There was a woman who decided to go out to look for her son, the day she did not return home.
And that was how, in the middle of squares and avenues, she met other mothers who, like her, were claiming their missing children.
"Who has dared to take away the sacred fruit of our womb?" They asked themselves very sadly. Everyone in that country knew the answer, but kept silent out of fear.
Everyone knew that a great monster had taken over. Everyone knew that this monster was an ashen, many-headed tyrant, who hated joy, sharing, equality and many other sunny longings of the human heart. He, and it was a certainty, had taken the children of these mothers without leaving any trace of their existence other than the memory of those who loved them.
-What do we do? Asked the mother with the name of a flower, like the other mothers.
—We want our children back to have mate together, before breakfast; to celebrate their birthdays; to smell the sweet smell that rises from their shirts when we iron them, ”they said. But nobody answered.
They went for a walk together, they met every Thursday in the Plaza de Mayo with their children's cloth diapers tied around their heads. They resisted marching around the obelisk in the Plaza, in a counterclockwise direction to turn back time, as if by magic, that is, as by the art of love.
The tears of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo little by little became a luminous route of crumbs that many followed. Courage, like laughter, is always contagious. They never stopped tying hope to their belts: they marched with photos of their children, they put their silhouettes in every corner, they made white scarves fly like homing pigeons ... and to every street and every corner of the city they were asked about them.
—You don't know, suddenly they've seen them go by.
They never gave up. Nobody wanted to be forgotten, they all needed those children back. They were the children of all.
Mothers survived the tyrant. And in them, the dream of his children survived undefeated.
Between March 1976 and December 1983, Argentina suffered one of the most atrocious military dictatorships in the American continent. More than fifteen thousand disappeared, ten thousand prisoners and four hundred dead, were the product of military operations that suspended the main civil rights. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo fought every day for truth, memory and justice, on behalf of their children and human dignity.
Do you want to know more stories like this?
The book "Once upon a woman"by the author Vera Carvajal, proposes a journey through different times and geographies of humanity at the hands of intense, powerful, entirely beautiful women, capable of turning pain into hope; of taming the bloody with words; of resisting and transforming ; of asking and answering; of nurturing life in love; of changing paradigms of being, of knowing, of loving, of doing.
