Madres de Plaza de Mayo member Vera Jarach dies at 97

Vera Jarach, a leading figure of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo human rights group that has tirelessly sought justice for children who disappeared under Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976–1983), has died in Buenos Aires at the age of 97.

Jarach’s death was confirmed by the organisation in a statement on Friday.

Born in Milan on March 5, 1928, Jarach fled Italy with her family in 1939 to escape dictator Benito Mussolini’s new racial laws. A Jewish-Italian who later became a naturalised Argentine, she was also the granddaughter of a Holocaust victim murdered at Auschwitz. 

Jarach joined the Madres in 1977 after the abduction of her only daughter, Franca, who was seized in Buenos Aires on 25 June 1976 at the age of just 18. 

The Colegio Nacional Buenos Aires student and young political activist was last heard from in a phone call to her family saying she was being held at the Federal Police’s headquarters.

Survivors later testified that she had been transferred to the clandestine detention centre at the ex-ESMA Navy Mechanics School, one of the dictatorship’s most notorious torture sites.

She is believed to have been among the victims of the so-called “death flights,” in which detainees were sedated and thrown into the Río de la Plata from military aircraft.

Jarach never stopped searching for her daughter. Beyond the Madres, she sat on the board of the Espacio Memoria y Derechos Humanos at the ex-ESMA site, helped establish the Parque de la Memoria monument, and was active in the Fundación Memoria Histórica y Social Argentina.

A journalist by training, she worked for the Italian news agency ANSA and later co-authored books on exile, dictatorship and Jewish identity in Argentina, including Tantas voces una historia and Il silenzio infranto.

Her peers in the movement described her as a tireless advocate for memory and human rights.

“Beloved Vera, intelligent, cultured, joyful so many times and silent on others, because your soul was haunted by a question that should never have existed: why?” said Taty Almeida, president of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, in a farewell statement.

Former president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner also paid tribute, recalling their last meeting: “She never stopped fighting or smiling – an example of resilience and memory. We will miss you.”

The Buenos Aires City Legislature will host a public memorial before her burial at Chacarita cemetery.

Human rights groups estimate that Argentina’s military dictatorship left around 30,000 people missing.

– TIMES/AFP/NA