Seamstress rallied for the missing in Argentina unrest
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — Hebe de Bonafini, a former seamstress who, spurred by the disappearance of her sons during Argentina’s brutal military dictatorship of the 1970s, helped rally women to build the human rights protest movement the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, died on Sunday in La Plata, a town an hour outside Buenos Aires. She was 93.
Her daughter and sole survivor, Alejandra Bonafini, confirmed the death, in a hospital. The government decreed three days of national mourning.
De Bonafini was a 49year old housewife in 1977 when her life took a dramatic turn for the worse. Argentina’s right-wing military dictatorship, which had been backed by the United States, had taken power a year earlier. Her two sons, as members of Marxist-Leninist parties, were exactly the kind of people the dictatorship targeted. On the morning of Feb. 8, 1977, one of them, Jorge, 26, was kidnapped and never seen again.
De Bonafini searched tirelessly for her son in morgues and hospitals and was repeatedly turned away by the police and the courts. She soon found that she was not alone. Quietly at first, and then in a torrent, other women started coming out with stories of their missing children.
At the time, Argentina’s regime, the bloodiest in modern South American history, was rounding up thousands of real and presumed leftists and putting them in torture camps or killing them outright in what came to called the “dirty war.” The dictatorship lasted seven years, during which at least 8,960 people disappeared, according to official estimates. Some human rights groups put the figure at 30,000.
De Bonafini started organizing meetings with other mothers of disappeared children in cafes and churches and at home. Months later, they staged the first of what would become weekly vigils in Plaza de Mayo, a square in downtown Buenos Aires in front of the presidential palace, demanding answers. To identify one another, the newly christened Mothers of Plaza de Mayo wore simple white scarves wrapped around their heads, a symbol of the diapers their children had worn as babies.
Though the dictatorship disappeared three founding members of the movement, the women kept turning up at the plaza every Thursday, becoming a constant thorn in the dictatorship’s side and a symbol of the dark truths it was trying to hide. And de Bonafini became one of the movement’s most celebrated, and polarizing, figures.
The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo went on to win the Sakharov Prize, the European Parliament’s top human rights award, and were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize multiple times, most recently in 2018.
Hebe María Pastor was born on Dec. 4, 1928, into a poor household in Ensenada, a port city in the province of Buenos Aires. Her father, Francisco Pastor, who was Spanish, worked in a haberdashery; her mother, Josefa Bogetti, an Argentine, was a homemaker.
Hebe did not attend middle school because her parents couldn’t afford the bus fare. Instead, she started working as a seamstress, eventually joining with others to form a cooperative to sell ponchos. At 14, she met Humberto Bonafini, who would become her husband and the father of her two boys as well as a girl. He died in 1982.
All around them, Argentina was experiencing profound change. Gen. Juan Perón had come to power in 1946 and formed alliances with worker’s unions, while his glamorous wife, Eva Perón, known as Evita, promoted social programs to help the poor.
A string of coups over the next three decades would leave Juan Perón ousted and then reinstated until his death in 1974. By the time the military took power in 1976, Peronism, the ideologically fractious movement Juan Perón had founded, had split into left- and rightwing paramilitary groups that were killing each other on the streets of Argentina’s biggest cities.
In the middle of this convulsion, de Bonafini’s life was turned upside down. Only a few months after her son Jorge disappeared, the regime kidnapped her other son, Raúl, while he was attending a union meeting in the city of Berazategui in the province of Buenos Aires. Months later, her daughter-in-law, Jorge’s wife, also disappeared.
She ended her days mired in a corruption scandal. The judiciary is investigating whether her organization embezzled some of the hundreds of millions of Argentine pesos donated to build social housing for the poor.