Five women over 90 years old, wearing a white headscarf, circle the Pirámide de Mayo in front of the Casa Rosada, the seat of the Argentine government.
It's Thursday and it's round 2,298 of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
Almost half a century has passed since the first time, on April 30, 1977, that a group of women became the most unexpected adversary of the Argentine dictatorship.
They were mostly housewives looking everywhere for their missing children.
Some suspected they might have been grandmothers and wanted to find their captive-born grandchildren as well.
They were looking for them alone, until one Thursday they decided to join and claim together with the hope of being received by the dictator, Jorge Rafael Videla.
When a policeman told them that they couldn't stay there and they had to move around, they began to walk around the square.
They came back, they come back, every week.
When they are gone, they know that others will follow in their footsteps.
"Our fight will continue, the Argentine people will continue," says the president of Plaza de Mayo, Hebe de Bonafini.
Born in 1928, she married at the age of 14 and had three children: Jorge, Raúl and María Alejandra.
The two men were kidnapped and disappeared during the dictatorship and her husband, Humberto, died in 1982, before Argentina regained democracy.
Bonafini remembers the loneliness with which they searched for her children in the early years, but her desire to embrace them again always prevailed over fear.
They did not even give up when three of the founding Mothers - Azucena Villaflor, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga and Mary Ponce de Bianco - were kidnapped.
“It was very hard when they murdered Azucena, Esther and Mary.
They were kidnapped, tortured, raped and thrown into the river alive.
We were left in the greatest abandonment, with great loneliness and no one wanted to return to the square, the families told us: 'Don't go any further, what are you doing, they are going to kill you all'”, De Bonafini recalls, “We went house to house to convince a lot of mothers to come back and start over.”
Nora Cortiñas during a protest demanding justice for her disappeared son Carlos Gustavo Cortiñas. ENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
The 'mad women of Plaza de Mayo', as the military called them, became a worldwide symbol of resistance to the Argentine dictatorship.
They traveled abroad to tell what was happening in their country.
They filed complaints with international organizations, such as the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which visited the country in 1979. When the country regained democracy in 1983, they were the battering ram to overthrow the impunity of the repressors and shout Never Again. To date, 1,058 people have been sentenced in Argentina for crimes against humanity perpetrated during the dictatorship and at least 600 others still remain to be tried. who have never given information on the whereabouts of their loved ones.
The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo who were looking for their grandchildren, children of their missing children, knocked on the doors of science to find them and found an answer in genetics: DNA allowed to confirm the filiation.
With this method, the identity of Paula Eva Logares was restored in 1984. She was the 23rd granddaughter found by Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, but she was the first to know who her parents were through genetic analysis.
The results determined that she was the daughter of Mónica Sofía Grinspon and Ernesto Claudio Logares and not of the appropriators who raised her during the first eight years of her life.
“We did not stay crying, but we went out to meet our peers, whom we knew for having a double search, that of our daughters and that of the grandchildren born in the clandestine centers.
That solidarity is present today and we will not stop looking for them as long as we have life and lucidity.
We have found 130 grandchildren, but there are about 300 missing and we don't know where they are”, says the head of Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto.
This 91-year-old woman defines herself as "one more woman from Argentina, mother of four children, teacher and school director, who while she is alive will work to repair the permanent damage that the last civic-military dictatorship did to us."
In 1977, the military kidnapped Laura, her eldest daughter, who was pregnant.
De Carlotto retired early to look for her and also look for her grandson or granddaughter.
He was a male and he found it.
She was 83 years old and he was 36 when she held him in her arms for the first time.
Laura would have already turned 60 if the military had not murdered her at 24.
Estela de Carlotto, in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2014. Leonardo Alvarez Hernandez (Getty Images)
Carlotto says that 12 Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo are still alive throughout the country, but only four are still active: the rest "are very sick."
She is not sure how many there were, but she does remember that there were many and that her search no longer depends only on them: “The day there is not a single Grandmother, our grandchildren will follow, who know how to work and have committed themselves to looking for their brothers".
One of those grandchildren is Guillermo Amarilla Molfino.
He was born in captivity in the Campo de Mayo military estate, where one of the large clandestine detention centers operated during the dictatorship.
Today, at the age of 44, he works in the space of memory in which another of them was transformed, the Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy (ESMA).
In the Open House for Identity there is a mural with the faces of more than 70 Grandmothers.
