Members of Caravane Theatre, a French group which uses humour to help people, give an impromptu performance at the World Social Forum in Mumbai on Sunday. (PTI)

Mumbai, Jan. 18: She climbed onto the stage after all the other speakers were seated. She didn’t look arresting at first glance, an old woman with crinkles around her eyes, but a very pink nose and pink cheeks, her head covered in a white scarf, wearing a loose white blouse and matching skirt.

If anything, she looked like the granny whose home is best to spend summer vacations at. But then as the redoubtable speakers discussed war and imperialism at the first news conference at the World Social Forum on Friday, she quietly unfurled a banner in front of her. It said: “Madres de Plaza De Mayo Linea Fundadora” or Mothers of the May Plaza, an organisation of mothers of missing children.

Cortinas from Buenos Aires is one of the founders of the mothers’ movement in Argentina, a response to the sinister “disappearance scheme” adopted by the dictatorial military government of Argentina of the seventies.

“Thirty thousand men and women disappeared during the regime,” said Cortinas. “The government just took away people whose political connections they suspected. They never came back,” she added. Her son Carlos Gustavo was one of them.

“He was a Peronist youth. They came and arrested him on April 15, 1977. He never came back. He was 24,” said his 73-year-old mother, pointing to her headscarf. It has her son’s name written on it.

“But there were so many mothers like me whose sons and daughters had also just been snatched away. After he was arrested, I went from police station to police station, church to church, hospital to hospital. We women were all of us running from one place to another together,” she said.

“Then on April 30, we decided we would go to the main plaza, the hub of all social and cultural activity,” said Cortinas. “All of us mothers gathered there. The movement was born.”

She added: “I don’t know how many women are a part of it, but the women kept meeting at the plaza every Thursday between 3.30 pm and 4 pm to protest against the government and express solidarity with the victims.”

Till this day, there hasn’t been a single Thursday when the women haven’t met, said Cortinas’ young interpreter.

There were no direct results of the mothers’ coming together. In the next decade, the military government fell, to be succeeded by what Cortinas considers another evil, a government that pushed neo-liberalisation policies, wringing the country dry. The organisation became well-known for its stand against dictatorial rule.

Some of them also tried to point out the connection between bullets and hunger. “First they killed our sons with bullets. Now with hunger,” a slogan went. Because a poor country that gives in to liberalisation kills off its young by perpetrating a new economic terrorism.

“That’s why I am here,” said Cortinas. “At this forum, I want to say to all of you that dictatorship or other forms of government are deeply linked to the economy. It is Argentina’s economy that led to dictatorship.”

But she sees some hope though. “The present government in Argentina and Brazil are more positive on human rights.” It is an improvement on the earlier decades, when under the several dictatorial regimes of South America 1,30,000 people had disappeared.

Cortinas has another son, Marcello. “There is another organisation in Argentina started by the brothers and sisters of the missing children. In Chile, before our organisation was formed, there was one formed by the wives of the missing men,” she said.