On April 15, 1977, the 24-year-old son of a seamstress set off for work from a Buenos Aires suburb. As he waited for a train, he was seized by security forces on orders from Argentina’s ruling military dictatorship.
When word of the abduction reached his mother, she was gripped by the fears that had torn through thousands of the other Argentine families during what was known as the “Dirty War.” The right-wing junta, which rose to power in a 1976 coup, was waging a sweeping campaign of torture and death against anyone perceived as a leftist opponent of the regime.
The mother, Nora Cortiñas, pleaded for information on her son from police. She was told to stop looking or put herself at risk of being arrested. “I entered into a spiral of madness,” she recounted.
She heard about a group of women — mothers and grandmothers of the missing — who had started gathering in the city’s Plaza de Mayo, across from the presidential palace. Some of the women initially wore white cloth diapers to evoke the childhood of their sons and daughters. The protesters later adopted white headscarves, which over the years became a powerful symbol of resistance to the 1976-1983 junta.
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About two weeks after her son was taken, Ms. Cortiñas went to the plaza. Scared but driven by desperation, she took her place among about 20 women — and went on to become one of the leaders of the movement known as Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) and later gained renown as an internationally known activist for human rights.
“We were very few and trembling with fear and anguish,” recalled Ms. Cortiñas, who died May 31 at age 94 at a hospital in the Buenos Aires suburb Morón. A family statement said Ms. Cortiñas, widely known as Norita, had health complications following hernia surgery earlier in May.
During the early months of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Ms. Cortiñas and the others were harassed by authorities and faced constant fear of arrest after three of their leaders were hauled away by authorities to die in custody. For the public, the women were mostly ignored at first, mainly out of dread of drawing notice from the military-led regime. “Like we were invisible,” she said in an oral history with Argentina’s National Library.
Ms. Cortiñas began wearing a laminated photo of her son, Carlos Gustavo Cortiñas, a university student with a part-time job, who was married and had a 2-year-old boy at the time of his disappearance.
Her son was targeted, Ms. Cortiñas believed, because of his sympathy for leftist guerrillas and his past association with the Rev. Carlos Mugica, an activist Roman Catholic priest who aided a Buenos Aires shantytown. Mugica was killed by a suspected right-wing death squad in 1974.
Ms. Cortiñas’s son was never seen publicly again, and his fate remains unknown. Human rights groups estimate that as many as 30,000 students, activists, journalists and others purported to be leftist sympathizers were killed or “disappeared” in Argentina during the Dirty War, including being pushed from aircraft in “death flights” over the sea. Many more were tortured in clandestine detention camps.
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The United States, hoping for a semblance of stability in South America’s second-largest country, was among the first countries to recognize the military-led regime.
“We never knew, we still don’t know to this day, exactly what happened to Gustavo,” Ms. Cortiñas said of her son. “We don’t know who kidnapped him. We don’t know where they took him. We don’t know how or when he was killed, or anything.”
The Plaza de Mayo movement grew to hundreds of women. Their white headscarves, tied tightly under their jaws, were depicted in graffiti and street art in defiance of the junta. “There must be justice,” Ms. Cortiñas told The Washington Post in December 1982.
About the same time, other protesters had taken inspiration from Ms. Cortiñas and the mothers in the plaza. Thousands of marches in late 1982 took to the streets in Buenos Aires with the chant: “The disappeared — tell us where they are.”
The military regime collapsed in 1983 amid growing dissent, a failing economy and anger over the junta’s disastrous moves to assert control over the Falkland Islands, known in Argentina as the Malvinas, that led to defeat by Britain in the 1982 Falklands War.
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The Mothers movement did not disband. Ms. Cortiñas and other leaders demanded answers on the missing and sought accountability over Dirty War atrocities. In 1986, the group splintered over internal quarrels.
Ms. Cortiñas founded the humanitarian organization Madres de Plaza de Mayo Línea Fundadora. Others followed the more militant path of Hebe de Bonafini, another of the early Plaza de Mayo protesters with a firebrand style that inspired some but alienated many others. (Bonafini died in 2022.)
“We are not the mothers of just one child,” Ms. Cortiñas said in a 1999 interview. "We are the mothers of all the disappeared.”
Many of the women of Plaza de Mayo, including Ms. Cortiñas, continued to meet at the site each Thursday for decades. Ms. Cortiñas rarely appeared in public without her headscarf.
Moments after Ms. Cortiñas’s death was announced, someone put a sign on the fence surrounding the plaza’s central obelisk. “Eternal Nora,” the message said.
‘Our courage’
Nora Irma Morales was born on March 22, 1930, in Buenos Aires to Spanish immigrants who met in Argentina. Her father ran a printing business from their home; her mother was a seamstress who passed along skills to the young Nora.
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She left school after the sixth grade, and in 1949 married Carlos Cortiñas, who worked in the country’s economy ministry. Ms. Cortiñas led sewing classes and took on seamstress projects from home. “Very traditional housewife,” she once said.
In 1977, the family was on a holiday over the Easter break. Ms. Cortiñas son, his wife and child left early so he would return to work. When authorities came to interview Ms. Cortiñas’s daughter-in-law Ana, the family knew her son was taken. “A tsunami hit us all,” Ms. Cortiñas said in 2019 during a literary event for her biography “Norita, la madre de todas las batallas” (“Norita, the mother of all battles”).
Months after Ms. Cortiñas joined the Plaza de Mayo protests, three of the founders of the movement — Esther Careaga, Azucena Villaflor and María Eugenia Bianco — were arrested along with others supporting the group, including two French nuns. None survived.
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“That kind of suffering didn’t make us fearful, didn’t make us afraid, even when the mothers themselves were disappeared,” Ms. Cortiñas told Britain’s Independent newspaper in 2017. “In a sense it became the source of our courage and our capacity to continue to look for our children.”
Ms. Cortiñas studied social psychology and taught courses at the University of Buenos Aires. Her husband died in 1994. Survivors include a son, Damián Cortiñas; a sister; three grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.
“The struggle starts with the disappearance of a son, which is like having an arm amputated,” she said in an interview when she was 88. “The wound leaves you bleeding with no cure. Reparation serves to calm the injury, nothing more.”
