Daniel Garcia\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Esther knew Bergoglio long before he had even joined the priesthood. She had been his boss while he was a high schooler working a technical internship at a laboratory. <\/p>\n
While Ana Mar\u00eda was detained \u2014 always chained and blindfolded, she said \u2014 her mother and other members of the movement met in a back room at the Santa Cruz Church in downtown Buenos Aires. <\/p>\n
Ana Mar\u00eda turned 17 while still in captivity, and she was released on September 30, 1977, by then seven months pregnant. <\/p>\n
Within days of a medical check arranged by her mother, she left for Sweden, where she was granted asylum. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat was the last time we saw each other,\u201d Ana Mar\u00eda said. \u201cWe wrote letters to each other, and in one letter she tells me that when I was kidnapped, she was like an automaton, thinking about (me) the whole time. She left in the morning and came back at night, out all day with the mothers searching, searching, searching.\u201d <\/p>\n
Even when her daughter was safe, Esther kept campaigning for those who had become known as the \u201cdisappeared.\u201d <\/p>\n
To Ana Mar\u00eda, and perhaps to the priest who\u2019d befriended her mother, it was a reflection that \u201cthe struggle wasn\u2019t just individual, but a collective one.\u201d <\/p>\n
Months after her daughter\u2019s release, in December 1977, Esther and others met as usual at Santa Cruz when they were betrayed. Stepping out of the church, she and others were abducted. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey had been taken to \u2026 a clandestine center for torture and extermination, and then they were thrown alive from the \u2018death flights,\u2019 which was the final solution they (the regime) boasted of having found to get rid of the bodies,\u201d Ana Mar\u00eda said. The \u201cdeath flights\u201d where prisoners were killed by being tossed from a plane over land or sea is now a documented horror of the Dirty War. <\/p>\n
Many bodies were never recovered, but days after she disappeared, the remains of Esther washed up on land. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the Mothers say is that the sea did not want to be an accomplice and returned the bodies,\u201d Ana Mar\u00eda said. <\/p>\n
Esther\u2019s remains were unidentified though and buried in a mass grave. <\/p>\n
Ana Mar\u00eda did not know of her mother\u2019s disappearance until she called to tell her of the birth of her granddaughter, the baby carried while she was detained. <\/p>\n
\u201cShe was born on December 11, and we called on December 11, 1977, to say that she had been born, and that\u2019s when we found out that my mom had been kidnapped three days earlier,\u201d she said. \u201cMy mom didn\u2019t know that she had been born safely.\u201d <\/p>\n
As Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio testified about Esther during a 2010 trial related to Dirty War atrocities. In an excerpt posted on YouTube by journalist Uki Go\u00f1i, he said he had known her for more than 20 years. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt caused me great pain,\u201d Bergoglio said of learning of her abduction. \u201cI tried to get in touch with relatives, I wasn\u2019t able to. They were mostly \u2026 in hiding.\u201d <\/p>\n
He said he had tried to speak to people who could help but had not approached the authorities. His actions or lack thereof during the Dirty War hung around him as unanswered questions, even as the Vatican dismissed allegations against him. <\/p>\n
\u201cI did what I could,\u201d he told the trial. \u201cI remember her as a great woman.\u201d <\/p>\n
Decades later, long after the fall of the military regime in 1983, the remains from the oceanside mass grave were identified, and found to include Esther. <\/p>\n
Families petitioned Bergoglio to allow them to be buried not in a cemetery, but outside the Church of Santa Cruz \u2014 the last place they had walked free. <\/p>\n
\u201cHe said it was an honor,\u201d Ana Mar\u00eda told us. \u201cHe remembered his friend Esther and said it was an honor and authorized it so we could, as the faithful of this church say, sow them in the last free land that their feet trod.\u201d <\/p>\n
To commemorate her mother and all the others who challenged the regime, April 30 is now recognized as the founding of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. <\/p>\n
The Vatican publicized a message then Pope Francis sent to Ana Mar\u00eca in 2018 to play on a radio show she hosts. \u201cI very much remember your mother,\u201d he said then.\u202f\u201cShe worked hard, she was a fighter and together with her many women who fought for justice, both because they had lost their children or simply because mothers who, seeing the drama of so many missing children, came together to fight for this as well.\u201d <\/p>\n
Standing just off the main altar inside Santa Cruz Church, Ana Mar\u00eda calmly pulled out her replacement phone \u2014 her original had been recently stolen. Fortunately, her WhatsApp messages had been backed up, preserving the Pope\u2019s words, and her memories. <\/p>\n
She still has that recording on her phone. In it, the Pope tells her: \u201cI\u2019m glad you follow these footsteps of your mother and that you broadcast it to others in your radio show. So today, in a special way, I pray for mothers, I pray for you, I pray for your mother Esther, and I pray for all the men and women of good will who wish to carry forward a project of justice and fraternity among all. May God bless you all.\u201d <\/p>\n
Esther Ballestrino de Careaga never met her granddaughter. But Pope Francis did, spending about an hour with her last year when she visited Rome, her mother said, proudly showing a video of the two together. \u201cHe knew the whole story because my mom told him everything they had done to me, the torture, everything,\u201d Ana Mar\u00eda said. <\/p>\n
As another April 30 anniversary approaches, Ana Mar\u00eda has only memories now of her mother and the Pope. <\/p>\n
Of her mother, she said: \u201cI have a very vivid memory of a very loving, hard-working, and committed person. I feel she left me with many values, and she\u2019s present in our history because disappearance generates that \u2014 disappearance is the permanent presence of an absence.\u201d <\/p>\n
She carries a directive from the Pope as well. <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen my daughter went to see him last year, he told her that we had to continue bearing witness,\u201d she said. \u201cWe, right now in Argentina, are going through a very difficult time, and I say \u2026 we need to remember again.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cEverything that happened, the 30,000 disappeared, and how the Mothers created a civilizing pact in this country, a social contract of \u2018never again.\u2019 And that\u2019s why it\u2019s so important to preserve memory, which was also what the Pope said: that memory had to be preserved.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ana Mar\u00eda Careaga was just 16 when she was kidnapped, stolen by the regime then running Argentina. To her mother, Esther Ballestrino de Careaga, it was as if she had vanished. It was an event that would change not just the lives of both the women and the daughter Ana Mar\u00eda was carrying, but the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5881,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/republicanstradetoday.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}