Hebe de Bonafini, the founder of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who challenged the Argentine dictatorship

Every dictatorship is monstrous, each in its own way. Starting in 1976, Argentina showed its horror by making the opposing party’s children and grandchildren disappear. During the dictatorship of Videla, which began with the coup of March 24, 1976, at least 30,000 citizens were made to disappear by the military, desapericidos, neither alive nor dead, disappeared without news. Among these also the two children, never found, of Hebe de Bonafinifounder and leader of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayothe Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, the women who took to the streets every Thursday to ask for justice, to be able to get news of their loved ones and of all the other missing persons.

These women decided to take to the streets during the years of dictatorship and to always come back because, also thanks to them, Videla’s regime is no longer there, but there has been no news of many of the missing persons and above all of the children taken from their legitimate parents and entrusted to families linked to the regime.

Again last October, before being hospitalized, like every Thursday in the last 45 years, 93-year-old Hebe de Bonafini took to the streets in front of the Casa Rosada, seat of the Argentine presidency. He had begun in 1977 to ask for news of those who had not returned. During Videla’s regime, opponents were kidnapped, tortured and killed, some thrown from planes into the sea. There was no news of them. It was as if they never existed. The mothers then took to the streets with the cloth they had used on their children as a handkerchief on their heads. Above they wrote the name of the deceased, the date of birth and the date in which he was last seen alive.

Hebe de Bonafini wrote the names of her children: Jorge Omar and Raúl Alfredo. His daughter-in-law, María Elena Bugnone, also disappeared with them. «Before the kidnapping of my children I was a housewife. I wasn’t interested in the country’s political situation or the economic question: they were absolutely foreign to me. But after their disappearance, thanks to the love I felt for them and the search for justice shared with many other mothers, I was able to know a new world. And now I care about everything around me. I realized fundamental facts, which everyone should take care of, because they are crucial for the destiny of the country and for that of thousands of families”.

He wanted his children to return and for the guilty to be punished. He has always refused compensation. «If you sign the economic reparation, you must enter when you believe your son died. I can’t do it because I don’t know. The people who took him away have to tell me,” he said. His figure has been controversial. The association of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo that she defined «a political organization, with a national and popular project of liberation» she was involved in a corruption scandal. She has always been radical, close to Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez capable of defining Spain as a terrorist state for the torture of ETA prisoners and rejoicing in the attacks on the Twin Towers. The association supported the presidency of Nestor Kirchner and then that of Christina Kirchner.

“Our president Hebe de Bonafini has moved house, as she said of the companions who preceded her. She will remain forever in the Plaza de Mayo,” the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Association said. The Argentine government has decreed three days of national mourning for his death. At her funeral she will be greeted with the words that have been used in all the demonstrations: «Hebe, presente, ahora y siempre», «Hebe is present, now and forever».

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