killed.
Between 9,000 and 30,000 Argentines ‘disappeared’ as a result. The military rulers never acknowledged that this was a tactic in their ‘dirty war’ and never gave the names of those who had died.

But at the end of April 1977, fourteen brave women whose children had vanished in this way challenged the authorities by walking in the main Plaza de Mayo square in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires. They were demanding to know what had happened to their sons and daughters, and wanted them ‘to appear alive’. They realized that it if they joined together and campaigned in whatever way they could, they were more likely to make their cause known and perhaps receive answers from the authorities.

The founders of the group were soon joined bytens and then hundreds more women, who met every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo and walked round and round in pairs, wearing white scarves round their heads. Another group, ‘the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ was soon set up to try to discover what had happened to the more than 500 children born in captivity and often adopted by military personnel without knowing who their true parents were. The mothers themselves were threatened, and in December 1977 the notorious Alfredo Astiz (nicknamed ‘The Angel of Death’) was responsible for the kidnapping of three of the group, one of whom never re-appeared.

The white dove symbol of the Madres.
In spite of this, the mothers continued their weekly marches. The military junta did not know what to do with