It was 1977 and Argentina was in the grip of a military dictatorship. Outside the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, women in white headscarves began demonstrating to demand news of their children who had mysteriously disappeared. Laura Bonaparte had lost three offspring, their father, two sons-in-law and her son’s girlfriend; she became one of these original “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo”.
Bonaparte, who has died aged 88, went on to work for Amnesty International, reporting on alleged human rights violations by Israeli forces in Lebanon and by the armed forces of war-torn El Salvador and Guatemala. She would later campaign in Bosnia on behalf of Muslim women who had been victims of ethnic cleansing and, back home, for abortion rights as well as for equal treatment of those whose sexuality defied the country’s traditionally macho culture.
All the while, she continued to press the judiciary and successive Argentine governments for information on the fate of an estimated 30,000 desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) during the “dirty war” conducted by the military against domestic opponents until 1983.
Bonaparte lost her 24-year-old daughter Noni even before the 1976 coup against president Isabel Perón. Facing an armed struggle by various leftwing groups, Perón had empowered army and police to “annihilate subversion”. A feared far-right paramilitary death squad called Triple A (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance), joined in. On Christmas Eve that year, Bonaparte learnt that Noni, who had ties to the armed leftwing Revolutionary Army of the People, had been killed.
Her body was never returned. “They offered to give us her hands, conserved in a jar, but I refused and told them: ‘I want my daughter in one piece’,” the mother said. She later assumed that Noni, minus her hands, had been dumped in a mass grave.
Soon after the March coup, Noni’s husband Adrián was assassinated by soldiers but his body never found. In June, soldiers kicked down the door of Laura’s ex-husband, the Jewish biochemist Santiago Bruchstein, shouting: “How can a Jewish bastard judge the armed forces?” She later heard he had been set fire to and burnt to death. The following year, Bonaparte’s son Víctor and daughter Irene disappeared, as did Víctor’s girlfriend Jacinta and Irene’s husband Mario.
Mothers such as she started arriving at the Plaza de Mayo, the square in front of La Casa Rosada (the Pink House of Evita fame), to demand news of their loved ones. One afternoon in 1977, more than a dozen appeared, separately. The authorities had forbidden gatherings of more than three people and told them to leave. Instead, they split into pairs and paraded around the square.
The white headscarves were adopted as a symbol and the Mothers’ ranks swelled to a few thousand as more and more family members vanished. Late that year three of the original Mothers themselves “were disappeared”. Their bodies, as well as those of several sympathisers including two French nuns, were found washed up on the banks of the Rio Plata. Retired naval captain Adolfo Scilingo later said opponents of the military were routinely taken on board vuelos de muerte (death flights), drugged, stripped naked and dumped into the Atlantic so that salt water and fish would destroy the evidence.
Then came June 1978, when journalists from around the world descended on Buenos Aires for the World Cup football tournament and stumbled on the story of las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. The Mothers went what would nowadays be called viral. In 1986, however, with differing political ideologies, they split into two factions: Bonaparte set up the more moderate Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Linea Fundadora (“founding line”), while Hebe de Bonafini headed the original Asociación Madres de Plaza de Mayo.
In 1988, Bonaparte successfully fought president Carlos Menem’s plan to privatise the Esma naval academy in Buenos Aires, which had “processed” many of the disappeared. Instead it was preserved as a memorial, museum and human rights centre.
Bonaparte was born in the province of Entre Ríos, close to the Uruguayan border, in 1925, daughter of a socialist judge. By the age of 13, encouraged by her father, she was teaching women prisoners to read and write. After qualifying as a psychologist, she helped female hospital patients, many traumatised by abortion issues, in the city of Lanús.
Her work strengthened her belief in women’s rights and she divorced her husband at a time when that was widely considered a shameful sin. They had had five children, one of whom died as a baby, the other four raised in an ambience of art and music, variously playing piano, harp or cello.
Her son Luís Bruchstein, now a journalist, is the only one remaining. Grandchildren Hugo and Victoria Ginzberg, who were babies when Irene and Mario disappeared, also survive her and are involved in human rights. The family story was told in the book Una Madre de Plaza de Mayo – Contra el Olvido (“lest we forget”) by French writer Claude Mary.
This week, Laura Bonaparte’s white headscarf was buried with her.
Tuesday 2 July 2013
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/12c7f8e2-de78-11e2-b990-00144feab7de.html
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