More on Buenos Aires

Situated, getting set in our new routine, enjoying wonderful weather each and every day.  Met up with cousins for a lovely tea at the delightful café attached to the Eva Peron museum in Palermo, and waded through their cultural updates on museums. Several good possibilities.  In the meantime we wandered down to the Mercado Abasto—Buenos Aires’ former central market, a huge and not uninteresting structure, that sadly now houses a slick mall with blurred edges when it comes to local shops—the global shopping phenomenon that requires we find exactly the product we seek regardless of where we are geographically.  Sigh.


Spent the requisite hours wandering the pedestrian streets in the center of town, and discovered a lovely old convent about two blocks from the Plaza de Mayo.  A small oasis that I had read about and was determined to find amidst the grit and  frenzy of downtown.  From there on to the Plaza de Mayo—site of the Casa Rosada(Pink House)—Argentina’s White House—although it’s not residential.

The Plaza is the hub of all protests in Buenos Aires, and is perhaps best known as the home of the madres de los desaparecidos—mothers of the disappeared—, those who were persecuted by the various military dictatorships in the mid 70’s who were swept off the streets and tortured, killed, and “disappeared”.  The protests have continued for decades with a stronghold of women—many of them now abuelas—grandmothers, still seeking justice, closure, and lately, proper and legal identification for some of the “found”.  Hopefully the pictures help you scratch the surface of these women’s pain.

NOTE CORRECTION:  Thanks to CR for giving me the correct info:  The abuelas(grandmothers) were not  mothers become grandmothers, but grandmothers who were looking for the missing children of their most often assassinated children, who were subsequently put up for adoption and never rightly returned to or identified with their original families.  Women who were disappeared but who were known to be pregnant thus had grandmothers who continued to look for the children born in prisons, and to thus bring these children full circle legally into families that were actually theirs. A horrendous situation that persists, although numbers have shrunk.