During the military dictatorship it was illegal to stand in a group of more than three people in a public place because it was considered a potential protest.
This was not a problem for the mothers who had their children taken from them in the night. They would not give up, they would not be silenced.
They began to walk around the Plaza de Mayo in a circle, meeting every Thursday to talk. These meetings of a few women turned into a ritual that is still practiced in the square today. Fourteen women founded an organization that would go on to fight for decades to find their children and demand answers from an unresponsive government.
They walked with banners, holding pictures of their children, desperate to know where their sons and daughters were.
The mothers wore white scarves on their heads, thought to symbolize the blankets and diapers of their children, embroidered with the names of the disappeared.
Though only a small percentage of the disappeared have been found, the organization keeps alive their memory, in an attempt to never forget the horrors of the Dirty War.
“We cannot call them (the disappeared), but they will always call us.”
Madres de Plaza de Mayo 