And, having lost everything except their cause, they will not let Argentina forget.

Says Bonafini: "Every time there are violations, we go out to demonstrate, and as we are a strong movement, we will succeed. We always have to be on our guard so it doesn't happen again."

"We are not fighting over whether our children are alive or dead. We have a much more wide-ranging fight," she continues. "We are looking for justice, and all that that might mean: That people not forget. And besides that, the vindication of our children who after so many years were considered terrorists--this is our most important task."

The mothers came together in mutual sorrow and desperation. They became friends while spending long nights in the Plaza de Mayo hoping to be one of 10 people each day "permitted" to request information from the Interior Minstry about their missing children. They never got the news they sought. They still know nothing, other than what is obvious after nine years, that their children are dead (though even this they have trouble accepting). In a society in which the family is a sacred institution (opposing divorce is translated as "defending the family") and women still define themselves in terms of their success in bearing and rearing children, losing one's children means, literally, losing everything.

Bonafini, a large woman of tremendous inner strength and rigid convictions, lost both her sons within 10 months of each other in 1977. She, like so many others, turned to the mothers organization, which allowed her to pour her heart and soul into the quest for justice and posthumous vindication of her children. It also gave these women a support group, a voice, a way of forgetting loneliness while forcing Argentina to acknowledge, then remember, the horror. The mothers carried their despair to Pope John Paul II and to political leaders worldwide; they became the focus of a couple of movies and a handful of books (including Bonafini's autobiography); the world listened when Argentina did not.

Now, Bonafini says, the mothers' is a "fight for the morality of this country, which is no more and no less than to defend life. And to defend so strongly the lives of our children, one must defend the lives of all citizens of this country."

Their June 19 demonstration, like the hundreds that came before it, lasted half an hour. Unlike nine years ago, the aging women attract little attention from harried passersby, and the police don't pay them so much as a nod. They walk peacefully, unconcerned, and use the time to chat with each other, catching up on the week's news. By now, the mothers are accustomed to the inevitable photographs of tourists and are eager to tell their story to anyone who will stop to listen. Each one, after all, has her story, as do eight, ten, twenty, thirty thousand other Argentine mothers. They recite their disappeared child's full name, occupation and date of disappearance quickly and emphatically as if rehearsed a hundred times.

It remains to be seen whether democracy will be able to give the mothers what they seek. For all their diverse political concerns, they have stuck steadfastly to their demand for information about their children's fate. President Alfonsin has thus far been unable to crack the SIDE, the state intelligence service. Nobody knows whether any records still exist, or whether they were destroyed, like so many lives, before the 1978 World Cup whitewash.

One mother, whose 36-year-old playwright son "disappeared" in 1976 because three years earlier he had sublet his apartment to a stranger who turned out to be an alleged guerrilla, wrote in her diary: "For a mother, hope never dies...No matter how tired and disappointed, the will to fight increases with every defeat."

"For us distraught mothers, there is no cure, and mystery only makes our trial worse."