Word: argentina
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...newspapers (with one exception) were silent, the courts were a farce, the police formed an arm of the military government and members of opposition groups were being tortured and murdered in some 340 clandestine, Naziesque concentration camps, the mothers were the only group that forced the people of Argentina to face a horror they would have rather continued to ignore...
...bitter June wind began to pick up, most of the human traffic scurrying through the plaza probably wondered why these women continue. It is now generally accepted in Argentina that the military liquidated all remaining political prisioners and their traces shortly before the nation hosted the 1978 World Soccer Cup. In all, it is estimated that anywhere between 8,000 and 30,000 people "disappeared" during the military's 1976-1979 "dirty war" against left wing extremism. It is also generally accepted that the vast majority of them were completely innocent and in fact had no ties to guerrilla groups...
...mothers now, three years into stable, democratic rule, flounder precariously between their status as a movement and a political pressure group. To the outside world, it is tempting to term their current situation an identity crisis, though the mothers would firmly disagree. Argentina is a nation where movements rapidly, sometimes underhandedly, sometimes violently, turn into governments. (The most outstanding example is that of dictator Juan Domingo Peron, who managed to unite the most curious mixture of labor unions, fascist military men, left-wing guerrillas and a host of other disparate elements into a movement that has lost its cohesion...
...parties and splinter factions, for reaction to current events. The mothers voiced strident and widely publicized opposition in July, for example, when the church and other anti-divorce groups held a moderately successful "march for the defense of the family" in anticipation of congressional debate on a divorce bill (Argentina is one of a small handful of countries where it is still illegal...
...having lost everything except their cause, they will not let Argentina forget...