Azucena Villaflor

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
View of the street in Buenos Aires named after Azucena Villaflor
President Cristina Fernandez presents the Premio Azucena Villaflor to Julio Morresi

Azucena Villaflor (born April 7, 1924 in Avellaneda , † December 10, 1977 ) was an Argentine social activist and one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo , who disappeared after the Desaparecidos , the people who disappeared during Argentina's Dirty War between 1976 and 1983 , searched.

She came from the working class. Her mother, Emma Nitz, was only 15 years old at the time of her birth; her father, Florentino Villaflor, was 21 and worked in a wool factory. At the age of 16, Azucena began working as a telephone secretary in a household appliance company. There she met Pedro De Vincenti, a union official . They married in 1949; they had four children.

On November 30, 1976, eight months after the beginning of the military dictatorship known as the “National Reorganization Process”, Néstor, one of Villaflor's sons, was kidnapped along with his wife Raquel Mangin. Azucena started looking for them through the Home Office. During this search she came across other women who were also looking for relatives.

After six months of unsuccessful search, Villaflor began a series of demonstrations to make itself heard. On April 30, 1977, she and thirteen other mothers went to the Plaza de Mayo in downtown Buenos Aires , in front of the so-called Casa Rosada , the government building. Villaflor had chosen this place as an important place in Argentina's political history. They decided to walk around the square because the police had ordered them to "move on". The first protest was on a Saturday, not yet very noticeable, the second on a Friday; then an agreement was reached on Thursday around 3:30 p.m. (this date is still being kept).

On December 10th of the same year, International Human Rights Day , the mothers published an advertisement in the newspaper with the names of their "disappeared" children. On the same evening, Azucena Villaflor was picked up and presumably taken to the concentration camp at the ESMA school .

Urn with the remains of Azucena Villaflor

Azucena's body was identified in July 2005 by the Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense , EAAF, which had also found and identified the body of Che Guevara in Bolivia at the time . The bodies showed fractures that indicated an impact with a hard surface. This confirmed the assumption that the prisoners had been taken to one of the many Vuelos de la muerte ( death flights ) reported by former naval officer Adolfo Scilingo . On these flights, the prisoners were drugged, undressed and pushed out of an airplane over the sea.

Villaflor's remains were cremated; the ashes were buried in front of the Pyramid Mayo in the center of Plaza de Mayo on December 8, 2005, in memory of the 25th anniversary of the mothers' demonstrations. Your surviving children chose this place; her daughter Cecilia said: “Here, in this square, my mother's public life began and this is where she will stay forever. It should stay for everyone. "

In 1997 the historian Enrique Arrosagaray wrote a biography of Azucena Villaflor.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Villaflor, Azucena
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Argentinian social activist
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH Avellaneda
DATE OF DEATH December 10, 1977