Watching your portraits of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo I quickly forget that I'm looking at photos, one photo after another.  Instead, I find myself facing faces, trying to decipher a small part of the infinite experiences they have lived.

Each Madre is different, with her own secrets, her own origin, her own sense of humour, her own way of mourning.  At the same time their expressions as they look at us - they often look at one another but now they are looking at us - their expressions have something deep and wordless in common.  And this is understandable because they all suffered a comparable loss and they all found the courage to accuse publicly and openly those who killed their children in secret.

They shared both their grief and their determination to resist politically.  For decades they have pursued - and still pursue - a common action.  This is visible in their eyes.  Each one of them gives a unique face to the solidarity they created together.  Gazing at them, I become aware of - and am made humble by - a sense of tragic achievement.

What is this achievement?  In political terms you will define it more precisely than I, for I'm a stranger writing from far away.  Nevertheless, inspired by the experience of facing the Madres, I have one thing to suggest.

All their children, when they were covertly “disappeared” by the Dictatorship's agents of death, were young.  Their lives were just beginning.  Their lives were cut short.  Not only were they physically annihilated, but their futures were amputated.  Even the role of martyr was denied to them because their killings were unannounced and hidden.

The pain of their loss to those who knew and loved them was due not only to the violence suffered, and the lifelong absence, but also to the abrupt putting to an end to all their projects and hopes as women, men, parents, friends, thinkers, craftsmen, messengers, builders, guides, cooks, singers, jokers....  The lives which had been terminated were so cruelly unfinished.

The Madres who may today be grandmothers - more than thirty years have passed -have in in a manner, which is both mysterious and evident, completed those unfinished lives.  This is their achievement.  None could have done such a thing alone.  It was only possible to achieve this collectively in solidarity, and it could only be brought about by political action, which involved the imagination of millions of other citizens and comrades.

The whiteness of the headscarves the Madres wear speaks of that completion.

Mothers, just mothers. But suddenly, Mothers with head scarves. They don't have their children any more. They use the white head scarf. Their faces. They express something infinite, boundless: the constant question: why so much cruelty?Why so much evilness? They had to learn the meaning of the word Disappeared. Their children were disappeared for ever. How could it be. Nobody could deny their existences, nobody could at least inform about what had happened with their lives. The cynical in uniform did it, the most cruel uniformed that Argentinian streets remember, Videla. Jorge Rafael Videla, Argentinian general. The military man repeated it twice to foreign journalists: “they are neither alive nor dead, they are disappeared”.

Taking photographs of them, the visual artist Marcos Adandía draws us the Mothers' eternal faces. He makes portraits of them with all their feelings, here, in their eyes, on their lips. The gaze. All of them are asking to the destiny how so much cruelty has been possible, and what does being disappeared means.
D-I-S-A-P-P-E-A-R-E-D.

Let's look a while at their faces. They are asking us. Why. Their gazes, they are questioning silence, trying to understand the incomprehensible. Is this fate, bad luck, coincidence, that designated them to suffer that word they had never thought about: disparition. Soul, sky, earth, spirit, coincidence? Destiny. They were appointed when they were born: they would be mothers of disappeared. What could they do: cry, take comfort, resign themselves, pray, kneel down, beg, ask for mercy to the almighty? NO. Only struggle. And shout “assassin” in the face of the assassin. Assassin for the eternity. And always remember, every hour, every day, every month, every year, always, their son, their daughter. The braves. Understanding their struggle. Carrying forward their ideas. The reason why they went out into the street. To denounce childhood hunger in the country of the golden wheat spikes. To condemn the existence of shanty towns… Injustice in those Argentinian fertile pampas.

I see them, I recognize them. Without their scarves, with a sad look and lonely. With their scarves, brave, so powerful, here I am to see my son again, to caress him, to kiss him, to talk to him like when he was a child running everywhere and hugging me. My son…my daughter. The mothers. The Mothers, from now on always with a capital letter. All the courage. The question will be eternal in Argentina: where are the Children? They took them away alive, we want them back alive. In the plural now. Just the mother of all the disappeared children. Eternal photographs that will last decades, centuries, always staring at us: where are they? In two decades, in ten decades, this book will never cease to stare at us from the bookcase. Our great-grandchildren and the grandchildren of our great-grandchildren will ask us: who are these women staring at us? The Mothers. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The Mothers of the white head scarves. Places will have their names and every thursday we'll see their figures outlined on our greatest place, for ever.

Their names, their wrinkles, their eyes full of insatiable questions: where? why? They took them away alive, we want them back alive… the uniformed always will wear the uniform of contempt; the Mothers, the wings of love, the courage, the infinite trail of perseverance, of deep love for life. The scarf of motherhood. The ones that carried in their bodies the fertility of love, the protection, the sweet wait… converted by the uniformed beasts and their civil sub-officers into the terrible wait for knowing that death had come but that they wouldn't surrender, that they would go on waiting for ever, for centuries, entering the history books as the Mothers that would wait for ever in these Argentinian lands stained with blood and shamelessness.

Yes, we Argentinians distinguish ourselves by a new and more coward method of terror: the disparition of people; but we can stand up and look at the world into the eyes thanks to the example of our Mothers, who never backed down and who will go on walking with the life banner. The Ethic's seed, the value for the other people. Absolute generosity. The seed that might let grow the plant of future. No more death.

Their portraits. Their infinite pain. The wait. The endless wait. Their wrinkles as the furrows of pain. But also of perseverance. Determination. Yes, we are here, they repeat to us while we look at them, while we revise that book page by page. Page by page, yes. We look into their eyes. They'll penetrate our souls. Why? How has it been possible? The tyrants never had mothers, they will never have. They were born in incubators.

A book full of expressions. Expressions that ask us and won't stop asking us. That's a book of Argentinian history, Argentinian. How could it be? The kidnapping, the tortures, being thrown alive from the planes into the sea, the newborns abduction from parturient imprisoned women…this supreme moment of giving birth and never more being able to see the fruit of your body. Evilness, perversion, the climax of perversion. But life against wickedness.

Life against wickedness. Argentinian Mothers against Argentinian death. Argentinian Mothers against Argentinian militarized disparitions. Thank you photographer, celestial artist, thank you for that life testimony. In these very faces we see Life against Death. An incomparable testimony. Here we have true history. The history of Winners. Because they'll remain for ever in our history. Our eternity Heroines. Thank you.