Buenos Aires Herald 
Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo co-founder Mirta Acuña de Baravalle died age 99 on Saturday.
She was one of 14 mothers who marched in the Plaza de Mayo for the first time in 1977 demanding to know where their children were. Baravalle met the women after her daughter Ana MarÃa, who was five months pregnant at the time, and her partner were kidnapped by the military in 1976.
Baravalle was also instrumental in creating the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, as she was also searching for her grandchild. The twelve founding grandmothers met during the rounds the Madres de Plaza de Mayo had every Thursday in the square and decided to create a separate group devoted solely to searching for their children’s offspring.
The Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo confirmed Baravalle’s passing via social media.
“Mirta has left us, age 99, without ever receiving a hug from her grandson or granddaughter. To hers and all the grandchildren, we will continue looking for you,” the human rights organization wrote in a post on X.
Born January 12, 1925, as Mirta Acuña, she was married to Romildo Baravalle. Their daughter Ana MarÃa was a pregnant 28-year-old Sociology student when she and her partner, Julio César Galizzi, were kidnapped on August 26, 1976, by a group of heavily armed men.
Baravalle and her husband went to police stations and churches looking for information. In their quest, they discovered that there were many people in the same situation. In an effort to try and find out what happened with her daughter, she tried to get an appointment in Casa Rosada and talk with the military authorities. After being denied entrance, she found herself sitting on a bench with three other women who had gone with the same intentions.
All of a sudden, one of them took out a ball of yarn and began knitting.
“That woman was Azucena Villaflor. She was the one who called on us to get to the square, because it was the only place where there was a chance we’d be heard,” Baravalle said in an interview in 2005, describing how the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo began. She added that on that first Thursday there were only 14 of them, but soon there were many more as “kidnappings started to become systematic.”
Madre de Plaza co-founder Azucena Villaflor was one of twelve people kidnapped by the military on December 10, 1977. A few days later, she was thrown from an airplane into the RÃo de la Plata.
Baravalle was not able to find out what happened to her family. Neither her daughter nor her partner were ever heard from again. In the aforementioned interview, she stated that in early 1977 she was told that her grandchild was born around January 15, and the child and the mother were well. She added that the person who told her this was also disappeared and that she could not find any more information. Her grandchild has never been found.
