Nora Cortiñas, campaigner for Argentina’s ‘disappeared’, 1930-2024

For the first two weeks after her son’s disappearance, 47-year-old Nora Cortiñas felt as if she were “in a spiral of madness”. It was April 1977, one year into Argentina’s rightwing military dictatorship, and Cortiñas, a friendly and outgoing housewife, went from government office to government office, finding no information about Carlos, a 24-year-old leftwing activist.

Then on April 30, Cortiñas and a dozen other women with missing relatives gathered in the Plaza de Mayo, the square outside Argentina’s presidential palace in Buenos Aires. They began to meet there every Thursday — wearing white scarves to recognise one another — to share their pain, to co-ordinate their searches and to protest.

“The fathers couldn’t have done it,” she said in 2006, recalling the group’s clashes with the authorities at a time when thousands of suspected critics of the regime were being abducted and killed, or sent to torture centres. “[We had to] shout, stamp, make a fuss, and also cry — cry and shout.”

Cortiñas died on 30 May, aged 94, without ever finding out what happened to Carlos after his kidnapping at a Buenos Aires train station. But the group she helped start, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, became the backbone of perhaps the most successful human rights movement in history. 

No other country that suffered a 20th-century dictatorship has so completely prosecuted its crimes as Argentina. Upon its return to democracy in 1983, it quickly launched one of the world’s first truth commissions, which identified 8,961 people who had been murdered or forcibly disappeared, though human rights groups argue that the true number may be more than three times that. In the mid-2000s, after the repeal of amnesty laws, Argentina launched still-ongoing criminal prosecutions, with 1,221 people convicted of human rights abuses to date.

Born in 1930 and married at 19, Cortiñas, known affectionately as Norita, said she had never planned to venture beyond her domestic role caring for her two sons and her husband — whom she described as “very sexist”— and teaching younger women to sew.

But after Carlos disappeared, she became a prolific activist. As well as attending the Thursday marches in the Plaza de Mayo up until her death, she argued for justice for victims of state violence before governments, international commissions, feminist conferences, university and school students, and Pope John Paul II.

In 1986 Cortiñas, a pragmatic advocate of dialogue with parties across Argentina’s political spectrum, split from hardline leaders of the Madres to found her own organisation: Línea Fundadora. Its members collaborated with government programmes to identify victims and compensate families. The hardliners, who saw their role as continuing their children’s fight for a socialist transformation of Argentina, boycotted such efforts.

While Cortiñas embraced many of the social causes championed by Argentina’s left — becoming a key supporter of the 2020 legalisation of elective abortion — she maintained a distance from the country’s political parties. 

“Cortiñas’ contribution was to reach out to people that [the more radical voices] couldn’t, which was key for the legitimacy of the Madres’ cause in Argentine society,” said Enrique Romanin, a human rights researcher and dean of the humanities faculty at Mar del Plata National University. 

“We’ve lost someone who was able to build bridges without ever losing the clarity of her demands,” he added. “There aren’t a lot of people like that in the movement.”

Cortiñas’ death comes at a moment of peril for her movement. Javier Milei, who became president in December, has not only railed against policies promoting abortion access and protections for LGBTQ people. He also chose as his vice-president a devoted opponent of Argentina’s human rights agenda.

Victoria Villarruel, daughter of an army general, has spent two decades campaigning for Argentina to reframe the abuses of the dictatorship as part of a “war” between the military and leftist guerrilla groups that were active in the early 1970s. She rejects the 30,000 figure that activists use for the number of regime victims, which has become a flashpoint between Argentina’s right and left.

Ever determined to engage, Cortiñas told a radio station after Milei’s victory in November that she would seek a meeting with both Milei and Villarruel.

“We are very worried, because all that we’ve achieved on human rights has cost years and years, and deaths, and prison, and many sorrows,” she said. “We are going to have a lot of dialogue. I’m sure of it.”