In July 1976, the “fool,” as the dictatorship’s operation groups in Argentina, consisting of plainclothes police officers, were called, knocked on the door of Cristina Navajas, a member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, somewhere in a peripheral neighborhood of Buenos Aires. And he kidnapped her, like so many others.
Meanwhile, the desperate Nélida Navajas, the activist’s mother, discovered in her daughter’s papers a letter from her daughter to her husband stating that she would be pregnant with the couple’s third child. This child was held captive by the military and given to another family for adoption.
In July 2023, the man, already 46 years old, became “nieto 133”, that is, the 133rd grandchild recovered and returned to his biological family by the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, one of the three organizations descended from the original Madres the Plaza. the Mayo Movement, from 1977. It was he, whose name was not disclosed, who took the initiative to contact the Abuelas, who estimate that another 300 are missing. Cristina Navajas, the mother of “nieto 133”, is one of them.
Due to differences over the years, in addition to the Abuelas, whose historical leader is the mythical Estela de Carlotto, 93 years old, there are two more groups derived from the famous women’s movement who, from April 30, 1977, march in white scarves on their heads, on the Plaza de Mayo, opposite Casa Rosada, seat of the Presidency of the Argentine Republic: one is the association Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora and the other, the only one that remains true to its original name, the Madres of Plaza de Mayo, chaired by the no less mythical Hebe Bonafini until her death last year, about to turn 94 years old.
In Bonafini’s place today is Carmen Arias. At the headquarters of Madres de Plaza de Mayo, about a twenty-minute walk from the square to which the association takes its name, Carmen receives the DN to killthat is, chatting while your partner drinks, a custom of indigenous origin, from which no Argentinian (or Uruguayan or Brazilian from the southern region) can part.
“I am almost Portuguese, I come from Lugo, in Galicia, but when I was nine years old I arrived in Argentina and lost my Spanish accent and my Galician,” begins telling the successor of Hebe Bonafini. She says her main goal now is to ensure that “this,” read the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, “never ends, in memory of our children.”
“To this end, we have moved our university from the status of Popular University to that of University Institute and now to that of National University Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and we have created a radio, AM530, and a cultural center, Encuentro Cultural Nuestros Hijos, where we teach young people and the elderly to learn a profession for free.”
Carmen is a different mother from the other Madres de Plaza de Mayo: “yes I am, because the one who was mother was my mother, that is, the missing person in my story is my brother, but he was ten years younger than Me, I almost saw him as a son.” “That’s why I’m in charge of the association. Because the mothers are a bit older, I took over. It’s not because I’m more important, nothing like that.”
However, the head of the institution respects the other associations that emerge from the founding group, the Abuelas and Línea Fundadora, although she notes that they have different views. “Some of the original group decided to follow a different path when we socialized motherhood, that is, when we said that we are no longer the mothers of our own children, but of all 30,000 who have disappeared, because, mind you , the mothers of some of them did not search, because they were afraid or because they did not agree politically with what they were doing.”
“At another point,” Carmen continues, with a white scarf around her head, “a group started to accept economic reparations for the disappearances, something we did not agree with, because first of all our children are not being left in plata translated and because, secondly, that would mean that they are dead, hence the separate paths but with mutual respect,” he concludes with a smile.
However, the smile immediately disappears from Carmen’s face when she hears the name of Javier Milei, an extreme right-wing candidate for tomorrow’s elections, against Sergio Massa, the current Minister of Economy. ‘We are very concerned: there are many people who are dissatisfied with the way the economy is running, which is not going well at all, that is true, and people who want change, but, by God, let them change for the better. and not for evil.”
‘Look at the United States with Trump, at neighboring Brazil, with Bolsonaro, they all have the same style, and what worries me is this: look at what it cost Lula to win the elections, and then at Lula, the best Brazil. already had it, just like we had Nestor,” referring to Kirchner, Argentina’s president from 2003 to 2007.
“These people from Milei want to privatize public schools and public hospitals, abolish subsidies for the unemployed and pensions for retirees, but that is not what scares me most.” “What scares me most,” he says in a deeper voice, “is that these people are going to try to establish a dictatorship. I always say that in a few months we will have a civil war with them.”
Carmen Arias also sees Milei as a “very un-Argentine” figure. It was not enough that he had insulted the Pope and Maradona, the country’s benchmarks, he still decided, to defend economic liberalism and praise Margaret Thatcher. “Is there anything less Argentinian than that? To idolize someone who helped kill many people in the Falklands and not be proud to say “the Falklands are Argentinian”, how is that possible, he is someone who wants to destroy the country . . .”
But what officially upset Carmen were the statements made by Victoria Villaruel, candidate for the vice-presidency of Milei, about Estela de Carlotto, the leader of the Abuelas, the group that discovered “nieto 133”. “This denier, who is probably not very intelligent, called her a “sinister character”…” It seemed to me a total disrespect and an abomination. We and the Abuelas do not agree on the way we fight, but this insult seemed unbearable to me against a lady she does not even know, does not even know who she is, against the deniers of the crimes of the dictatorship, we walk together .
Source: DN
