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“We Want Them Back Alive”:
How Argentina’s Mothers of the Disappeared
Challenged the Paralysis of Fear
Between 1976 and 1983, a military dictatorship ruled Argentina. Human rights were violated. Many journalists were killed. Thousands of people working to improve the country disappeared. Many of their relatives disappeared. Fear was used by the military government to maintain its grip on power. On April 30, 1977 about a dozen mothers of those who had disappeared gathered in the Plaza de Mayo (May Square). Gradually, as others joined them over the next months and years, they articulated their basic call: “They took them away alive, we want them returned alive.” Their relentless persistence was not without cost, including beatings, detentions and the killing of some of their members. Nevertheless, their courageous and loving witness contributed significantly to the nonviolent struggle for the eventual restoration of democracy in Argentina. The following excerpt from Peter Ackerman and Jack Duvall’s book, A Force More Powerful (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000, pp. 268-278) highlights the power of love to transform fear. We are invited to find ways to challenge paralyzing fear in our own lives and in our society.
On that first day, there were only fourteen in the resistance force – an improbable troop of women in their middle years, anonymous and ordinary, filled with anxiety, not knowing whether the gray hand of authority would crush them or merely brush them away… They had gone to the Plaza de Mayo, in the civic heart of Buenos Aires, in search of another kind of independence – freedom from an uncertainty more haunting than grief. “We arrived separately,” recalled one of the women, Maria del Rosario de Cerruti. “We wore flat shoes so we could make a run for it if they came after us. To demonstrate in front of Government House was very dangerous.” But they were linked securely as climbers on a rock cliff by the rope line of what they had in common. All were mothers; all had children who had disappeared….
The women, whose number soon grew to several score, already sensed that they were testing a surface without knowing what was beneath. Many others elsewhere in the world who had lived under dictators could have told them what was below: the mendacity of authoritarian control. In the clear air, life in Argentina preceded as it always had. Given the façade of normalcy, the regime seemed unassailable. No one appeared eager to penetrate it, except now for these desperate women…
[Between 1977 and 1983, the government] established covert detention centers and special task forces trained to capture and interrogate suspects. “First we will kill all the subversives,” explained the military governor of Buenos Aires, “then we will kill their collaborators; then…their sympathizers, then…those who remain indifferent; and finally we will kill the timid.”
But killing was not enough… The junta’s poison of choice was a campaign of state-sponsored terror. It would employ the usual techniques of kidnappings, interrogations, torture, and secret detention…. In time, as many as 30,000 Argentines would disappear, and each disappearance was concealed and denied; survivors were left with only an empty place, as if the loved one never existed….
At first the mothers of the disappeared felt only numb loss. Some were so shattered they could not eat, sleep, or rise from bed. But as they realized the no one else would solve the mystery of their missing children for them, they began a melancholy migration from the world of their families and homes out onto Argentina’s cold plains of political lawlessness. …They resolved to deny the junta what it most needed: silence….
It was [Azucena de Villaflor de De Vincente] who suggested that they take their grievance into the bright light of the Plaza de Mayo and like a flock of ancient mariners, tell their story.
“At first we didn’t march together in the square,” remembered Maria del Rosario. “We sat on the benches with our knitting or stood in small groups… We had to speak to each other quickly, in low voices so it didn’t look like we were having a meeting. Then, when the police…began pointing their rifles at us and telling us to move on…we began to walk in twos around the edge of the square… There were so few of us we were hardly noticed and we had to make sure the public knew we existed. We wanted people to see us…so we began to walk in the center of the square, around the monument.”…
By the last month of 1977, las Madres de Plaza de Mayo, as the women were now known, had grown from 14 reluctant housewives to about 150 protesting mothers, who were in touch with hundreds more, all intent on locating their children.
…Where the generals had thrown a cape of legitimacy over its crimes, the mothers lifted it. Despite threats and even the disappearance of some of their own, they refused to submit.
…As the century ended, the survivors among the brave women who led the first wave of Argentina’s nonviolent rebellion in 1977 were in their sixties, seventies, and eighties. Many still felt the effects of the days and nights of marching or queuing in government ministries, of beatings and detentions. But the force the had fashioned became a permanent feature of the Argentine political landscape, as Argentine women, and aggrieved women elsewhere in Latin America as well, put on white scarves. In the twentieth century there was no better emblem of the fact that replacing fear with truth is the first step toward freedom.