Psychologist who was a voice for the “disappeared”
One cold morning in April 1977, Nora Cortiñas’s 24-yearold son Carlos Gustavo left the house and never came back. A former student at the University of Buenos Aires, he had become involved in left-wing politics – which made him a target of Argentina’s US-backed military dictatorship. Cortiñas went in search of her son, but when she made enquiries at public offices, she met evasiveness and worse. “I entered into a spiral of madness,” she recalled. “I was called, threatened, told I would be put in prison.”
A month after Carlos Gustavo vanished, she joined forces with a group of women who were asking similar questions, and who had started to hold weekly vigils for their missing children in the
Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires. There were only a dozen of them or so at first, but this group morphed into the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, said the FT – “the backbone of perhaps the most successful human rights movement in history”. The mothers, who carried photographs of their missing children and wore white headscarves to represent the nappies their children had once worn, were ignored by passers-by; and three of the group’s founders joined the ranks of the “disappeared”. But the campaign continued, with Cortiñas as one of its driving forces; and following the return to civilian rule in 1983, more than 8,000 victims of the regime were identified (rights groups believe the true number is 30,000), and 1,221 people were convicted of human rights abuses. But Cortiñas died without ever discovering what had happened to her son.
She was born in Buenos Aires in 1930, the daughter of immigrants from Catalonia. She left school at 16, and three years later married Carlos Cortiñas, who worked as a civil servant. She raised their two children, while also running sewing classes. Her son had recently had a baby when he was seized at a railway station on his way to work. His mother said his disappearance was like “having an arm amputated”.
In 1986, Cortiñas broke from the original mothers – who had decided to pursue their children’s radical socialist goals – and set up a splinter group, which focused on the narrower agenda of getting archives opened and perpetrators brought to justice. Later, she campaigned for other causes, including the legalisation of abortion (which came about in 2020) and better conditions for prisoners with HIV/Aids. She studied for a degree in social psychology at the University of Buenos Aires, graduating in 1993, and later taught at that university. “I want to change this unjust world,” she wrote in her 2019 biography. “Every day when I wake up, I feel the urge to fight. I don’t see it as an obligation but as a commitment.”