page_title: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
section_title: Becoming a movement
hierarchical_section_title: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo / Becoming a movement
caption_attribution_description: English: Deputy chief of Argentine Federal Police, Carlos Gallone, holding a Mother of the Plaza de Mayo during a protest at Plaza de Mayo, Buenos Aires. Policemen were there to repress the protest. The photo won the "Premio Rey de España", a photography award of Spain.
context_page_description: Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is a movement of Argentine mothers who campaigned for their children who had been "disappeared" during the military dictatorship, pursuing the government for answers between 1977 and 2006.
context_section_description: As growing numbers joined weekly marches on Thursdays, the day they first few met, the Mothers also began an international campaign to defy the propaganda distributed by the military regime. This campaign brought the attention of the world to Argentina.
  One year after the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo was founded, hundreds of women were participating, gathering in the Plaza for weekly demonstrations. They found strength in each other by marching in public, and attracted some press. They made signs with photos of their children and publicized their children's names. They wore white headscarves embroidered with the names and dates of births of their lost children.
  The government tried to trivialize their action calling them "las locas" (the madwomen).
  As the number of disappeared grew, the movement grew, and the Mothers were getting international attention. They began to try and build pressure from outside governments against the Argentine dictatorship, by sharing the many stories of the "disappeared".
  On 10 December 1977, International Human Rights Day, the Mothers published a newspaper advertisement with the names of their missing children. That same night, Azucena Villaflor (one of the original founders) was kidnapped from her home in Avellaneda by a group of armed men. She is reported to have been taken to the infamous ESMA torture centre, and from there on a "death flights" over the ocean. In-flight, the abducted were drugged, stripped, and flung into the sea or killed and thrown overboard.
  Also an estimated 500 of the missing are the children who were born in concentration camps or prison to pregnant  'disappeared'  women; many of these babies were given in illegal adoptions to military families and others associated with the regime. Their birth mothers were generally believed to have been killed. The numbers are hard to determine due to the secrecy surrounding the abductions.
caption: A policeman (Carlos Gallone[9]) and a Mother during an act of protest at Plaza de Mayo, October 1982.
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