There is also a photograph in which Guillermo Amarilla Molfino is seen with a huge smile embracing his three brothers.
"Only a couple of days had passed since we met again," he recalls in front of the image.
He was 29 years old and a genetic analysis had just confirmed his suspicions: he was not the son of an Army intelligence officer and his wife, but of Guillermo Amarilla and Marcela Esther Molfino, members of the Montoneros guerrilla organization kidnapped in 1979 and missing.
“Identity is a universal right, but we don't become a person overnight because of a genetic sample.
Identity is built by establishing links with relatives and sowing memories that make up our lives, such as the meeting with my brothers, with my uncles, aunts, the birth of my nephews.
I already have 15 years of memories”, reflects Amarilla Molfino.
The 98th grandson found by Grandmothers works today as a guide for students who visit the former ESMA and thus contributes to keeping alive the memory of one of the darkest pages of Argentine history.
Nearly 5,000 people were detained on that property during the military regime, of which only a handful survived.
His testimonies have been key to prosecute and convict those responsible for state terrorism.
In turn, Amarilla Molfino also participates in the search for the nearly 300 grandchildren who still do not know their true identity.
“The Grandmothers did the most difficult thing, we already have the path marked out, from science, with the National Genetic Data Bank, and from justice, with sentences handed down such as the systematic plan to steal babies.
The biggest challenge we have I think is the fight against time.
There are Grandmothers who have not yet found their grandchildren and they are people who perhaps have uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers and who are being deprived of knowing their own history”, she laments.
Guillermo Amarilla Molfino, grandson recovered by the grandmothers and mothers of Plaza de Mayo.
ENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
Adriana Metz is one of the women who inherits the quest.
She was one year old when the military broke into her house and took away her pregnant mother, Graciela Romero, and her father, Raúl Metz.
Some neighbors took care of her baby until her paternal grandparents were able to go look for her.
From the city of Mar del Plata, where he lives, he speaks with admiration of those Grandmothers who fight to disrupt the macabre plan that the dictatorship devised to steal children and that they would never be located again: "They did not expect that these women, whom they called Crazy, they were going to look for them in Argentina and all over the world”.
"There is a whole family looking for my brother," says Metz.
Family absences became even more painful when she gave birth to her children: "That's when I realized what it meant not to have had my mother and when I saw my two children interact, I realized how much I needed my brother" .
Throughout her life she has written letters to him and she has had many imaginary conversations with him.
“At this point the roast I was thinking of sharing with him could perhaps be a salt-free meal,” she jokes.
“One day in Buenos Aires I ran into Estela and told her: 'Thank you, thank you for teaching us to search' and she replied: 'Thank you for choosing to learn'.
When they are no longer there, we will continue looking,” says Metz.
The seeds of Memory, Truth and Justice that the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo planted 45 years ago have grown and multiplied throughout the country.
The historic mobilization of 2017 against the court ruling that granted benefits to imprisoned repressors waved the Mothers and Grandmothers handkerchief as a symbol and evidenced the great support that their struggle has in Argentine society.
The covid-19 pandemic kept these tireless fighters off the streets, but the vaccines allowed them to get out again.
"I was too bad.
I had a lot of stress, a lot of anguish, I ended up being paralyzed in a wheelchair.
But I got out of there and started walking again because I am surrounded by love, love, love,” says Nora Cortiñas, head of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo - Founding Line.
Protest of the mothers in Plaza de Mayo, in May 2022. ENRIQUE GARCIA MEDINA
For five months, Cortiñas, 92, has been taking singing classes and last week he debuted with the folklorist and former Kirchnerist Culture Minister Teresa Parodi in the auditorium of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires.
“Beyond silence, beyond oblivion, our companions, our loved ones, go with you and with me.
They did not count on that, they have not disappeared, they could not with them, nor could they with you”, they sang together with the university students present.
This woman who left everything during the dictatorship to look for her son Gustavo, has also extended her militancy to the new challenges of this century, such as the defense of the environment and gender equality, among others.
“You are the height of the enemy you have decided to face, that is why the highest peak in the world is in Argentina and measures one meter fifty”, says Gerardo Szalkowicz, author of the book
Norita: the Mother of all battles
.
Next to her, Cortiñas narrows his eyes and smiles, pressing the photo of her son against her chest.
“There are few Mothers left and we are all over 90 years old.
But there are brothers, sisters, grandsons, granddaughters, all of you, we leave you the post so that you can continue”, she encourages.
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