Alicia Zubasnabar died aged 92 without discovering the true fate of her relatives, who were kidnapped during the last military dictatorship in Argentina. In the late 1970s, her son Roberto, her youngest daughter Elena and her son-in-law, Héctor Baratti, all “disappeared”. All three were militants of the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party and considered dissidents by the de facto Government. Up to 30,000 people died as a result of the state terror that relied on kidnapping, torture and extra-judicial killings to silence internal opposition.

Many of the “disappeared” were tortured and then killed on “death flights”. The victims were drugged, stripped naked and then pushed out of aeroplanes into the River Plate estuary to drown. However, pregnant women were kept alive and in custody long enough for them to give birth to their children. The babies were then adopted by infertile couples close to the military regime and denied their real identity. So far, more than 400 children have been reported missing, and the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo suspect that over 500, born between 1975 and 1980, were separated from their legitimate families in this way.

When Elena was abducted by the state security forces, she was five months pregnant. According to Zubasnabar’s subsequent investigations, her daughter gave birth to a baby girl on June 16, 1977, and named the child Ana Libertad (which means freedom in Spanish). Although Zubasnabar suspected that Elena had been killed, she was sustained by the possibility of recovering Ana Libertad and “holding her tight, as her parents would have wanted”.

In April 1977 a group of mainly women began to protest courageously against the abductions in the hope that they could exert pressure on the military Government to reveal the whereabouts of their relatives. They regularly marched round the square — the Plaza de Mayo — outside the main government building in Buenos Aires, wearing white headscarves to draw attention to themselves. They quickly became known as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Zubasnabar and her husband joined the marchers in September of that year.

Meanwhile, Zubasnabar’s home in La Plata, the capital of Buenos Aires province, became an informal meeting place for local women whose daughters and daughters-in-law had been abducted while pregnant. They realised that the military Government was systematically separating newborn babies from their mothers. The group offered each other mutual support in the climate of fear, and set about trying to locate their grandchildren, who they feared had already been given away as “war booty”.

In October 1977 Zubasnabar founded an organisation along with María Isabel Mariani, whose pregnant daughter-in-law had also “disappeared”. Originally called Abuelas Argentinas con Nietitos Desaparecidos (Argentine Grandmothers with Missing Baby Grandchildren), they became known as the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and officially adopted that name in 1980. Zubasnabar was the organisation’s first president.

The Grandmothers recognised that the search for their grandchildren required a different approach to the search for their children. Despite the very real danger, they began their detective work in defiance of the dictatorship. During this period, Zubasnabar discovered that her daughter had given birth in a dirty cell occupied by five other women and without any medical assistance. In addition, she convinced Bishop Mario Picchi to plead with the Army on her behalf. However, the cleric was turned away and told that the situation was “irreversible”. Zubasnabar’s granddaughter had already been given away to an “important family”.

Zubasnabar and Mariani aimed to raise international awareness of their cause and, in 1981, they travelled to Europe to publicise the dictatorship’s crimes. With the restoration of democracy in late 1983, the Grandmothers were able to operate openly in Argentina, and, to date, they have reunited 90 children with their biological families. They continue to raise awareness of the missing children, and have had recent success as a result of advances in genetic testing. The Grandmothers have also founded a genetic data bank for this purpose.

Last year Zubasnabar was a key witness at Christian von Wernich’s trial, in which the former chaplain of the Buenos Aires Province Police was sentenced to life in prison for his active role in the state terrorism. Von Wernich was involved in Elena and her husband’s abduction, and was regularly employed by the police to coax information from detainees.

Zubasnabar was born in Sauce, a small town in Corrientes province, northwestern Argentina, in 1915. She married a steelworker, Roberto Luis de la Cuadra, and had five children. In 1959 the couple moved to the coastal city of La Plata to seek better living conditions. After her daughter “disappeared”, Zubasnabar never gave up the tireless search for her granddaughter, whom she knew to be alive and living with another family as their daughter. She regularly spoke of her conviction to continue her struggle until they had “identified all of the grandchildren.”

Zubasnabar died, however, without meeting Ana Libertad, who has never been located, and without witnessing the trials of those responsible for the clandestine detention centre in La Plata where Elena gave birth.

Alicia Zubasnabar de la Cuadra, Argentine human rights activist, was born on July 15, 1915. She died on June 1, 2008, aged 92