A Force More Powerful: A Century of Non-violent Conflict by Peter Ackerman & Jack DuVall

Author:Peter Ackerman & Jack DuVall [Ackerman, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-12-01T05:00:00+00:00

Members of the Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the disappeared in Argentina, seen here at a Buenos Aires demonstration in 1995.

Credit: ©Amy Mayer/Impact Visuals

As they eddied about the plaza, the mothers developed an instinct for political theater. Sometimes they piled up the personal effects of disappeared children, and often they carried carpenter’s nails to show their solidarity with the Holy Mother, whose son had also been detained and tortured to death. In September 1977 they decided to join the annual pilgrimage to pay homage to the Virgin Mary at Luján, about thirty miles outside Buenos Ares—Azucena thought it would give them a chance to tell their stories to strangers during the long walk. But how to identify themselves among the thousands of pilgrims?

“Azucena’s idea,” said Aida de Suárez, “was to wear as a head scarf one of our children’s nappies, because every mother keeps something like this, which belonged to your child as a baby. It was very easy to spot the head scarves in the crowds … so we decided to use the scarves at other meetings and then every time we went to Plaza de Mayo … and we embroidered on the names of our children. Afterwards we put on them ‘Aparicion con Vida’”—literally, reappearance with life—“because we were no longer searching for just one child but for all the disappeared.”15

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