Buenos Aires, Argentina
CNN
 — 

Ana María 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 María was carrying, but the future of Argentina. And it was something a priest named Jorge Bergoglio would never forget.

It was 1977 and Argentina was under the grip of a military dictatorship following a coup the year before. Those who opposed the regime were abducted, tortured, and killed – victims of what would become known as the “Dirty War.”

There was no notification or public record of the detentions, and families had no idea what had happened to their loved ones.

By the time Ana María was seized, her brother-in-law had already disappeared. Soldiers took her to the clandestine detention center known as El Atlético, where she was tortured – even after she told her captors she was three months pregnant.

Although the extrajudicial kidnappings were becoming increasingly common, families did not speak of them — until mothers took a stand.

On April 30, 1977, a dozen or so women, each the mother of a missing child, gathered in Plaza de Mayo, the grand square in front of the Casa Rosada presidential palace in Buenos Aires. They were ordered to disperse, but instead linked arms and continued to walk slowly around the square.

Each Sunday, more women would come to join in, soon to include Esther who became one of the leaders of Las Madres de Playa de Mayo (the Mothers of Playa de Mayo.)

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.

“He says she taught him the culture of work,” Ana María told CNN on Thursday, standing in Buenos Aires’ ornate Santa Cruz Catholic Church. “He says she sent him to get some tests done and he brought back the results very quickly.” She questioned him on his speedy work, and he revealed that the tests were coming out the same, so he merely copied them out. “She told him, ‘You have to do it right,’ and sent him to do it again,” Ana María said. It’s an account Bergoglio confirmed after he became Pope Francis, and the two stayed in touch as he joined the priesthood and rose to become a leader of Argentina’s Jesuit community.

While Ana María was detained — always chained and blindfolded, she said — her mother and other members of the movement met in a back room at the Santa Cruz Church in downtown Buenos Aires.

Ana María turned 17 while still in captivity, and she was released on September 30, 1977, by then seven months pregnant.

Within days of a medical check arranged by her mother, she left for Sweden, where she was granted asylum.

“That was the last time we saw each other,” Ana María said. “We 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.”

Even when her daughter was safe, Esther kept campaigning for those who had become known as the “disappeared.”

“When she returned to the plaza after I was released, the mothers asked her, ‘What are you doing here if you’ve already recovered your daughter?’” Ana María told CNN. “And she said, ‘I’m going to continue until they all appear, because all the disappeared are my children.’”

To Ana María, and perhaps to the priest who’d befriended her mother, it was a reflection that “the struggle wasn’t just individual, but a collective one.”

Months after her daughter’s 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.

“They had been taken to … a clandestine center for torture and extermination, and then they were thrown alive from the ‘death flights,’ which was the final solution they (the regime) boasted of having found to get rid of the bodies,” Ana María said. The “death flights” where prisoners were killed by being tossed from a plane over land or sea is now a documented horror of the Dirty War.

Many bodies were never recovered, but days after she disappeared, the remains of Esther washed up on land.

“What the Mothers say is that the sea did not want to be an accomplice and returned the bodies,” Ana María said.

Esther’s remains were unidentified though and buried in a mass grave.

Ana María did not know of her mother’s disappearance until she called to tell her of the birth of her granddaughter, the baby carried while she was detained.

“She was born on December 11, and we called on December 11, 1977, to say that she had been born, and that’s when we found out that my mom had been kidnapped three days earlier,” she said. “My mom didn’t know that she had been born safely.”

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 Goñi, he said he had known her for more than 20 years.

“It caused me great pain,” Bergoglio said of learning of her abduction. “I tried to get in touch with relatives, I wasn’t able to. They were mostly … in hiding.”

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.

“I did what I could,” he told the trial. “I remember her as a great woman.”

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.

Families petitioned Bergoglio to allow them to be buried not in a cemetery, but outside the Church of Santa Cruz — the last place they had walked free.

“He said it was an honor,” Ana María told us. “He 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.”

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.

The Vatican publicized a message then Pope Francis sent to Ana Marìa in 2018 to play on a radio show she hosts. “I very much remember your mother,” he said then. “She 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.”

Standing just off the main altar inside Santa Cruz Church, Ana María calmly pulled out her replacement phone — her original had been recently stolen. Fortunately, her WhatsApp messages had been backed up, preserving the Pope’s words, and her memories.

