Azucena Villaflor

Azucena Villaflor grew up in a working-class family in Avellaneda, south of Buenos Aires, left school early and worked as a telephone operator at a factory before marrying and raising four children. She was not political. On 30 November 1976, eight months after the military coup, her son Néstor and his wife Raquel were taken from their home by armed men and never seen again.

She did what the other mothers did: she went from police station to barracks to ministry to church office, and was told there was no record. In the waiting rooms she met other women doing the same. After five months she said that they were wasting their time one by one, and proposed going together to the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the presidential palace, where they could not be ignored. On 30 April 1977, fourteen women stood there. Gatherings were banned, so when the police told them to move on, they walked slowly around the square in pairs. They came back every Thursday, wearing white headscarves so they could recognise one another, and their numbers grew.

That December the group placed a newspaper advertisement listing the names of the disappeared. A young naval officer, Alfredo Astiz, had infiltrated the mothers by posing as the brother of a missing man. Within days several of them were seized, and on 10 December Villaflor was taken from her home. She was held at the navy's mechanics school and thrown from an aircraft into the sea.

Her body washed ashore that month and was buried without a name. Forensic anthropologists identified her in 2005, and her ashes were buried in the Plaza de Mayo.