So… on Thursday we decided to start off the day with a trip to Palermo to the Botanic Gardens. However, the Subte wasn’t running because the workers were on strike. As a result, the traffic was very congested and the buses all looked very full. As we wandered and wondered what to do we heard drumming, shouting and firecrackers and decided to search out the demonstration as a little light entertainment. It seemed to consist of several groups of workers from the public sector, presumably including the transport workers who run the Subte trains. As such, we decided we were probably better sticking to walking for the day.

Lucky that we did, as we soon came upon an excellent tango group playing in the street, calling themselves El MeTodo - We think it’s a play on words, perhaps meaning ‘The Method’ or ‘Me Altogether’, hence the capital mid-word. But we could be totally wrong! The Bandoneon player looked particularly anguished and melancholy! Our tinny recordings never sound very good - you can hear a much better rendition of them on their website by pressing CTRL + click on this link:

http://www.purevolume.com/elmetodotangojazz/videos/33708/eL+MeTodO+%28en+San+Telmo%29

Next we headed towards La Plaza de Mayo, where we almost bumped into four guards who were stomping along the pavement looking as though they were on a mission. We weren’t sure where they were going from or to but we stepped aside and left them to go on their way as we wandered around the plaza. When we entered La Catedral Metropolitana, the woman on the door gestured for us to go in the door to the right, where we were once agin nearly ploughed down by four very similar looking guards, in all the same regalia, who were on their way out with the same determination. At first it seemed an unlikely place to be changing the guard until we discovered, inside, the final resting place of Liberator General Jose de San Martin, Argentina’s Independence leader, draped in the Argentine flag and being guarded by two of the guards. Presumably the other two guards are to guard the guards on their way to the changing of the guards.

At 15.30hrs we made our way into Plaza de Mayo to witness the march of ‘Las Madres de Mayo’. This takes place every Thursday at this time. It started as an association of a group of mothers whose husbands, brothers and, particularly, children ‘disappeared’ during the rule of the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. Somewhere between 9,000 and 30,000 children and adults were abducted by the military during this time. The numbers are hard to determine due to the secrecy surrounding what was happening. It has transpired over the years that many of the children were given to military related families to adopt and bring up as their own. As mothers started searching for their ’disappeared’ sons and daughters they began to meet others who were doing likewise. They started to meet in the Plaza de Mayo wearing white head scarves with their children’s names embroidered on, to represent the children’s blankets. They walked around the obelisk as they could not be accused of ‘gathering’ if they were moving. However, three of the original founders of ‘Las Madres’ also became ‘disappeared’ and, it has later transpired, were taken into concentration camps and killed.

‘Las Madres’ came together to try and find out what had happened to their lost sons and daughters. Over the years some of them have been located or information has come to light about what happened to them. However, many are still ‘lost’. As so often happens in militant groups, in 1986 ‘Las Madres’ split into two factions. The ‘Founding Line’ focused specifically on legislation to help locate bodies or other remains and to bring ex-officials to justice, while the ‘Association’ is bound up in all sorts of other political activity fighting for justice. There is still a weekly gathering to walk around the obelisk, but as the two separate groups, on opposite sides of the circle, each with their own gaggle of supporters.