She still has that recording on her phone. In it, the Pope tells her: “I’m 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.”

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. “He knew the whole story because my mom told him everything they had done to me, the torture, everything,” Ana María said.

As another April 30 anniversary approaches, Ana María has only memories now of her mother and the Pope.

Of her mother, she said: “I have a very vivid memory of a very loving, hard-working, and committed person. I feel she left me with many values, and she’s present in our history because disappearance generates that — disappearance is the permanent presence of an absence.”

She carries a directive from the Pope as well.

“When my daughter went to see him last year, he told her that we had to continue bearing witness,” she said. “We, right now in Argentina, are going through a very difficult time, and I say … we need to remember again.”

“Everything that happened, the 30,000 disappeared, and how the Mothers created a civilizing pact in this country, a social contract of ‘never again.’ And that’s why it’s so important to preserve memory, which was also what the Pope said: that memory had to be preserved.”

CNN
 — 

When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected to lead the Catholic church in 2013, he chose the papal name Francis, after the 13th-century figure St. Francis of Assisi, known as the patron saint of ecologists and champion of the poor.

It was a befitting choice. Pope Francis was the fiercest climate and environment advocate in the church’s history.

The pope spoke often about the importance of environmental stewardship in a way none of his predecessors had, connecting climate change to social inequities, going so far as to blame industry, world leaders and “irresponsible” Western lifestyles for the worsening crisis.

In his landmark 2015 encyclical “Laudato Si’” on the “care for our common home,” Pope Francis was able to dissolve some of the long-standing tensions between the Catholic church and ecological science, eliminating room for climate denial in the church and bringing the Vatican into the world of international climate action.

In the encyclical, a kind of letter addressing the world’s more than 1 billion Catholics, the pontiff argued that Catholic values were aligned with climate change action. He drew points from the Bible, including the first book of Genesis, which outlines the creation of the Earth and how humans are tasked with keeping it safe and clean.

He argued that God gave humans the Earth to cultivate and protect, not to conquer and destroy, underscoring how the planet had suffered from human activities since it began rapidly burning fossil fuels to industrialize. “Never have we hurt and mistreated our common home as we have in the last 200 years,” he wrote.

The pope touched on a series of woes wreaking havoc on the planet: polluted air, water poverty, toxic waste, industrial pollution, rising sea levels and extreme weather.

“The Earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he wrote, using frank language. “In many parts of the planet, the elderly lament that once beautiful landscapes are now covered with rubbish.”

The timing was crucial and intentional. Pope Francis pushed the Vatican to publish the encyclical early, so that it would play into the UN COP21 climate summit in Paris later that year. The pope was seen as highly influential in the landmark agreement eventually reached.

Although popes in the past had addressed issues like environmental destruction, Alberto Pallecchi, head of faith and sustainability at the non-profit World Resources Institute, told CNN that Pope Francis’ attention to climate change and the environment was “unprecedented for a pontiff,” with “its significance and reach unparalleled to any faith leader.”

“He has consistently put his moral authority on the line, pushing governments, the private sector, and rallying the global environmental faith-based movement,” Pallecchi said, in an interview conducted before Francis’ death.

He put “climate change firmly on the Catholic Church agenda,” he added.

In 2022, Vatican City, which is also a country, became party to the UN’s international climate framework, which presides over annual climate summits. And in the lead up to the COP28 climate talks in Dubai in 2023, the pope published an Apostolic exhortation, calling for binding action on climate.

The 12-page document was the pope’s strongest statement following the encyclical. In it, he blasted the greed and selfishness of the wealthy who consume the most, while emphasizing that the poor were the first victims of the climate crisis.

“The reality is that a low, richer percentage of the planet contaminates more than the poorest 50% of the total world population, and that per capita emissions for the richer countries are much greater than those of the poorest ones,” he wrote.

Other initiatives the pope pursued included publishing the Vatican’s first pledge to slash carbon emissions, and a plan to green the Vatican’s car fleet.

Many observers say the pope’s ability to link poverty and the climate crisis over the course of his papacy reflected the time he spent in the slums of Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he was surrounded by hardship.

In 2018, the pope made his first visit to the Amazon in Peru, where he called on industry to end its destruction of the vast biome, saying that indigenous people there had “never been so threatened in their territories.”

“We have to break with the historical paradigm that views Amazonia as an inexhaustible source of supplies for other countries without concern for its inhabitants,” he said.

