20 Years Later, Mothers of Plaza de Mayo March to Old--and New--Tunes

Twenty years ago, the mothers went to the plaza in front of the presidential palace and confronted the bureaucracy of horror.

The mothers were fed up with futile visits to military chaplains who wore boots under their cassocks and to the “complaint office” where the dictatorship received inquiries about people whom it was systematically kidnapping, robbing, torturing and killing.

When the women congregated at the plaza, police snapped at them to keep moving. So the 14 mothers walked the plaza in slow circles. They kept coming back to protest, braving nightsticks, police dogs and military spies who infiltrated the group and killed three leaders.

“They say the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo were fearless,” said Maria Adela Antokolez, now 85, who moves with slow, tottering steps and enormous dignity. “But we were scared to death. We learned to walk with fear, to live with fear. We had an obligation: to find our children.”

The mothers still march every Thursday afternoon demanding justice. The ritual moves bystanders to tears and applause. The women are elderly and fragile now. They walk arm in arm, hunched beneath the white head scarves that have become an international symbol of the fight for human rights.

But time has brought change and conflict to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Their divisive evolution is part of Argentina’s philosophical quandary about the phantoms of history. The debate about the battles of the past and present sharpens even as the mothers are being showered with accolades this month, the 20th anniversary of that first defiant walk.

“It is a very inspiring story,” said U.S. philanthropist Alan Gleitsman, whose Malibu-based foundation will award a $50,000 prize for social activism to Antokolez here April 30. (Previous winners include South African President Nelson Mandela.) “The mothers created an effective organization that has been replicated successfully in other places.”

Luis Moreno Ocampo, who prosecuted Argentina’s deposed military leaders in the 1980s, observed of the women: “They are a living myth. The mothers were not Batman and Robin. They were ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. . . . And they brought down a military government.”

Moreno and Argentine human rights leaders are less enthusiastic, however, about some of the group’s current exploits. While Antokolez and a small, breakaway faction stick largely to the original mission, a larger faction has evolved into a vehement, all-purpose voice of protest.

At the urging of their firebrand leader, Hebe de Bonafini, this faction wades into the fray at strikes and demonstrations, denounces the government of President Carlos Menem at every turn and jets off to other nations to support leftist causes.

Last month, the group tried to mediate in the 4-month-old hostage crisis in Lima, the Peruvian capital, at the invitation of a Peruvian guerrilla sympathizer in Germany; the reception in Peru was chilly.

Menem had nothing good to say about the mothers in an interview earlier this month.

“They go abroad to discredit Argentina,” Menem declared. “They have absolute liberty to say what they want. But they are against democracy. . . . This is an unjustifiable attitude, not only in Argentina, but among all people who share the dreams of liberty and peace.”

The image of the mothers is complicated by democratic Argentina’s uneasy relationship with the past. Because of amnesties and pardons granted by Menem and his predecessor, Raul Alfonsin, former leftist guerrillas and military killers and torturers walk the streets; some hold posts in the security forces and appear on television talk shows.

The unresolved conflicts of Argentina’s “dirty war,” which claimed up to an estimated 30,000 lives between 1976 and 1983, still make headlines. A Spanish investigative magistrate last month indicted former dictator Leopoldo Galtieri and other notorious figures in the deaths of about 400 Argentines who held Spanish citizenship. The judge issued international warrants that make the suspects subject to arrest if they leave Argentina. France, Italy and Sweden have pursued similar cases. And there was an uproar here over a recent report that meticulous records of the repression have been stashed in Europe.

Bonafini said she will be satisfied only when the perpetrators and architects of the repression are behind bars. The atrocities were committed by an unjust system that has changed only in appearance, she said, explaining why the mothers have broadened their mission. “We realized that human rights are violated when a man does not have a house or a job, when he has to send his kids to eat scraps from the garbage dumps,” she said.

Bonafini is a sturdy 68-year-old with a pugilistic manner. In a recent interview in the group’s bustling offices, she wore a blue-and-white flowered dress and sandals. It was noon; she had already granted 10 interviews that morning. On the walls were paintings and literature about the mothers, plaques from donors and admirers around the world, and photos of the revolutionary Che Guevara and of Bonafini with Subcommander Marcos, the rebel leader in the Mexican state of Chiapas.

Under Bonafini, who lost two sons and a daughter-in-law during the military regime, the mothers have taken on an unabashedly leftist identity. “People have called me Marxist, Leninist, all the ‘ists’ you can think of,” she said. “I am all of that and more. I don’t care. I don’t want to see kids eating garbage. I don’t want to see shantytowns by the river full of rats and worms. And capitalism brings this: always death, always death.”

Fellow activists assert that Bonafini is authoritarian. They question the wisdom of her alliance with an ex-convict-turned-lawyer who did prison time for killing his wealthy parents in a case involving allegations of sexual abuse. He has become a high-profile advisor.

Bonafini’s militant politics threaten her group’s moral authority, colleagues say. Her faction has failed to adapt to democracy, said Martin Abregu of the Center for Legal and Social Studies, a longtime human rights agency.

“It’s clear that justice was not done in Argentina, but in their enormous hate for the state, they insist that the government {is} the same people as during the dictatorship,” Abregu said of Bonafini and her followers. “Hebe attacks without differentiating. We cannot accept the accusation that Menem and Alfonsin are the same as [former dictator Jorge] Videla. It is wrong.”

Bonafini says her critics are envious. At a recent forum held by her group, speakers belittled several figures who held considerable human rights credentials, including writer Ernesto Sabato, who chaired the truth commission that investigated the dirty war, and former prosecutor Moreno, who locked up the military rulers and leaders of right-wing uprisings.

Moreno, now a private anti-corruption consultant, laughed off the attacks. “I don’t agree with Hebe’s philosophy,” he said. “But she is always on the side of the weak against the strong. A society needs people like that. Her hard line might damage the symbol of the mothers, but it also prevents the issue from being buried.”

Various philosophical disputes--Bonafini rejects proposed government reparations to the families of victims as “blood money”--motivated the split with Antokolez’s group, known as the Founding Line. “We were afraid that the mothers were beginning to lose the dignity with which we had always fought,” Antokolez said. “We felt there was no democracy within the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo.”

Antokolez is one of the oldest surviving founders. Although she stumbles occasionally over names and dates, she retains the lucidity of a woman who learned the value of oral history in the Plaza de Mayo. “It was our educational academy,” she said. “The plaza saved us from the madhouse.”

A heart problem has confined Antokolez to her dim, cozy apartment in a middle-class neighborhood, where a photo of her son Daniel, a lawyer who defended political prisoners, sits prominently atop a cabinet. “My heart is starting to let me down,” she said, “But I’m taking care of myself because I am really looking forward to receiving this award from the United States.”

The award culminates an extraordinary life. A diplomat’s wife, Antokolez divorced young and went to work as a court clerk to raise her two children. She was 65 when Daniel “disappeared.” The crime led to her rebirth into a harrowing new world that she could have never imagined. And 20 years later, she is still at it: As soon as the doctor gives permission, she will return to the plaza.

“We never found our children,” she said. “But in that plaza we went to school. We told our stories 50 times. We cried together. At 3:25, the plaza would be as empty as a desert. And five minutes later the mothers would appear like plants growing, out of the subway station, the side streets. People would come up and ask: ‘Who are you? Teachers, pensioners? What are you protesting?’ It spread by word of mouth. When [Julio] Cortazar, the writer, heard about us in Paris, he said, ‘The military have lost.’ ”