Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1977): Argentina's Disappeared

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Madres de Plaza de Mayo) are Argentine women who began gathering in Buenos Aires’s main square on 30 April 1977 to demand news of their children, abducted by the military dictatorship. Wearing white headscarves and walking in silent circles, they became one of the most recognised human rights movements in the world. Their protest defied a regime that killed thousands of its own citizens in secret, including three of the movement’s founders.

Background: the junta and the disappeared

On 24 March 1976 the armed forces overthrew the government of Isabel Perón. A junta led by General Jorge Rafael Videla, Admiral Emilio Massera and Brigadier Orlando Agosti launched what it called the “National Reorganisation Process”, a campaign against left-wing guerrillas and anyone suspected of “subversion”.

Security forces abducted students, trade unionists, journalists, priests and others, held them in secret detention centres, tortured them and in most cases killed them. Many were drugged and thrown from aircraft into the River Plate or the Atlantic. Because officials denied any knowledge of the victims, they became known as the “disappeared” (desaparecidos).

The first gathering

Mothers searching for their children found that police stations, ministries and churches gave them no answers. In the waiting rooms they met each other. Azucena Villaflor, whose son Néstor and his partner had been taken in November 1976, proposed that they go together to the Plaza de Mayo, opposite the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace.

On Saturday 30 April 1977 fourteen women gathered in the square. They soon moved the gathering to Thursdays, when more passers-by would see them. Told by police that gatherings were forbidden, they began to walk in pairs around the May Pyramid at the centre of the plaza, a weekly march that has continued for decades.

Persecution

The regime dismissed the women as “las locas” (the madwomen), but their numbers grew. In 1977 a young man calling himself Gustavo Niño joined them, claiming his brother had disappeared. He was in fact Alfredo Astiz, a naval intelligence officer.

Between 8 and 10 December 1977 a group linked to the movement was abducted, including founders Esther Ballestrino de Careaga and María Ponce de Bianco, the French nuns Alice Domon and Léonie Duquet, and, on 10 December, Azucena Villaflor. They were taken to the Navy Mechanics School (ESMA), a notorious detention centre, and are believed to have been thrown alive from a military aircraft into the sea. In 2005 forensic anthropologists identified remains that had washed ashore in December 1977 as those of Villaflor, Careaga, Ponce de Bianco and Duquet.

Consequences

The mothers kept marching. Foreign journalists, especially during the 1978 World Cup held in Argentina, brought their protest to world attention. Their work, and that of other groups, helped expose the regime’s crimes after Argentina’s defeat in the 1982 war over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas) led to the return of democracy in December 1983.

President Raúl Alfonsín created the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP), whose 1984 report Nunca Más (Never Again) documented 8,961 cases. In the 1985 Trial of the Juntas, Videla and Massera were sentenced to life imprisonment. Later amnesty laws and pardons halted prosecutions, but these were overturned in the 2000s, and in 2011 Astiz was sentenced to life imprisonment.

The movement since 1977

In 1986 the movement split. The Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, led by Hebe de Bonafini, took a more radical political line, while the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo–Founding Line focused on legal justice and recovering remains. Bonafini died in 2022.

A related group, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (Abuelas), was founded in 1977 to find babies born to detained women and given to other families. Using genetic testing, they have helped identify more than 130 of these grandchildren.

Myths and facts

The Mothers are sometimes portrayed as non-political housewives. Most had no previous experience of activism, but their protest was deeply political, and many came to see their children’s causes as their own. Their emphasis on motherhood was also a tactic: it made it harder for the regime to present them as subversives.

Timeline

• 24 March 1976: A military junta seizes power in Argentina.
• 30 April 1977: Fourteen mothers gather in the Plaza de Mayo for the first time.
• October 1977: The mothers wear white headscarves at a pilgrimage to Luján.
• 8–10 December 1977: Azucena Villaflor and other members are abducted and killed.
• December 1983: Democracy is restored under Raúl Alfonsín.
• September 1984: CONADEP delivers its report, Nunca Más.
• 1986: The movement divides into two organisations.
• 2005: The remains of Villaflor and other founders are identified.

Why it matters

The Mothers turned private grief into public protest under a regime that relied on silence and fear. Their persistence helped make “the disappeared” a recognised crime under international law, in the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and inspired families of victims of other dictatorships, such as that which followed the Chilean coup of 1973.