They call themselves "permanently pregnant." They've been pregnant now for thirty long years.
It's not what the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo imagined for themselves in 1977. Back then, they were just a small group of frightened housewives, wanting nothing more than to know where their children were. Most of them knew little about politics. Many of them had never before even ventured out of their tradition-bound, working class neighborhoods. But now, here they were, trembling in front of the Government House in downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, demanding that the military dictators tell them where. their children were.
I first met the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo twenty years ago, during a four month stay in Buenos Aires, and my involvment with them then remains one of my most powerful experiences. Back then, in 1987, they'd come a long way since those frightened first meetings ten years earlier. In the twenty years since, they've traveled a remarkable political journey.
Please join me below the fold for a look at this remarkable group of women, and for some thoughts on motherhood and politics...
But first, a word about this weekly series:
Feminisms is a series of weekly feminist diaries. My fellow feminists and I decided to start our own for several purposes: we wanted a place to chat with each other, we felt it was important to both share our own stories and learn from others’, and we hoped to introduce to the community a better understanding of what feminism is about.
Needless to say, we expect disagreements to arise. We have all had different experiences in life, so while we share the same labels, we don’t necessarily share the same definitions. Hopefully, we can all be patient and civil with each other, and remember that, ultimately, we’re all on the same side.
I first met the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Spanish language link)in September of 1987. I knew their weekly marches took place each Thursday at 3:30pm in the Plaza de Mayo, across from the Casa Rosada, the seat of the executive branch of the national government. When I arrived a short while before the designated time, the Plaza was crowded, but there were no signs of any organized demonstration. But at 3:30 on the dot, a remarkable materialization occurred. Women suddenly donned white kerchiefs embroidered with the words "Aparicion con Vida" (literally 'Appearance with Life,' meaning 'bring them back alive'). Large numbers of the people who had been randomly milling around the Plaza or sitting on park benches suddenly began to coalesce into a circle slowly walking clockwise around the small obelisk in the center.
Round and round went the circle, dozens of women in their white kerchiefs mingling with dozens of supporters, drawing me in as well. There was an odd casualness to the march. The sound of so many feet hitting concrete at the same pace gave a somber background sound, yet there was also much conversation, even laughter. After half an hour, the group moved to the side of the plaza directly in front of the government House, where the group's leader, Hebe de Bonafini, gave a fiery speech on the week's political events and on their continuing demands to know what happened to their children.
The meetings in the Plaza had not always been so filled with relaxed camaraderie. What I witnessed was a deeply symbolic recreation of how the Madres came into being....
The military dictatorship that took over Argentina in March of 1976, in the name of what it proclaimed a war against leftist subversion, 'disappeared' some 30,000 mostly young adults from all walks of life. Some of the disappeared were politically active, but most were simply idealistic, and many were simply unlucky. None of them deserved what we now know to have happened: to be pulled from their homes in the middle of the night or dragged off the street into unmarked cars in broad daylight, to be tortured in clandestine detention centers, to be thrown dead into anonymous mass graves or hurled while still living from military airplanes flying over the wide estuary of the Plate River.
A subversive, in the words of Junta leader Jorge Videla, included "whoever spreads ideas which are contrary to Western and Christian civilization," and the military governor of Buenos Aires province, General Iberico Saint-Jean, gave this notorious interpretation of what needed to be done:
First we kill all the subversives; then, their collaborators; later, those who sympathize with them; afterward, those who remain indifferent; and finally, the undecided.
Terror was the military's tool, and the normally vibrant social life of Argentina shut down as people withdrew into silence and isolation, aware every moment of the horrors a wrong word or action could bring.
Even in the face of this dread, however, many mothers could not bear the thought of doing nothing to try and find their missing children. One by one, they would travel to government offices, to prisons, to military bases, trying to get answers but continually being rebuffed. Gradually they came to recognize one another, and in spite of the brutal repression, sought to organize themselves.
Some of the mothers recall those early days, quoted in Jo Fisher's book Mothers of the Disappeared:
Dora de Bazze: It was very dangerous. So we carried different things so we could identify each other. For example one would hold a twig in her hand, one might carry a small purse instead of a handbag, one would pin a leaf to her lapel, anything to let us know that this was a Mother....
Maria del Rosario: At first we didn't march together in the square. We sat on the benches with our knitting or stood in small groups, trying to disguise the letters we were signing to send to the churches, to government officials, the military. We had to speak to each other quickly, in low voices so it didn't look as if we were having a meeting. Then, when the police saw what was happening and pointed their rifles at us and telling us to move on, that we had to disperse, that we couldn't be more than two together, we began to walk in twos around the edge of the square....We wanted people to see us, to know we were there, so we began to walk in the centre of the square, around the monument. Even if people supported us they stayed outside the square. It was very dangerous for them to approach us. We were very alone in the beginning....
