Las Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo
The question posed here made me think of the human rights movements in Latin America that took place when democratic governments came back to power replacing military dictatorships.
During the 1970s, repressive military governments ruled in many countries of Latin America. Particularly noted for their brutality were the regimes in Argentina and Chile where thousands of people were “disappeared.” The term “disappeared” come to describe those people who were arrested or detained by members of the military and never seen again. It even became a verb – “to be disappeared.” The disappeared, had of course been murdered but because no official explanation was offered as to what happened to them, they became collectively known as “los disaparecidos” or the disappeared.
By the 1990s, democratic governments had returned to power in both countries and movements were born to find out what happened to the disappeared. The families of those who had lost loved ones needed closure and resolution.
“The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” or Las Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina became the best-known of these organizations. They were the mothers of sons and daughters who had “been disappeared.” Every Thursday at noon they gathered for a half hour walk around the landmark plaza in the capital city of Buenos Aires to demand answers about the fate of their loved ones.
An off-shoot organization, The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo Las Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) worked to locate the children kidnapped along with their parents or born while their mothers were in captivity and return them to their biological families. They had some small successes in reuniting some children with their grandparents or other biological family members.
I covered both organizations and their protests while working as a journalist in Latin America ten years ago. The women involved were brave and heroic – it took a lot of courage to begin their movement at a time when no one wanted to speak out against past abuses. But they did so in a way that almost everyone could relate to – not as political activists (which of course, they were) but as mothers and grandmothers. And within the cultural context of Latin America, it would be difficult if not impossible for authorities to attack and arrest a group of middle-aged women whose placards simply demanded to know – “donde estan?” or where are they? After all, who cannot relate to a mother wanting to know the whereabouts of her child.
Like the civil rights movement of the U.S. in the 1960s, they also utilized the tactics of non-violent confrontation. As Martin and Nakayama wrote (p. 417) “this type of confrontation exposes the injustices of society and opens the way for social change.” Based on what we read, I would see their approach as one of viewing conflict as opportunity – in the sense they confronted the government and other political and economic leaders to demand social change and answers. They got both in a sense.
Their movement also promoted concepts of forgiveness – NOT forgetting. There is a difference. This is not the kind of forgiveness that one would give an errant child. The wrongs that were committed were much more grievance. What the mothers and grandmothers accmplished was not dissimilar to the achievements fo the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa that looked into the racial wrongs and the brutal acts committed that occurred during the apartheid era. In Chapter 12 Martin and Nakayama write about forgiveness “as an option to promoting intercultural understanding and reconciliation.”
The mothers and grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo did help make Argentina whole again.
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