Madres de la Plaza de Mayo

I just came back from the Plaza de Mayo, one of the main squares in downtown Bs As. Every Thursday at 3:30pm, a group called the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo take over the square with a political march.

In a nutshell, the group came about during the dictatorship, when the mothers of men and women who had mysteriously "disappeared" in the middle of the night decided to take action. They started regularly protesting, demanding justice and the safe return of their children, in the Plaza de Mayo, white kerchiefs the "uniform" of their ranks. Since the dictatorship ended, the group has continued to be active in various social justice and human rights related causes.

The Madres are very well respected and are famous around the world. Their weekly march is, I learned today, a big tourist attraction. There were tons of foreigners there with digital cameras, filming, or just taking in the march.

But I felt mixed feelings watching the march today. On one hand, the fact that so many tourists are interested by the Madres, a political group fighting for social justice, is a good thing. Ideally learning about the Madres, snapping their picture, and taking that story back to your home country helps promote their cause - it's not the same kind of tourist attraction as the Recoleta Craft Fair or the beach at Mar del Plata.

But it was sort of weird. The Madres silently circle the statue in the centre of the Plaza. And there's tourists with their cameras everywhere; people taking pictures from afar, people walking backwards in front of the group to take a shot from the front, people going up amongst the women and taking pictures from there... One girl standing at the little table the Madres have set up with pamphlets and things, right in the woman's face with her digital camera, not taking a pamphlet or talking to her, but simply capturing her "quaint kerchiefed-ness" on film. And everyone else is standing around the plaza, just watching them walk.

Now, it's not meant to be a loud protest, and I don't even know how it's seen to just join into the march. But it still seemed really strange to me that everyone's standing around casually snapping pictures of these women and this march whose movement has deep roots in the dirty past of this country and is heavy with signification.

The whole scene just struck me as sort of weird. Are the Madres really no more than some kind of tourist attraction?