Mirta Acuña de Baravalle (born 12 January 1925) is an Argentine human rights activist who was one of the twelve founders of the

Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo is an Argentine human rights association formed in response to the National Reorganization Process, the military dictatorship by Jorge Rafael Videla, with the goal of finding the ''desaparecidos'', initially, an ...

and the

Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo ( es, italic=no, Asociación Civil Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo) is a human rights organization with the goal of finding the children stolen and illegally adopted during the 1976–1983 Argentine military dicta ...

associations.

Biography

The Argentine coup d'état of March 24, 1976 established a

terrorist Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of criminal violence to provoke a state of terror or fear, mostly with the intention to achieve political or religious aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violen ...

regime that sought to " disappear" their political opponents. Neither another country, the Catholic Church, nor an international humanitarian organization, was willing to condemn the military regime's atrocities. The judicial system systematically rejected legal remedies. Baravalle's daughter Ana Maria, who was five months pregnant at the time, and her son-in-law Julio Cesar were among those arrested and "disappeared". The last news Baravalle heard about her daughter was that she had given birth to a girl while in prison. At the beginning of 1977, Mirta Acuña de Baravalle joined a group of mothers, fathers, and relatives of the disappeared who began to meet in the

Plaza de Mayo The Plaza de Mayo (; en, May Square) is a city square and main foundational site of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It was formed in 1884 after the demolition of the Recova building, unifying the city's Plaza Mayor and Plaza de Armas, by that time know ...

as a form of

nonviolent resistance Nonviolent resistance (NVR), or nonviolent action, sometimes called civil resistance, is the practice of achieving goals such as social change through symbolic protests, civil disobedience, economic or political noncooperation, satyagraha, cons ...

. The proposal came from

Azucena Villaflor Azucena Villaflor (7 April 1924 – 10 December 1977) was an Argentine activist and one of the founders of the human rights association Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which looked for ''desaparecidos'' (victims of forced disappearance during Arge ...

, who was later murdered by the dictatorship. This group later became known as the

and she was one of its founders. In October 1977, she received an invitation from Alicia Zubasnabar, another of the Mothers, to form a group of grandmothers who were looking for their missing grandchildren. She was one of the twelve founding women of Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Her daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter are still missing. In 1986, due to internal discrepancies, Mothers of Plaza de Mayo fractured. Mirta Acuña joined the sector called Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Fundraiser Line. PitrolaBaravalleEspenFukman

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Acuna de Baravalle, Mirta 1925 births Living people Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo