The Daughters of the Plaza de Mayo

In the late 1970s some 30,000 Argentines, mostly young men and women thought to have leftist sympathies, were kidnapped and tortured to death by the military government, which denied what was happening. In response, the mothers of the disappeared came together and marched in Buenos Aires at the Plaza de Mayo, demanding week after week that their children be returned or accounted for. Democracy was finally restored, with promises of truth and justice. As memory gave way to historical amnesia, however, and judicial processes to reconciliation, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo continued to march. Do not forget, they insisted, do not forgive. Sixty years later, a nonlocalizable electronic agent that calls itself the Daughters of the Plaza de Mayo emerges on the global Network. No one knows what the Daughters are or what they want. They tell horrifying stories from Argentina and elsewhere. They provide seemingly endless lists of victims' names. They invoke El Eternauta, a comic book character from a space beyond time, to press a moral perspective that demands the impossible. They are singular and plural, informative and obscure, irritating, threatening, unclassifiable, and relentless in the pursuit of their agenda, whatever that may be.