Mothers on a Mission: Uruguay’s movement for the missing
Story by Meredith Jackson, edited by Purple Romero
Photo: Members of Madres y Familiares hold posters of the disappeared at the annual Diversity March in Montevideo, Uruguay. September 27 2024 / Meredith Jackson
Forty years after the fall of Uruguay’s military dictatorship, the families of the disappeared are still demanding answers. Slowly but surely – through alliances that span politics, forensics, law, history and anthropology – they are casting light into the darkest recesses of their country’s past, in hope of a brighter future.
“Where are they?” These words pervade the streets of Montevideo, a constant reminder of the loss that Uruguay continues to suffer decades after it overcame a brutal dictatorship.
“Where are they?” The question echoes throughout the city. It is seen on banners flapping from balconies overlooking the Rambla, Montevideo’s famed waterfront promenade, in graffiti on sidewalks and building facades, on posters and photos in apartment windows, on lampposts and storefronts.
Every year on May 20th, thousands take to the streets of the capital and small towns alike, an immense, silent mass of people demanding “truth, justice and memory.” The faces of the disappeared rise above the crowd. The mothers, the friends, the sons, nieces and grandchildren of the disappeared hold up photos of their loved ones, long missing yet never allowed to fade into the oblivion of history. They march down main avenues, soundless save the ceremonial reading of the names of the disappeared, each name followed by a response in unison from the crowd: “Present.”
The Madres y Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (Mothers and Families of the Detained-Disappeared) lead this march, as they are the group largely responsible for making this question ubiquitous across the capital and beyond.
From silent marches to football jerseys
An organization comprising family members, friends, former political prisoners and other citizens, Madres y Familiares don’t stop at demanding answers to their question. They help establish other grassroots groups who maintain public attention on a multitude of unanswered questions. They collaborate to digitalise and democratise access to data about the disappeared. Connecting with legal organizations, they push for investigative and legal advances, fighting misinformation from the military and burial of the truth. They refuse to allow the erasure of the hundreds of their fellow Uruguayans who, after more than 50 years, have yet to come home.
Madres y Familiares came together in 1983, 10 years after president Juan Maria Bordaberry dissolved parliament and outlawed political parties, consolidating the power of Uruguay’s right-wing civic-military dictatorship. They fused three existing organisations that had formed organically in Uruguay, Argentina and in European countries of political exile. The three women at the forefront of the new group, Luz Ibarburu, Luisa Cuesta and Maria Ester Gatti, dedicated their lives to searching for not only their own missing children and grandchildren, but for all of the disappeared.
Uruguay’s dictatorship was part of a web of authoritarian regimes that emerged in the region in the early 1970s and shared a network of intelligence and repression tactics, and were funded and organised by the CIA under Operation Condor. In line with the United States’ broader Cold War anti-communist objectives, these governments brutally repressed civilians and enforced a culture of silence and paranoia.
Uruguay’s thriving communist party, active trade unions and armed left-wing groups like the Tupamaros, made it a natural target for Operation Condor. But the initial focus on guerrillas and communists quickly expanded to include anyone who dared speak or act against the regime: students, artists, intellectuals, union leaders and members of opposing political parties. During its reign, the military unleashed a campaign of torture, murder, rape and abduction. Nearly 14% of the population sought exile abroad. Around 20% of Uruguay’s population was detained by the police or military at some point during the dictatorial period. The state killed an estimated 202 people and forcibly disappeared 197, some 160 of whom remain missing today.
The dictatorship started showing signs of weakness in 1980, when constitutional reform proposed by the regime failed to win the popular vote. In 1983, the fall of Argentina’s dictatorial regime – and the general disintegration of Operation Condor – further diminished the strength of its partner regime in Uruguay. Sensing the regime’s weakening grip on power, Uruguayan citizens were emboldened to begin openly organising protests, strikes and acts of civil disobedience. In 1984, the regime finally allowed democratic elections to be held. Julio Maria Sanguinetti was elected and ascended to the presidency in 1985, effectively ending 12 years of vicious repression.
With the return of democracy on the horizon, family members of the forcibly disappeared formed Madres y Familiares, whose side of the fight is focused on public-facing activism, putting faces to the victims of Uruguayan state terrorism, and giving their relatives a voice. Javier Tassino, a former political prisoner and brother of disappeared victim Oscar Tassino, describes the organisation’s objective as, “to be able to explain and search for the disappeared… The principal strategy is to light up the minds of the people.”
They organise the annual Marcha del Silencio (Silent March) on the anniversary of the murder of opposition politicians Hector Gutierrez Ruiz and Zelmar Michelini. Thousands attend in Montevideo while other marches take place simultaneously in every major city in Uruguay, as well as internationally in places like Buenos Aires and Paris. They also attend every major march and political event in the country, silently holding the victims’ photos on the sidelines.
