40 years later, the mothers of Argentina’s 'disappeared' refuse to be silent

Haydée Gastelú was among the first to arrive. “We were absolutely terrified,” she recalls. On the afternoon of 30 April 1977, 14 courageous women set aside fear – and the their families’ warnings – and left their homes to confront the dictatorship that had stolen their children. That day marked the first weekly march by the mothers of Argentina’s “disappeared” against the military commanders who had planned the systematic murder of thousands. Blaming the victims: dictatorship denialism is on the rise in Argentina Read more Four decades on and 2,037 marches later, the mothers are still marching, though some of them are now confined to wheelchairs. The mothers’ white headscarves became a symbol of courage and the relentless battle for justice – and they have largely succeeded in their original aims: as of 2016, more than 1,000 of the dictatorship’s torturers and killers had been tried and 700 sentenced. But the mothers – most of them now in their late 80s – warn that the current era of alternative facts and revisionist history poses a new kind of threat for the country. “Argentina’s new government wants to erase the memory of those terrible years and is putting the brakes on the continuation of trials,” says 88-year-old Taty Almeida, whose 20-year-old son, Alejandro, disappeared in 1975.