The mothers of the disappeared

‘‘We were seeking justice. We wanted to prevent disappearance, for it to end. Unfortunately, I still see girls disappearing. I don’t want to be negative, but I don’t know when this will stop,’’ said Paula Flores of Juarez, Mexico, on July 3, 2016, 18 years after the disappearance and murder of her daughter, Maria Sagrario Gonzalez Flores.

Women like Flores, especially mothers of victims of violence, are constantly at the forefront of human-rights activism on issues like forced disappearance, femicide, and abuses by the military.

Where state institutions or elected officials fail to take action against such violence, these women have filled a vacuum, challenging traditional gender roles in the process.

Demanding justice in Mexico, a country where 98 per cent of crimes fail to result in convictions, is no easy task.

The country’s activist mothers and grandmothers follow in the Latin American tradition of predecessors like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who in 1977 began to march in front of the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to protest the mass disappearance of children under the military dictatorship.

They marched weekly for years, forcing public discussion of human rights abuses under the dictatorship.

The Plaza de Mayo mothers inspired similar groups from Africa to Serbia to Los Angeles, and brought them together in the mid-1990s as the International Gathering of Mothers and Women in Struggle.

As Professor Marguerite Bouvard of Brandeis University documented in her 1996 book Women Reshaping Human Rights, women’s groups more generally have played a critical role in the human-rights movement, pursuing economic, social, and cultural justice and emphasising the importance of human dignity and mutual respect among citizens and between citizens and the state.

Even among women’s groups, however, mothers have a special place.

They operate in countries that typically refuse to recognise the agency of women beyond the role of mothers, wives, and daughters.

They use their given role as a badge of moral authority, taking their voices and their truth out of the home and into the streets to fight not for abstract concepts of justice, but for sons and daughters with names and histories.

When renowned Honduran activist Berta Caceres was murdered on March 3, 2016, it was her mother, Austra Bertha Flores Lopez, a midwife and social activist, who took the lead in holding the Honduran state responsible for her death. In India, they have marched to raise awareness of widespread sexual assault.

Flores and her fellow activists have committed themselves to a long road.

For many mothers like Paula Flores, change is measured in decades. But their work continues.

In 2014, 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teacher’s College on buses heading to Mexico City to join protesters on the anniversary of the 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre (in which up to 300 students were killed 10 days before the opening of the Olympic Games).

Local police stopped them near an army checkpoint.

They were ‘‘disappeared’’ in what appears to have been a coordinated state action to silence young activists.

It was mothers who immediately organised and took action to demand justice.

August 30 was the International Day of the Victims of Forced Disappearance.

Around Mexico, mothers of victims of disappearance and femicide organised protests. In Juarez, mothers marched to demand that governor-elect Javier Corral adopt policies to prevent forced disappearance.

These mothers refuse to allow their children to be forgotten.

Anne-marie Slaughter is president and CEO of New America. Alice Driver is an independent journalist.