But the annual Marcha del Silencio and presence at other major events is but one small aspect of Madres y Familiares’ efforts to maintain public awareness. Their logo and slogans can be seen throughout the city, in graffiti and street murals, in banners and posters permanently hung in windows, on t-shirts and bandanas. Photos of the disappeared are plastered on walls and signs throughout Montevideo.
“We ask that people put in their house, their park, in their tree, in their garden, the white flag, a “Present” a “Where are they?” a daisy,” Tassino says.
In 2021 and 2022, they held shows exhibiting works by 197 artists in homage to the 197 disappeared. They persuaded local football teams to use jerseys with the names of the disappeared during their matches during the month of May. And they maintain an active presence on social media, marking the birthday of each victim on their platforms. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they decided to “bring the march to the people” and continued the annual tradition through an interactive livestream on social media.
Constellations of collaboration
Yet Madres y Familiares know they could not “light up the minds” of the people on their own. One of the organisations they collaborate with, Sitios de Memoria (Sites of Memory), began in 2019 as a collectivist project to digitise, publicise and democratise access to all available information on the dictatorial period. Their web page features meticulous maps of all known locations of human rights violations and discoveries of human remains, as well as a robust archive of primary source materials and a plethora of pertinent documents and records.
On the legal front, Madres y Familiares works with Luz Ibarburu Observatory (OLI). Named for one of the founders of Madres y Familiares, OLI provides legal counsel and support to victims and their families who bring legal cases against perpetrators of state-sponsored crimes, helping them navigate complicated and often-hostile legal waters.
“In almost no instance do the cases originate from the [state] prosecution,” says Pablo Chargoñia, the legal coordinator of OLI, “but rather are initiated by the victims. For this reason, our presentation of cases to the courts is a highly important aspect … There would be no investigation without the initiative of the victims.”
Working together and maximising each other’s strengths, expertise and resources is crucial in the face of complex obstacles and byzantine challenges in the struggle for justice – most of which are posed by the state and foremost among them is weaponisation of the law.
Unlike Argentina or Chile, Uruguay never had a period of transitional justice or widespread prosecutions. In fact, Uruguay experienced quite the contrary.
A “Pseudo Amnesty”
When democracy was officially restored in 1985, with it came the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law). This, Chargoñia explains, functioned as a “pseudo-amnesty” or impunity law for perpetrators. The government effectively shirked its responsibility to investigate or prosecute any state-sponsored crimes that occurred from 1968 to 1984. Judges were required to seek approval from the executive branch of government before pursuing any charges against possible perpetrators. For the next 15 years, all complaints were archived – or, in other words: ignored.
In 1989, founding members of Madres y Familiares – as well as Mathilde Rodriguez Larreta, widow of murdered opposition politician Hector Gutierrez Ruiz – led a nationwide campaign of petitions that resulted in a referendum vote on the law.
The country voted to uphold the law that year, but Madres y Familiares did not give up. Together with many other groups, they spearheaded another campaign to annul the law by plebiscite starting in 2005. When the vote finally took place in 2009, the law was again upheld by a tiny margin.
During the 26-years the Ley de Caducidad was active, it was legally impossible to bring cases against military or police who had a hand in state terrorism. Chargoñia describes the attitude of the state during these years as, “wanting to turn the page – not to have eyes on the back of our heads – and look only forward.” So, lawyers and activists sought ways to circumvent the law.
“The first criminal conviction for crimes during the dictatorship was in regards to the responsibility of Juan Carlos Blanco, the chancellor of the dictatorship, who also participated in the cover-up of the abduction of teacher Elena Quinteros,” Chargoñia explains. “This was an exception to the impunity law because Blanco wasn’t a soldier nor a police officer, and the law had that imperfection… which was to exclude non-military civilians. This allowed us to open up a sort of gap or fissure in the Ley de Caducidad.”
This clever interpretation of the law also led to the arrests and later convictions of former dictators Bordaberry and Gregorio Alvarez for the murders of politicians Hector Gutierrez Ruiz and Zelmar Michelini – which were committed in Argentine territory and thus weren’t subject to the amnesty law.
Families of victims also brought cases to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, whose 2011 ruling on a case against the state for failing to investigate the disappearance of Maria Claudia Gelman finally invalidated the Ley de Caducidad and pushed the Uruguayan government to update its laws in accordance with international human rights conventions.
Unearthing the truth
Another grave obstacle for the groups seeking justice has been the military’s deliberate and ongoing concealment of bodies and campaigns of misinformation. When the dictatorship began to weaken in 1983, the regime understood that it had to protect itself from future prosecution. According to some former state sources, they did this by exhuming and burning the bodies of many of the murdered and throwing their remains into the River Plate – although these claims are contested and have, in some instances, proved to be false.
“The biggest problem is the silence of the military, or that some military member gives some untrue information that sends the investigations and excavations down one road when it should be going down another,” says Dr. Juan Pablo dos Santos Falcón, lawyer for the Secretary of Human Rights of the Recent Past.
