Graciela Fernández Meijide

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(Rosa) Graciela Castagnola de Fernández Meijide (b. Avellaneda, 1931-02-27) is an Argentine teacher, human rights activist and politician. She came to prominence investigating the forced disappearances of the Dirty War and later served as a deputy, senator and minister for the FrePaSo party.

Graciela Castagnola was born in Avellaneda and met her husband, Enrique Fernández Meijide, at a young age. They had a daughter and two sons, and she worked as a French teacher. In 1976, her 16-year-old son, Pablo, was taken by the authorities in a night-time raid on the family apartment, along with his girlfriend in what appears to be a case of mistaken identity - the girl's former boyfriend was a student activist also named Pablo. They were not seen again by their families.

Fernández Meijide campaigned for the rights of the families of the disappeared and protested with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. She lived in exile in Montreal for a period and joined the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights. At the return of democracy in 1983, she was appointed to head the depositions department of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONDEP).

Although she was approached by several parties after her high-profile work, it was not until the creation of the centre-left Great Front and later FrePaSo (Front for a Country in Solidarity) that Fernández Meijide started a political career, having seen the passing into law of the controversial 'Pardon Laws' (the Ley de Obediencia Debida and the Ley de Punto Final) that pardoned those responsible for human rights abuses during the Proceso. She stood as a candidate for the Argentine Chamber of Deputies in 1991 without success.

In 1993 Fernández Meijide, by now 62 years old, was elected a deputy for Buenos Aires city. She was elected to the Argentine Senate in 1995 for the city. During this time the newly-formed FrePaSo's popularity and her own grew. In 1997, she resigned her seat in the Senate and was elected a deputy once again, but now for Buenos Aires Province, in a resounding victory over Justicialist Chiche Duhalde, greatly increasing her profile [1]. FrePaSo joined with the Radical Civic Union (UCR) and several provincial parties to create the Alianza in opposition to President Carlos Menem, and she led the Alianza majority in the lower house of the Argentine Congress.

Ahead of the 1999 Presidential election, Fernández Meijide contested the internal election to be the candidate for the Alianza against Radical Fernando de la Rúa, which she lost despite having been the front-runner in many polls [2]. She declined to be de la Rúa's running mate and announced her candidature to be Governor of Buenos Aires Province. However she was not successful in the gubernatorial election.

De la Rúa, on the other hand, was elected President, and he appointed Fernández Meijide to his cabinet as minister of social development and environment [3]. She was unable to put many of her social plans into action, however, due to lack of funds, and her popularity waned as the public's impatience grew. In 2001, in a reshuffle brought on by economic and social crisis, the President made her chief of cabinet; however she resigned after a few days in protest at the government's economic policies. De la Rúa's government and the Alianza subsequently collapsed in 2001 and both the UCR and FrePaSo backed the presidency of Eduardo Duhalde to remedy the country's economic crisis [4].