The Mothers Open a Coffee Shop.

• Author: STEIF, WILLIAM
• Position: Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo begin teaching others about the some 30,000 people who disappeared during the military dictatorships in Argentina - Brief Article

Buenos Aires, Argentina

For twenty-three years, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo--also known as the Mothers of the Disappeared--have marched on Thursday afternoons in front of Government House, where Argentina's president lives.

"There used to be hundreds," says Juana de Pargament, who is treasurer of the association, "but only fifteen or twenty march now." Age and death have taken their toll.

Now the Association of Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo has come up with a new approach to teaching Argentina about the 30,000-plus who disappeared during the military dictatorships in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.

The association's 2,000 members recently acquired two adjacent buildings on Hipolito Yrigoyen, a street only a block from Plaza de Mayo. They opened a library, a coffee house, and an area for seminars, study, and theater. Karl Marx's works line the walls, along with Leon Trotsky's, and biographies of Che Guevara and Commandante Marcos of Chiapas. "Boys and girls read poetry at night and do theater," says de Pargament. "Professors come and study, drink coffee, talk. No other cafe is like...