It began 40 years ago on an autumn day — on 30 April 1977 — when 14 mothers gathered in Buenos Aires' Plaza de Mayo, in the city's central square. They were seeking an audience with the military authorities.
They wanted to ask the whereabouts of their abducted children. 'Where are our children?' was a question that metamorphosed into a brave act of political resistance and defiance against the brutal 1976–1983 Argentinean military dictatorship.
In Plaza de Mayo, right in front of Argentina's pink government house, the mothers waited and waited for an answer, until the police forced them to move away.
'Circulate,' the threatening, baton-wielding police shouted at them. And so they did. They moved. And then, they marched slowly counter-clockwise in a line, two abreast around the Plaza's white obelisk, built to mark the first anniversary Argentina's independence from Spain in 1816. They have been performing this act of defiance since then, every Thursday at 3:30pm.
The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, one of the most potent movements of resistance against tyranny, was born that day. They began wearing white headscarves with their children's names embroidered on them, and carrying huge hand-made placards with the smiling faces of their missing children. Others hang small photographs around their necks.
In a speech, Hebe de Bonafini, a historical leader of the Mothers, once said: 'Our missing children gave us birth.' When a shroud of silence wrapped the frightened Argentinean society, these brave women raised their voices. They became — as Argentinean philosopher Rubén Dri put it — 'a sign of life in the face of the project of death carried out by the dictatorship'. And it was indeed a terrifying project of death. It is estimated that 30,000 were killed or went 'missing'. Few bodies were ever found.
While the military repression was massive and generalised, young people became the preferred targets. They became enemies of the state. Many years ago an Argentinian journalist sent shivers down my spine when he told me the military effectively 'annihilated a whole a generation of young Argentineans'.
While the military machinery of death was in full operation, one by one new Mothers joined the movement until it became a single unified voice with a single demand: 'They were taken alive, alive we want them returned.'
"Three of the Mothers were abducted, tortured and thrown alive into the Atlantic sea on one of the dictatorship's infamous 'death flights' — the practice of drugging opponents and