The Argentine Nora Morales de Cortiñas did not stop searching for a single day of her life for her eldest son, Gustavo, who disappeared due to State terrorism on April 15, 1977. Norita, as the president of Madres de Mayo was known in Argentina -Founding Line, died this Thursday at the age of 94 without being found. She asked about him along with other mothers in official offices and police stations during the dictatorship. Later, now in democracy, she appeared before Justice to try without success to find answers from the soldiers sitting in the dock. She never even managed to find out where they had him kidnapped and what they did with him. But that woman of tiny stature and immense smile always carried Gustavo’s image on her chest. She was her way of remembering him and also of vindicating the memory of the Argentine people about one of the darkest pages of their history.
Cortiñas underwent surgery for a hernia last week and remained in intensive care for days, until her heart stopped beating this afternoon. “Fuerza Norita!” Said the thousands of messages that flooded the networks while this social psychologist and teacher, one of the most beloved Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, fought for her life. She died on a Thursday, that day that for 47 years she has been the fixed appointment of all the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo to transform her pain into a collective struggle that has gone around the world.
“When I was a little girl I dreamed of princesses, I dreamed of taking my children to the carousel. She was not a revolutionary like now. My name is Nora Morales de Cortiñas, but everyone knows me as Norita”, this tireless fighter, present in any mobilization where human rights were attacked, liked to introduce herself to the new generations.
She was born in Buenos Aires, in 1930, as the third daughter of a middle class family. She was funny, very pizpireta, Mafalda type. They say she had fun outings,” she described herself when remembering that happy moment in her life in the biography. Norita, the mother of all battles that Gerardo Szalkowicz wrote. At 19 she married her first and only boyfriend, Carlos Cortiñas, and soon her two sons arrived: Gustavo and Marcelo. Although she had studied the trade of a dressmaker, her greatest aspiration in the following decades was to be “a perfect housewife,” like so many other Argentine women.
His life took a turn of 180 years the day Gustavo disappeared. He left that domestic world that he dominated and made his way into another unknown one, dominated by an atrocious dictatorship. Only a year had passed since the coup d’état and the military was kidnapping dozens of people a day, as part of a systematic extermination plan that she and other mothers stood up to without thinking: the lives of their children were at stake.
“They called me at my house, they threatened me, they painted the entire neighborhood with the name “terrorist mother,” he recalled when talking about the first Thursdays in which the Mothers met in the Plaza de Mayo, in front of the headquarters of the Argentine Government. . Given the prohibition to stay still, they began to circle around the Pyramid to demand the appearance of their children. Cortiñas maintained the ritual until the end of her life. He went to the Plaza de Mayo every Thursday, except for those when travel or illness prevented him. The only prolonged parenthesis were the months of forced confinement of the pandemic.
Feminist commitment
In those marches, she always wore on her head the white scarf that the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo turned into a global symbol against the dictatorship. “The white handkerchief fights against injustice, against silence, against oblivion,” Cortiñas defined it. In recent years, she began to tie another one around her wrist, which she considered the heir to that tradition of struggle of Argentine women: the green scarf that feminists raised in favor of legal, safe and free abortion.
When Argentina regained democracy in 1983, Cortiñas was excited about the possibility of seeing the military convicted of crimes against humanity. “The trial of the Juntas took us out of the uncertainty that there was never going to be justice,” summarized Nora Cortiñas when speaking about the historic judicial process that took place in 1984.
Two years later, however, internal divisions led Cortiñas to distance herself from the head of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo group, Hebe de Bonafini, and create another more horizontal and less dogmatic organization: Madres de Plaza de Mayo – Línea Foundress. Its members, like Cortiñas, agreed to testify before the National Commission on Disappearance of Persons (Conadep), approved the exhumation of corpses buried as NN and the reparation measures offered by the Argentine State, among other differences.
Owner of incredible vitality, Cortiñas supported numerous causes both inside and outside Argentina. “That absence, that pain that I feel every day, is the driving force of my commitment. That is why I am everywhere accompanying the struggles against all oppressions; because, quite simply, I want to change this unjust world,” that brave woman argued, when she was already walking with the help of a cane, when asked where she got her strength from.
His last public appearance took place on March 24, when he marched to commemorate the anniversary of the last coup d’état and shout “Never Again” alongside a crowd concerned about the rise of speeches demanding state terrorism since the around the Argentine president Javier Milei. He didn’t even lower his arms. He invited young people to keep the memory and the fight against injustice alive. “In many years I would like to be remembered with a smile and with that cry that means everything I feel inside me: We will win!” she expressed. A symbol of unwavering resistance, Cortiñas knew how to create a bridge between memory and utopia.
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