Her life once began as a fairy tale, Hebe María Pastor de Bonafini said in a recent video from the Argentine Ministry of Culture. Born in 1928 in the coastal town of Ensenada, east of Buenos Aires, the girl seemed destined for a simple but happy life as a housewife.
She had a ‘nice family’ and teachers ‘who taught me everything’, she looked back at a late age. At the age of 14 she married and had three children. ‘I always thought: everything is going so well with me, what will happen to me?’. A fortune teller predicted her great disaster: “You will lose your whole family.” In 1977, then 48 years old, disaster struck in the life of the mother of sons Jorge Omar, Raúl Alfredo and daughter María Alejandra.
The army had seized power a year earlier. Argentina lived in a dictatorship, General Jorge Rafael Videla resided in the Pink House (the presidential palace) on the Plaza de Mayo, the ‘Meiplein’ in Dutch. Bonafini’s sons, both active members of leftist parties, were kidnapped by the regime and never returned. The housewife ‘Kika Pastor’ turned into the activist Hebe de Bonafini. Bonafini devoted the second half of her life to protest.
White headscarves
The first public appearance of what would later become the ‘Mothers of Meiplein’ could hardly be called a protest. On a Saturday in 1977, a group of mothers, the very first time without Bonafini, went to the Pink House, hoping for an audience with President Videla. He would receive a group of distraught mothers anyway, was the vain hope. They were sent away. But the women were among the first to openly oppose the dictatorship.
The group of initially 14 mothers returned to the Plaza de Mayo every week, initially in the form of a seated protest, which later turned into a weekly 24-hour march around the clock tower in the square. The demand was always the same: to see their children alive. Their white headscarves, a reference to the cotton diapers their children once wore, became a world-famous symbol. According to the women, thirty thousand people disappeared during the military dictatorship. The official figure was thirteen thousand for a long time, in recent years the Argentinian government took over the number of the mothers.
The women became mocking las locas called, the fools. The nickname stuck more stubbornly in the Netherlands than in Argentina itself. Bonafini became the leader of the Foolish Mothers after their first forewoman, Azucena Villaflor, was arrested along with eight other mothers at the end of 1977 and also disappeared.
Bonafini turned out to be a ‘Mother’ with her heart on her sleeve. She was so political in her statements that in 1986, three years after the return to democracy, the group split into two. In addition to the majority led by Bonafini, a split emerged that stated that it remained faithful to the apolitical principles of the movement, aimed only at finding the truth.
Marxist struggle
For two decades, Bonafini fiercely opposed the democratic governments that followed the dictatorship. No government was worthy of its support until the crimes of the past were solved. That changed when she radically converted in 2003 to the Peronist (left-wing populist) government of Néstor Kirchner. Suddenly she became part of the establishment, got a role in a multimillion-dollar social housing project and became the subject of a corruption investigation.
At the same time, she hardened in her radical left convictions. In the last decades of her life she promoted the armed Marxist struggle and supported guerrilla movements such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Colombian Farc and the Basque ETA. Her aversion to the “imperialist” United States was such that she welcomed the 2001 attack on the Twin Towers as good news.
Her daughter Alejandra announced the news of Bonafini’s death on Sunday. She had been struggling with ailments for some time and died in hospital in her hometown of La Plata. Cristina Kirchner, the current vice president and widow of Néstor Kirchner, called Bonafini a “global symbol of the human rights struggle, pride of Argentina” on Twitter. Hebe de Bonafini died after 45 years of activism, the fate of her sons remains unresolved.
3 x Hebe de Bonafini
About September 11: ‘For the first time, it was the turn of the United States. I’m not going to be hypocritical about this, I didn’t feel any pain from this attack.’
On the fight against the right: ‘Let’s stop being democratic and good. I shit on the good guys. I am not good.’
About death: ‘People don’t have to cry about my death. There must be dancing and partying in the square.’