Perpetrators have made orchestrated efforts to lie when interrogated and give false information about the location of remains – purposefully derailing investigations and hindering prosecution. Only through years of painstaking historical and scientific work have forensic anthropologists and researchers begun to extricate the truth of the victims’ whereabouts.
The two most recently identified victims are Amelia Sanjurjo and Luis Eduardo Arigón. Their remains were found in 2023 and 2024 respectively, in a clandestine grave in Battalion 14, one of the most notorious sites of torture, execution, and burial of political activists during the dictatorship.
Sanjruro and Arigon were targets, along with Oscar Tassino, of an operation to “fracture” the Uruguayan Communist Party. Soldiers from the Coordinating Body of Antisubversive Operations (OCOA) kidnapped them in 1977 and held them at La Tablada, an infamous torture center. Survivors of the center later recounted the torture inflicted on the pair and the circumstances of their deaths. Former military personnel involved in the disappearances testified in the 2003 Peace Commission, the state’s first official investigation of crimes during the dictatorship, that their bodies had been exhumed, burned and thrown into the river.
“The soldiers said not to look anymore,” Tassino says, “because they’d removed all the bodies there… all lies….” It took years of excavations and tireless collaboration of national and international groups before the pair’s remains were discovered and their bone fragments positively identified. “I’m sure they knew who was buried there,” Tassion says. “Who Amelia was, and who interred her. They knew the name and they didn’t say it anyway.”
We have evidence
Following the discovery of Arigón’s remains on July 30th, 2024, Madres y Familiares spokesperson Ignacio Errandonea told the press, “We know and we have evidence that there is a lot of documentation that they haven’t surrendered. And it’s time that the government, once and for all, orders the Armed Forces to release all, absolutely all of the archives.”
The Investigative Group of Forensic Anthropologists (GIAF) at the University of the Republic is responsible for excavations. They work in collaboration with the Argentinian Team of Forensic Anthropologists (EAAF), who maintain a genetic database of family members of the disappeared of various countries involved in Operation Condor. But these excavations and recoveries of remains are the final steps in this work.
Years of historical investigation by academics, journalists, lawyers and grassroots activists are required to pinpoint which areas should be excavated. This includes compiling and verifying witness testimonies, comparing aerial photographs of the sites over decades, and conducting archeological surveys over large swathes of rural military zones. The National Institute of Human Rights, the official government office in charge of the investigations, provides funding, access to the land, archival documents, and the power to subpoena relevant witnesses for the operations.
None of this would be possible without the unwavering commitment and staunch visibility of Madres y Familiares.
Educating the youth
Despite decades of resistance from the state, the law and powerful political figures, Madres y Familiares have had many successes. The unearthing of Sanjurjo’s and Arigón’s remains is promising, as is the ever-growing list of convicted perpetrators. But Chargoñia says, “we’re working against the biological clock.”
As both the victims’ immediate families and the perpetrators age and pass away, investigations are more urgent than ever. But future generations also have a critical role in continuing what the movement has started.
“We have to disseminate, make public and distribute among people what happens when we disregard the rights of individuals,” Chargoñia says. “It interests me very much that the new generations learn, take the testimony of the surviving victims and understand exactly the phenomenon of state terrorism.”
Sitios de Memoria’s archiving work is essential to this. Records of incidents, statements, testimonies and data gathered on the disappeared could equip future investigators with vital knowledge. This rich documentation and preservation of the decades-long fight could also serve as a guide to preventing the erasure of past atrocities.
Mariana Risso, one of the founders of Sitios de Memoria, discussed in an interview with Uraguayan TV show Arriba Gente the importance of making this information easily accessible in a digital format, especially for high school students and teachers. “The good thing about memory is that it is never sealed and fixed forever,” she said. “Memory implies that remembering is using past events to interpret the present in order to know where one wants to go. And where one doesn’t want to go.”
Another important tool in the struggle for truth and justice is OLI’s database of every court case ever brought in regards to the dictatorship – the murdered, the disappeared and the wrongfully imprisoned and tortured. “The first database of crimes against humanity [in Uruguay] was developed by OLI,” Chargoñia says. “It’s a creation of civil society. Even the Uruguayan government, when it needs to access this information, accesses the information compiled by OLI.”
One important lesson they want to impart to future generations is that their activism and advocacy should bring in as many allies as possible. The people are at the center of this battle, and it can only be won with the support of diverse organisations and sectors. “A movement like ours can’t be made with one or two or three people,” Tassino says. “We work on a grand scale… without the people, we are nothing.”
Prioritising cooperation across a network of organisations and actors, ensuring continued public awareness and engagement, and pursuing creative legal tactics, Madres y Familiares vow to continue their struggle until every disappeared person is found. Not just to give closure to individual families, but so the country as a whole can move forward in a climate of transparency and justice. “We are convinced that we contribute enormously to democracy – to building democracy,” Tassino says. “We are part of our democracy.”
This article was originally published on Unbias The News. It has been republished here as part of a partnership.
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