The women, tidily dressed with cropped, graying hair, approached the armed officers conducting baggage checks in Argentina’s international airport. It was the late 1970s, and Argentina was engulfed in a brutal military dictatorship intent on “disappearing” anyone it deemed subversive. Thousands of Argentineans had been abducted and quietly killed.
Within their suitcases the women carried sensitive information—information that could surely get them detained, or worse. “We were terribly afraid. Because if they found that stuff … well, I don’t know what would have happened,” one of the women would later say.
To sneak the intelligence into Argentina from Brazil, where they had collected it, the women had purchased several boxes of chocolate truffles, devoured the sweets, and filled the shiny yellow wrappers with crumpled balls of silk paper covered in tiny notes. At the airport, they pulled out a box of truffles that contained actual chocolates and made a show of eating them as they waited in line for their bags to be searched. After eyeing the benign, wizened women licking chocolate off their fingers, the officers waved them through without a second glance at their baggage.
The smugglers belonged to a group of grandmothers called the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, or Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which had formed a few years earlier. Their children were among those taken by the military regime, some of them along with their own young sons and daughters, others while pregnant. A year after the armed forces took power, in 1977, the Abuelas had banded together to search for their stolen grandchildren, many of whom they suspected were being raised by military and police officers under false identities. The notes enclosed within the chocolate wrappers contained clues about their possible fates.
While some of their husbands and male relatives offered support, the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo was composed almost exclusively of women. As I researched and wrote my new book, A Flower Traveled in My Blood, a narrative-nonfiction history of the Abuelas, this point often confused me. Where were the fathers and grandfathers looking for their children and grandchildren? Surely, they were equally distraught about what had befallen their families.
Part of the answer, I learned, was practical. Traditional gender roles still reigned in 1970s Argentina, and most Argentinean mothers did not work outside the home. Grief did not stop bills from arriving, and Argentinean men had to continue to support their households, missing children and grandchildren or not. Another reason, one Abuela told a researcher in the 1990s, was the nature of motherhood, which she described as “this visceral feeling you carry inside, the one that says, ‘She’s my daughter, he’s my son, I can’t stop looking for them, I have to search wherever it takes me.’”
But over time, I came to understand there was an even more meaningful explanation: that the Abuelas were mostly women, and older women at that, allowed them to do things like breeze through airport checkpoints unnoticed. As grandmothers in their 50s and 60s, they recognized they would be overlooked and underestimated—and they transformed that into an advantage. “Who was going to suspect anything of the little old ladies carrying chocolates?” one grandmother said following the Brazil mission.
Each week during the dictatorship, the Abuelas boldly gathered alongside other women missing their children and grandchildren in the Plaza de Mayo, the square in front of the presidential palace from which they drew their name. “Las locas,” the palace’s guards called them dismissively. “The crazy women.” All the while, as Argentineans continued disappearing, the grandmothers conducted quiet investigations. They assumed disguises to more closely observe boys and girls who they thought might be their stolen grandchildren, held secretive meetings in cafés in which they pretended to celebrate birthdays or compare knitting projects, and conducted risky intelligence-gathering missions, such as the one to Brazil.
This bold detective work allowed them to find several stolen grandchildren even as the dictatorship raged. It also helped them to chip away at the military’s power. As news of the Abuelas’ activities trickled out, opposition to the armed forces mounted. Even the most rabid defenders of the dictatorship struggled to swallow the idea that the military had not only abducted its own citizens but also stolen their babies. Then, in 1983, after its disastrous performance in the Falklands War, the military government fell for good.
More than 40 years have passed since democracy was restored in Argentina. Today, the surviving Abuelas are in their 80s, 90s, and even 100s, but they have never stopped searching. They have reclaimed 140 of their stolen grandchildren—one as recently as this past July. To identify the hundreds they estimate remain at large, the Abuelas now work alongside many of the granddaughters and grandsons they have recovered.
As this new generation steps in, more men are involved in the movement than ever before. But within the Abuelas’ headquarters, an oft-cited refrain makes clear who’s in charge. “As long as there is an Abuela around, an Abuela leads.”
Haley Cohen Gilliland is the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative
