Azucena Villaflor

Who was Azucena Villaflor?

Azucena Villaflor was an Argentine social activist, and one of the founders of the human rights association called Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which looked for desaparecidos.

Villaflor was the daughter of a lower class family, and her mother, Emma Nitz, was only 15 years old when Azucena was born; her father, Florentino Villaflor, was 21 and worked in a wool factory. Villaflor's paternal family had a history of militance in Peronism.

Azucena started working at age 16 as a telephone secretary in a home appliances company. There she met Pedro De Vincenti, a labor union delegate. She married De Vicenti in 1949, and they had four children.

On 30 November 1976, eight months after the beginning of the military dictatorship that had named itself "National Reorganization Process", one of Villaflor's sons, Néstor, was abducted together with his wife Raquel Mangin. Villaflor started searching for them through the Ministry of Interior and sought support from the military vicar Adolfo Tortolo. During this search, she met other women also looking for missing relatives.