Argentine human rights campaigner
BUENOS AIRES — Hebe de Bonafini, who became a human rights campaigner when her two sons were arrested and disappeared under Argentina's military dictatorship, died Sunday, her family and authorities reported. She was 93.
The death was confirmed by her only surviving child, Alejandra, who expressed thanks for expressions of support her mother had received while hospitalized in the city of La Plata. Local officials said she had suffered from unspecified chronic illnesses.
Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner — a former president who had close ties with de Bonafini — posted a tweet calling her “a global symbol of the fight for human rights, pride of Argentina.”
Hebe María Pastor de Bonafini was one of the founders of the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in May 1977, two years after the military seized power and began a brutal crackdown on suspected leftists.
She became president two years later and led the more radical of two factions of the organization until her death.
The Mothers initially demanded the return, alive, of their children — and later punishment of the military figures responsible for seizing and killing them, with no public word of their fates.
In 1977, soldiers seized her oldest son. A few months later, a second, Raúl, also was captured. Both had been members of leftist militant groups, de Bonafini later said.
As she made the rounds of hospitals, courthouses, police stations and morgues in search of one son, and later both, she ran into other women on the same mission.
Faced with stonewalling from officials, 14 of them began holding demonstrations at the Plaza de Mayo in front of the presidential residence to demand the appearance of their children.
It was a daring move at a time when the government prohibited meetings of more than three people. But they began gathering every Thursday, walking counterclockwise around the center of the plaza.