On October 7, 1977 Hebe de Bonafini He left his house in La Plata heading for the procession to the Basilica of Luján with a cloth diaper tied to his head: It was him watchword that she and other mothers of the disappeared had agreed to identify each other the crowd gathered in prayer to the Virgin. Almost 45 years later, Hebe left her home once more with a white scarf for an event that traces the historical arc of the association that she presides over, as well as her own: opened on saturday in Ensenada on Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Parka green space 350 meters long by 35 meters wide that functions as a place of recreation and a memorial near El Dique, the neighborhood where she was born and raised.
This creation is part of a series of works that the Buenos Aires district will carry out with Mothers in its own territory, among them the installation of a cultural space of three thousand square meters that will include the University at Camino Rivadavia and 122, the street that separates Ensenada from La Plata. The green corridor inaugurated this Saturday moves between Echeverría and Masantonio streets with hammocks, games for children, resting places and posters that run through the history of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo Association since its inception until its continuity over time and beyond the claims for memory, truth and justice, as happened in his interventions during the December 2001 outbreakby case.
“We do not make squares to beautify the city and nothing more, but with an ideological and political sense”acknowledged the local mayor Mario Secco in the act in which the mayor of Berisso also participated, Fabian Cagliardiand the Undersecretary of Cultural Policies of the province of Buenos Aires, Victoria Onettowho remembered his father, Manuel Bellonimilitant of the FAP and assassinated by the Buenos Aires Police in March 1971.
Accompanied by Visitation Loyola and Carmen AriasHebe de Bonafini spoke on behalf of Mothers to close a well-attended ceremony that saw the crowd fill up for the first time park amphitheater, designed in the shape of the tied white handkerchief near the border with Andrade street in the Villa Albino neighborhood.
“This is beyond anything one can hope for.Hebe said, visibly shaken. “The park has a political commitment very deep because it is in every item and in every place we stop, in every deed we did from the guts and the heart. Read it carefully each place, it is not anything”, he added in relation to the posts and posters with the history of the Mothers that the space reviews.
“I love Ensenada. I was born near here, in El Dique, and I had my best teachers. First it was my parents, who taught me the value of work, of hands, of thinking for others. And then the school. There they taught me the only thing I learned, because I only went to primary school”, reviewed Hebe, who weaved her past in the town with the struggle of the Mothers and the link with Mario Seccowhom she and her classmates had known since the days when they called him “The municipal”. “We saw him protesting in a tent. And now she did all this. I have no words to thank him for everything he is doing.”
“Today, when I came here, I thought that I had never thought of myself since they took my eldest son. I went out into the street like an unrestrained madwoman, mothers did not yet exist. I forgot regarding that woman who dreamed in the El Dique neighborhoodwho became a girlfriend at the age of fourteen, who married at 18. And until today I have not stopped”, analyzed the president of Madres in an emotional speech stripped of all kinds of scripts.
“When we do politics, let’s think well. Because we do politics since we get up, since we open our eyes. That’s where the revolution begins: every morning, when one gets up and begins to think what I am going to do for the other that needs me today. That’s what my children taught me. That is the true political revolution: to think of the other more than ourselves,” he added.
Taking advantage of the presence of Carlos Gómez (a priest from Punta Lara who once made headlines for using inclusive language), Hebe said: “I got married in the Church, but not because I believed, but for the white dress.
Two things made me change. The first was a talk with Pope Francis when I was very angry. And later, a kid who was going to a manifestation of the Virgin of Itatí in a boat, they asked him if he was going to ask, and he said no, that he was going to thank them. When I saw where he lived, I thought if he was thankful even though he had nothing, then who am I not to believe.”
