When he sees that there are lots of us, (dictator Jorge) Videla will have to meet with us,” she suggested to other women like herself who were suffering from the unexplained disappearence of their children amid the junta’s “dirty war” against real and – more often – imagined subversives.
On April 30, 1977, with white scarves on their heads, 14 women united by pain and anguish gathered for the first time in the Plaza de Mayo to demand information on their loved ones from the authorities.
Because the military regime had prohibited public gatherings, the police forced them to keep walking, so they walked repeatedly around the obelisk in the middle of the square, in what became their signature method of demonstrating.
According to official figures, some 18,000 people disappeared in Argentina during the 1976-1983 military dictatorhip, while human rights groups put the figure at 9,000 to 30,000.
Over the years, participants in the repression have described methods of disposal of political opponents’ bodies intended to preclude their eventual discovery, including burial in unmarked graves, cremation and dumping in the Atlantic Ocean from military aircraft.
