Died this Sunday (20) in La Plata, aged 93, Hebe de Bonafini, leader and co-founder of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, an organization that, since the 1970s, has searched for the disappeared of the most recent Argentine military dictatorship (1976-1983). .
The association, which began with a group of mothers who walked every Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada to ask for the appearance, alive, of their relatives, soon became a powerful organization, which today has a university institute, a newspaper , a radio and a bookstore.
The Mães da Praça de Mayo also manage the cultural center that operates today in one of the former clandestine torture headquarters, the ESMA (Escola Superior de Mecânica da Marinha).
Interrupted for two years during the pandemic, the traditional Mothers march still takes place, with the remaining ones accompanied by human rights activists who help them make the journey and sing songs of support. Most of them today are of advanced age.
Bonafini’s presence at these marches had become rarer in recent months due to a series of health problems. When she could, she went, but she waited in the van that took the Mothers to downtown Buenos Aires.
Bonafini had two children who disappeared during the dictatorship, and his career was marked by struggle and activism in search of victims. She was also known for making politically incorrect comments, as when she celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers in the USA, in 2001. She was a supporter of Kirchnerism, which led her to internal rifts with other Mothers and with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo (this , a foundation that searches for grandchildren who disappeared during the period), who preferred that the activism of these organizations be limited to human rights and not be committed to politics.
Coming from a middle-class family in the province of Buenos Aires, Bonafini last appeared publicly a week ago, when she attended the opening of an exhibition of her photos at the Centro Cultural Kirchner. The show is called “Hebe de Bonafini – A Rev/Beautiful Mother”.
A friend of Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales, among others, she was an icon of the region’s left and made scathing criticisms of “neoliberalism” and the IMF (International Monetary Fund). Unable to have formal education due to lack of family conditions, she studied sewing and Spanish dancing with castanets, a habit she maintained for many years.
He defended Peronism based on his personal history, since he said that, in his childhood, “there were no vacations, regulated work schedules, unions or vacations”—included in the labor laws enacted by Perón.
At the age of 14, she married Humberto Alfredo Bonafini, with whom she had three children, Jorge Omar, Raúl Alfredo and María Alejandra. Only the latter is still alive. Bonafini was widowed in 1982, and her two other children remain missing.
Jorge Omar was kidnapped at the age of 26, in La Plata, he was a professor of mathematics, studied physics at the National University of La Plata and was a member of the Marxist-Leninist communist party. Before being kidnapped, he was attacked by the repression forces in the street, in front of several witnesses. After the beating, they covered his head with a black hood and took him away.
Her mother began visiting hospitals and police stations and, at her home, she began to meet with other relatives of missing persons. His other son, Raúl, 24, also a militant, started to live underground, until he also disappeared after a union meeting. He was a student of zoology at the Faculty of Natural Sciences and was a member of the same party as his brother.
Traces of the two brothers were found years later in one of the clandestine detention and torture centers. Those responsible for managing the center were sentenced to life imprisonment in the process known as “Circuito Camps”, whose verdict came out in December 2012.
The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, ignored by the major Argentine newspapers during the dictatorship, began to seek out the press in other countries to carry out their denouncements. This is how Bonafini’s international fame spread, drawing attention to crimes against humanity that were taking place in Argentina.
According to human rights organizations, the number of missing persons is between 20 and 30 thousand people. Many of the victims were thrown into the Rio de la Plata, drugged and with weights on their feet, and even today traces of people murdered in this way surface from time to time.
The marches began on April 30, 1977, when dozens of mothers and relatives of the disappeared gathered in Plaza de Mayo. The police tried to disperse them by saying that meetings could not be held there. Then, in order not to have to stand still and be repressed again, they walked in pairs, going around the space, which is in front of the Casa Rosada.
To this day, they wear white cloths on their heads, on which the names of their children are inscribed, whose faces are also stamped on the T-shirts they wear.
Bonafini had an aggressive activist profile that ended up dividing the Mothers, today organized into the Línea Fundadora, chaired by Nora Cortiñas, commanded by Bonafini, and others. She also had a bad relationship with Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, although both were, in recent times, supporting the Kirchnerist governments.
One of his most controversial attitudes was to give protection to the brothers Sergio and Pablo Schoklender in 1995, who had murdered their parents. Bonafini believed they deserved a second chance and that their parents were “members of the oppressing class”. He ended up appointing Sergio Schoklender as administrator of the “Sueños Compartidos” program, which builds housing for poor people. Schoklender, however, was accused of embezzling funds and arrested, in a scandal that soiled the honor of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Foundation.
Bonafini traveled the world giving lectures on the disappeared in Argentina and won several international awards, such as the René Sand, Unesco and the Honoris Causa title from the universities of California and Bologna. He was, until today, the best known face, inside and outside Argentina, of the struggle for the rights of victims of the dictatorship.
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