One of Plaza de Mayo's best-known figures, Delia Cecilia Giovanola, died yesterday in La Plata at the age of 96.
Mother and grandmother symbol of the search for the desaparecidos of the Argentine dictatorship (between 1976 and 1983), she was of Italian origin: her father was Francesco Giovanola, a sculptor from a Milanese family who emigrated in the nineteenth century.
Delia was an elementary teacher and in 2015 she managed to hug her nephew Martín, who was born clandestinely in a torture center.
The Nonne di Plaza de Mayo association, a body chaired by Estela de Carlotto, recalled that on 17 October 1976 Delia's only son, Jorge Ogando, and her daughter-in-law, Stella Maris Montesano, eight months pregnant, had been sent to Pozzo di Banfield clandestine detention center, in the Banfield neighborhood of Buenos Aires. In December 1976 Stella Maris had given birth to her son Martín in a kitchen, handcuffed and blindfolded, and two days later the baby had been stolen to be given to a couple close to the dictatorship.
The group of women asked each Thursday where their missing children were in front of the presidential Casa Rosada, in the square from which they took their name, Plaza de Mayo. Some then started another group to search for grandchildren born in hiding, called Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo.
Delia Cecilia Giovanola in 1982, during one of the usual Thursday “rondas”, showed journalists a sheet with the words: "The Malvinas are Argentine, but also the disappeared!".
(Unioneonline / ss)
