Mothers Of The Plaza De Mayo Quotes

It would be to hear resonating within oneself the shouting of the Mothers of the Disappeared in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in the 1970s, and to turn instead to other things.

All Latin Americans know about the disappeared. The period of the late 1970s and 1980s was a dark time in South America. It was a time of military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The governments kidnapped civilians and took them to undisclosed locations and tortured and killed them. Their bodies were never found. Their bones were never found. In Argentina, in just seven years’ time, the government disappeared about thirty thousand people. They woke up one morning and went about their days and then they vanished without a trace. So in Argentina, their mothers formed a group called the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They wore white scarves around their heads and marched two by two in front of the presidential palace every Thursday afternoon at 3:30 P.M. holding pictures of their disappeared children. They still do it every Thursday afternoon. These mothers are legendary. They have been marching for forty years.

All of this points to an important dimension of a spirituality of reconciliation. A spirituality of reconciliation involves not directing one's thinking along the traditional channels of power, but making possible the springing up of alternatives to dominative power. To counter power with the same kind of power may restrain it, but it does not lead to peace. This is something practitioners of non-violence have known for a long time. But it is a lesson hard to learn. The power that broke the hold of sin on the world was the powerlessness, the agony, and the humiliation of the cross. The blood that was shed in violence becomes life-giving, redeeming blood. Reconciliation requires finding a different kind of power from dominative power to transform situations. Matthilde Mellibovsky, one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, speaks of it as a “circle of love around death.” The women in Croatia called it a wall of peace. It is the power that raised Jesus from the dead.