Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, passed away this Sunday at the age of 93. The news has hit hard in Argentina and beyond the seas. She has left one of the icons of the fight for human rights worldwide.
President Alberto Fernández decreed three days of official mourning in “homage to Hebe, her memory and her struggle that will always be present as a guide in difficult times.”
Vice President Cristina Fernández, attached to Hebe by deep affection, was among the first people to post a message of condolence.
“Dearest Hebe, Mother of Plaza de Mayo, world symbol of the fight for Human Rights, pride of Argentina. God called you on the day of National Sovereignty… it should not be a coincidence. Simply thank you and see you always ”, Fernández wrote on his networks.
Alejandra Bonafini, Hebe’s daughter, was in charge of confirming the news through a statement:
“It is with great pain that we inform you that today at 9.20 Hebe de Bonafini passed away. We are extremely grateful for the demonstrations of love, accompaniment and concern that my mother has received during these days of hospitalization at the Italian Hospital in the city of La Plata, as throughout her militant career.
These are very difficult moments and of deep sadness and we understand the love of the people for Hebe, but at this moment as a family we have the need to mourn the Mother of Plaza de Mayo, Hebe, in privacy, for which we will inform from tomorrow what will be the spaces for tributes and reminders.
As of now, there are no words that really mean my deep gratitude to the medical health team that assisted and cared for her for so many years, as well as to the medical, nursing, auxiliary and managerial team of the Hospital Italiano de La Plata, who during the days of hospitalization they were by my mother’s side, taking care of her with much love and respect.
We will continue to find Hebe in the Plaza and in the town fights!
Alejandra Bonafini
For her part, Estela de Carlotto, president of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, also fired Hebe. “It is an enormous sadness, we know that we are not eternal, but [somos] companions of 46 years ago. With difficulties. She leaves nothing but her strength, Hebe’s strength, with mistakes like we all have, she walked, she did [algo] of this need of women, of Mothers and Grandmothers, to find and know where they are and what they did with them,” she said.
Carlotto also confessed: “I did not share many things; but it does not mean that we are enemies, far from it, the fight is the same and the pain is the same. It is a day of mourning. We will surely miss her, because people like that fill history. Her temperament sowed a lot (…) You have to respect her from pain and silence ”.
In October, in what would be his last public appearance, he attended the opening of a photographic exhibition dedicated to his life at the Néstor Kircher Cultural Center. In the snapshots of the room, the tender look of a little Hebe in the family environment was mixed; a smiling young Hebe on a beach; the happiness of a Hebe on her wedding day; that of a mother Hebe, surrounded by her three little ones; that of a Hebe in the streets, with a white scarf, crowning her hair as a symbol of struggle; a defiant Hebe and leading a round of mothers in the same square where soldiers on horseback and with batons repress them…
The 93-year-old Hebe with a firm voice, referring to Jorge Omar and Raúl Alfredo, her sons kidnapped and disappeared by the civic-military dictatorship in 1977, confessed to those present: “I forgot who I was the day they disappeared. I never thought more of myself.”
In addition to their children, the dictatorship disappeared a daughter-in-law, Jorge’s wife, and tens of thousands of other Argentine daughters and sons. The pain turned into a fight and Hebe became the mother of all. In 1979 she founded, together with other compañeras, the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Association, an organization that she has presided over from then until now.
Whoever had the opportunity to see or hear it once, perhaps thought that a heart like this would never stop beating. His strength and her energy, even as she was in her nineties and in a wheelchair, was electrifying. Until recently she was present, like every Thursday, in the Plaza de Mayo, in the historic rounds of the Mothers. There, where Hebe is eternal, where she and her companions fought so many battles, she will continue to haunt her legacy.
