Mexico City, Jul 20 (EFE).- The president and founder of Argentina’s Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, Estela de Carlotto, showed her support for Mexican mothers searching for their missing loved ones on Thursday, urging them to “cry at home and fight outside.”
“To fight well, to unite, to say that we can, to cry at home and fight outside. Don’t feel sorry for yourselves, let them be afraid, because you are asking for what is rightfully yours,” de Carlotto said at an event in Mexico City attended by several Mexican women with missing relatives.
The human rights organization Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo is a movement that emerged in Argentina last century during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s, a period in which at least 30,000 people were victims of forced disappearances.
In a new visit Mexico, a country mired in a missing persons crisis with more than 110,000 victims, to participate in the “Democracy, Memory and Human Rights: An Argentinian Perspective” conference organized by the Claustro de Sor Juana University, de Carlotto told the women that they must “demand that those who must respond do so.”
“We must continue, we must never give up, we must never wish evil for the evil that was done to us,” she said.
The Argentinian activist, whose daughter was kidnapped and disappeared in the late 1970s while she was pregnant, alluded to the Ayotzinapa case, one of the most representative events of the human rights crisis Mexico is suffering.
On Sep. 26, 2014, 43 students disappeared in the city of Iguala, in the western state of Guerrero, and the case remains unsolved.
“I was here when the students disappeared, at a book fair, and we were with three parents who didn’t know what to do, desperate. We taught them what we could, we advised them not to isolate themselves, not to get angry,” she recalled.
De Carlotto also celebrated the creation of the National Genetic Data Bank in Argentina, which matches the blood of the missing with their relatives and has so far managed to find 132 of around 500 children who were kidnapped and disappeared during the dictatorship.
“All countries with the problem of searching for the disappeared should have it,” she proposed.
On May 29, after years of civil organizations’ demands, the National Forensic Data Bank began operating in Mexico, aiming to contribute to the identification of missing persons. EFE
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