Erika Apfelbaum and Ana Vasquez
THE "MADWOMEN" OF THE PLACE DE MAl
Coups and military dictatorships in Uruguay and Chile
since 1973 have given rise to torture and assassinations, creating an
international public scandal. In 1976, the Argentine military applied
the lessons of their comrades' experience : no prisoners, no death
sentences, no public executions- but, in their place, "disappear–
ances." Sequester suspects without leaving a trace, sequester even
the witnesses, assassinate them and hide the bodies - and there you
have a new governmental method of putting the lid on protest.
Is it possible that one's child - or a whole family - could just
disappear overnight? The relatives of the "disappeared" ran to police
headquarters, to the commissioner's office, to the hospital- all the
hospitals - to the Ministry of the Interior; and everywhere they got
the same polite yet indifferent reply: nobody knows a thing. Caught
up in an infernal cogwheel, without direction, they no longer knew
whom to appeal to. No one was responsible .
In the face of such an absurd new reality, neighbors and even
friends began to wonder. "Her son has disappeared.... He certainly
must have done
something!"
Law-abiding women, respectable mothers,
kept up their individual searches, trying to break through the institu–
tional indifference . They saw each other daily in the same inter–
minable lines; they got to know each other, and they compared
experiences: nothing but unassailable bureaucrats , evasive and am–
biguous answers. And so they decided to blockade, in a silent patrol,
the forbidden place . "One Thursday in April of 1977, at five in the
afternoon, fourteen women ... mothers whose children have disap–
peared . . . demonstrated their suffering at the Place de Mai and
refused to be turned away without getting some answers...."
reported
J.
P. Bousquet ("Les folles de la place de Mai,"
Stock 2,
Paris , 1982).
As long as they came individually, in secret, to a ministerial of–
fice, demanding an accounting-"Where is he? What have you done
with him?" - one could show them out on the excuse of administrative
protocol. The woman was simply given to understand that her
Editor's Note: Translated from the French
by
Mary Barno.