Aida de Suarez: The headscarves grew out of an idea of our dear Azucena. It was at the time when thousands of people walked to Lujan on the annual pilgramage to pay homage to the Virgin. We decided to join the march in 1977 because many of us were religious and also because it would be a chance for us to talk to each other and organize things....[H]ow will we be able to identify each amongst all those people, because many thousands go, and how can we make other people notice us? Azucena's idea was to wear as a headscarf one of our children's nappies, because every mother keeps something like this, which belonged to your child as a baby. It was very easy to spot the headscarves in the crowds and people came up to us and asked us who we were. We'd managed to attract attention so we decided to use the scarves at other meetings and then every time we went to the Plaza de Mayo together. We all made proper white scarves and we embroidered on the names of our children....
Out of these first tentatives attempts to organize, all of which are symbolically echoed in the weekly marches to this day, grew an amazing and powerful human rights group. The forces of repression during the dictatorship at first tried to ignore them, then to ridicule them, and finally to intimidate them. Many were beaten by police, many were jailed, and some were even killed, including the group's founder, Azucena Villaflor de Vicenti (In 2005, Azucena's body was found and identified; her ashes were buried by the monument in the Plaza de Mayo.). But the women persevered, their numbers grew, and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo became one of the first groups to break the spell of fear cast over the people. Gradually, protests against the military began to rise, and in 1983, the military at last relinquished power and democracy returned to Argentina.
The return of democracy was only the beginning for the Madres de Plaza de Mayo. In the ensuing 24 years, they have fought against the amnesties given to those who carried out the repression under the dictatorship and they continue to fight for the truth about what happened to their children. Many of them have refused financial reparations offered by the government. Many even have refused to support the exhumations of mass graves and the identifying of bodies. To them, this only answers the question of what happened to each individual, but does not answer the larger questions of why. As Hebe de Bonafini says in Jo Fisher's book:
They've tried to convert us into the mothers of dead children and put an end to the problem of the desaparecidos. We will never accept that they are dead until those responsible are punished. If we accepted that, we would be accepting that murderers and torturers can live freely in Argentina. They can't negotiate with the blood of our children.
The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo bring their children to life each and every day, striving to remind the world that motherhood is not simply the physical act of giving birth. It also represents the continuity of the human spirit, a nurturing of goodness and a faith in the future. "I feel like after I gave birth to my children, my children gave birth to me," says Hebe de Bonafini.
These women, many of whom were once housebound, apolitical wives and mothers today seek to carry out the idealistic politics of their children. They are an active political force in Argentina, and indeed travel the world as well. Each week their marches offer a voice to representatives from some disaffected or downtrodden group—striking workers, retirees on dwindling pensions, indigenous people, the poor, the victims of police brutality.
Their headquarters in downtown Buenos Aires offers classes in leftist history and political organizing. They have an extensive library, a bookstore and cafe, and publish a monthly newspaper. They've recently started a program to build adequate housing in the slums ringing Buenos Aires. They have traveled around the world advocating for their brand of social justice.
They are, in fact, one of the most radical voices in Argentine political life, speaking out against capitalism, imperialism and the military. They meet with and support Fidel Castro of Cuba and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Their outspoken and caustic stances often put them at odds even with the political left. I have to admit that as much as I admire them, some of their stances have given me pause as well.
The Madres have also inspired a wide variety of similar movements around the world. In Argentina, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo work to find the babies of mothers who gave birth in prison before being killed. These babies were often given to members of the dictatorship to raise as their own. At the opposite end of the generational spectrum, H.I.J.O.S (the word means children, and the acronym is Spanish for Children for Identity and Justice Against Forgetting and Silence) is an organization formed by surviving children of disappeared parents.
Most of the Latin American countries of South and Central America that suffered disappearances of their own under dictatorships saw theis own versions of the madres spring up. The umbrella human rights organization MADRE has been mentioned in previous Feminisms diaries. The Tiananmen Mothers are mothers of students killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre in China in 1989. The Association of War-Affected Women was created in Sri lanka in response to atrocities in that country's guerrilla warfare. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), formed in 1980, is an example of mothers organizing in other political arenas. Cindy Sheehan's activism against the Iraq war after the death of her son Casey is another, very contemporary example.
This is not an entirely new phenomenon, of course. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom had its genesis in an international group of 1200 women who came together in 1915 to protest World War I. That famous Vietnam-era bumper sticker slogan "War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things" was created in 1968 by the group Another Mother for Peace.
Such groups perhaps present something of a conundrum for feminist thought. The power of these groups in part derives from the veneration society places on motherhood (National Review commentator Kate O'Beirne, on the occasion of the Million Mom March in Washington in 2000, grumped that "they'll get no skeptical coverage -- moms?"). And yet, many of the women in these organization break the mold of how society expects women, especially older women, mothers and grandmothers, to act. I'm interested in hearing your debate about these issues.
I'll end with a quote from Juana de Pargament, now 90 years old and still marching:
"Save the country with concepts, with feelings, with morality, not with the savagery of the military. We fight so new leaders are born to govern with honesty and love. When we don’t live anymore, we want people to remember our example and what happened in this country that made us give our lives to change it once and for all."