Hebe de Bonafini, who led a group of Argentine women known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in defying a military dictatorship and demanding the truth about their missing children, died on Sunday at the age of 93, the country’s vice president said.
Bonafini was one of the founders of the group in 1977, uniting a group of mothers who protested in front of the presidency, desperate to know the whereabouts of tens of thousands who were abducted during Argentina’s brutal 1976-1983 military regime.
For 45 years, the women continued to meet, marching around the Plaza de Mayo in their trademark white headscarves, in an often futile search for justice.
Photo: AP
Argentine Vice President Cristina Kirchner announced Bonafini’s death on Twitter, praising her as a “world symbol of the fight for human rights, pride of Argentina.”
Her daughter, Alejandra Bonafini, confirmed her death at a Buenos Aires hospital where she had been admitted for several days.
“These are very difficult moments of deep sadness, and we understand the love people have for Hebe. But, right now, we need to cry in private,” Alejandra wrote.
Argentine President Alberto Fernandez said Bonafini was a “tireless fighter for human rights,” and declared three days of national mourning.
“The government and the Argentine people recognize her as an international symbol of the search for memory, truth and justice for the 30,000 missing,” he said in a statement. “As founder of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, she shone a light in the middle of the dark night of military dictatorship, and lay a path to the recovery of democracy.”
About 30,000 people were abducted and presumed killed by the regime or right-wing death squads in the 1970s and 1980s for being suspected leftists.
That was compounded by the widespread kidnapping of babies born to suspected dissidents being held during the dictatorship. Many babies — the offspring of now-dead dissidents — were born in captivity without the knowledge of their blood relatives and were given to military families to adopt.
Bonafini, who attended rallies in recent years in her wheelchair, was a housewife when the military seized power in 1976.
However, in 1977, her sons and daughter-in-law were kidnapped and disappeared.
“I forgot who I was the day they disappeared. I never thought of myself again,” Bonafini said recently at the launch of a photographic exhibition on her life.
A few months later, she and a small group of women began protesting in front of the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. They risked the same fate as their political activist children — torture, death or simply disappearing without a trace.
Instead, the generals tried to laugh them off, mocking them as “madwomen.”
The women circled the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday until the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Indonesia and Malaysia have become the first countries to block Grok, the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, after authorities said it was being misused to generate sexually explicit and nonconsensual images. The moves reflect growing global concern over generative AI tools that can produce realistic images, sound and text, while existing safeguards fail to prevent their abuse. The Grok chatbot, which is accessed through Musk’s social media platform X, has been criticized for generating manipulated images, including depictions of women in bikinis or sexually explicit poses, as well as images involving children. Regulators in the two Southeast Asian
RSS