Matilde Herrera (1931-1990) was born in Buenos Aires where she was a journalist and poet. Her three children -- two sons and a daughter -- and their three spouses were all disappeared during 1976-77, the first year of Argentina's last military dictatorship. Her daughter and one daughter-in-law were pregnant at the time of their kidnapping; their unborn children were never found. Herrera was able to recover two other grandchildren who had been kidnapped with their parents. She went into political exile in Europe and became an outspoken leader of the resistance movement against the dictatorship. Subsequently she was a founder of the association Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
Herrera's poetry was included in an anthology of Argentine poets published in Madrid, and later translated and published in Warsaw and Rome. After the end of the dictatorship (1983) she returned to Buenos Aires, where she died in 1990 of cancer. Her volume of short stories VOS TAMBIEN LLORASTE (You Cried Too) was written in 1982 and published in 1986. Each story is based on an anecdote told to the author by others or present in her own memory. Matilde Herrera also published JOSE, a long testimonial biography of her older son narrated through his letters, in 1987.
