Nora Cortinas, one of the so-called “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” rights group fighting for answers on the fate of people disappeared under Argentina’s military dictatorship, has died aged 94, fellow activists announced Thursday.
Cortinas’s own son Gustavo disappeared in 1977, the year the organization was born with weekly marches that continue to this day.
“With deep pain, we bid farewell to our sister in the fight, Nora Cortinas, an undisputed pillar of the human rights movement in Argentina,” the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a sister group of the “Mothers,” announced on X.
The “Mothers” organization came to life on April 30, 1977, when 14 women who lost political activist children gathered outside the presidential palace on the Plaza de Mayo (May Square) in Buenos Aires to protest the military dictatorship installed in a coup the year before.
They dared to challenge the regime at a time when repression was at its height and risked the same fate as that which befell their children: taken from their homes or the street, tortured, killed or disappeared without a trace.
Cortinas’s son was only 24 and a member of the leftist Peronist Youth group when he was kidnapped by soldiers, never to be heard from again.
She has described the loss as akin to “having an arm amputated.”
Gustavo is one of about 30,000 people who disappeared under the dictatorship in power from 1976 to 1983, according to rights groups.
Cortinas, a petite and energetic woman known for wearing a white headscarf, was a social psychologist by training, and mother of two.
She was one of the founders of the “Mothers,” and apart from absences when she traveled abroad to further their cause, attended almost every Thursday march on the Plaza de Mayo.
Cortinas expanded her activism in later years to supporting rights for Indigenous people, workers, victims of gender violence and for women to access abortion.
She was a fervent opponent of liberal President Javier Milei, who has questioned the number of disappeared under the dictatorship.
The Grandmothers of May Square was born from the original “Mothers” — a group of women who discovered their abducted daughters had given birth in captivity.
An estimated 500 such babies were stolen and illegally adopted, often by families close to the regime.
AFP
