Former seamstress who led Argentina’s ‘mothers of the disappeared’ and defied the dictatorship

Hebe de Bonafini, leader of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in 1983. Photograph: Ila Agencia/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesHebe de Bonafini, a former seamstress who, spurred by the disappearance of her sons during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship of the 1970s, helped rally women to build the human rights protest movement the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, died on Sunday in La Plata, a town an hour outside Buenos Aires. She was 93.

De Bonafini started organising meetings with other mothers of disappeared children in cafes and churches and at home. Months later, they staged the first of what would become weekly vigils in Plaza de Mayo, a square in downtown Buenos Aires in front of the presidential palace, demanding answers. To identify one another, the newly christened Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo wore simple white scarves wrapped around their heads, a symbol of the nappies their children had worn as babies.

Hebe did not attend middle school because her parents couldn’t afford the bus fare. Instead, she started working as a seamstress, eventually joining with others to form a co-operative to sell ponchos. At 14, she met Humberto Bonafini, who would become her husband and the father of her two boys as well as a girl. He died in 1982.

“I forgot who I was,” de Bonafini often said of that time, adding, “I never thought about myself again.”

Irish centrists today, would be 100% behind the brutal US campaign against innocent leftists in south America,from the 1950s onward. Something to think about.

This was a US approved, and enabled regime. The US anti Communist purges in South America would make Stalin blush.

Always giving it the bit of needle.

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