Despite the pope’s climate credentials, there are limits to what he was able to achieve. His advice for Catholic institutions around the world to divest from fossil fuels was taken by some, but many have resisted.

Pallecchi, for instance, said more could be done around the greening of physical and financial assets that contribute to a warming climate, including places of worship and schools, pension funds and endowments.

He also said the Catholic church could strongly influence “extractive projects that violate the rights of local communities and destroy ecosystems.”

Nonetheless, observers say the pope’s passion and influence on climate action will live on.

“Part of his legacy is that he’s ignited a movement of people around the globe, who now embrace care for creation as part of their faith,” Christina Leaño, associate director of the global Laudato Si’ Movement, told CNN.

“So even if he’s gone, we know that this will continue to live — that he’s created this new space and language for us as Christians to continue beyond his physical presence.”

CNN
 — 

Pope Francis had a great sense of humor. When I met him once at the back of the papal plane, I cracked a joke with him that was a little bit close to the line. Luckily, he roared with laughter and told me “Sei cattivo!” (“You’re naughty!”). Every day, he used to say, he prayed the words of St. Thomas More: “Lord, give me a sense of humor.”

Francis took what he did seriously. But he never took himself too seriously.

One thing that struck me about him was his intuition and pastoral instincts. Whatever the situation, he always seemed to find the right words to say. When I met him with my family one time, my youngest child was crying.

“Whenever they see a man in white, they think I’m a doctor and about to give them some medicine!” he joked.

His ability to read people was also vital in his leadership. When he met bishops, he would get them into a circle and ask which one wanted to start speaking. It allowed him to understand the dynamics of a group, which helped him make appointments and decisions in the future.

Francis liked to make himself accessible. He would say his door was always open – but that same door also had a sign on it that read “no whining.”

There was never a dull moment covering his pontificate. As pope, he gave more media interviews than anyone else, but he never had a spokesperson or media advisers. Predicting his next move was notoriously difficult, and when it came to appointing new cardinals, no one knew in advance who he’d be choosing or when. New cardinals would talk about their phones blowing up in the middle of a Mass as people tried to contact them to tell them the news.

Francis wasn’t naïve, however. He was a politically savvy pope, very decisive and often stubborn. He wanted to stay true to himself and not become scripted. My enduring memory is of a very human pope who was full of surprises. He leaves big shoes to fill.

CNN
 — 

Fatalities have been confirmed after a car plowed into a crowd at a street festival celebrating Filipino heritage in Vancouver on Saturday night, according to officials in the Canadian city.

“A number of people have been killed and multiple others are injured after a driver drove into a crowd at a street festival,” the Vancouver Police Department wrote in a statement on X.

The driver of the vehicle is in custody, according to police.

Vancouver’s mayor offered condolences in a statement.

“I am shocked and deeply saddened by the horrific incident at today’s Lapu Lapu Day event,” Ken Sim wrote on X.

“Our thoughts are with all those affected and with Vancouver’s Filipino community during this incredibly difficult time.”

Sim said he would provide more information on the incident.

This is a developing story and will be updated.

CNN
 — 

US President Donald Trump questioned whether Russian leader Vladimir Putin wants a peace deal, shortly after meeting with his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky in the heart of the Vatican minutes before the start of the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday.

Saturday marked the first face-to-face encounter between Trump and Zelensky since a disastrous White House meeting in February, when the president and other US officials publicly berated Zelensky for being insufficiently grateful for US support and briefly suspended arms shipments and intelligence sharing.

The White House has since mounted an increasingly urgent push to strike a peace deal in Ukraine.

Photographs released by the Ukrainian presidency showed the two leaders huddled in close discussion without aides in the ornate surroundings of St. Peter’s Basilica.

Zelensky thanked Trump for the “good meeting” in a post on social media.

“We discussed a lot one on one. Hoping for results on everything we covered,” Zelensky wrote. “Protecting lives of our people. Full and unconditional ceasefire. Reliable and lasting peace that will prevent another war from breaking out. Very symbolic meeting that has potential to become historic, if we achieve joint results.”

A White House spokesman accompanying Trump said that the two leaders “met privately today and had a very productive discussion.” Officials from both Zelensky’s camp and Trump’s said the meeting lasted for about 15 minutes, and the leaders agreed to continue talks.

In a Truth Social post sent as he returned from Rome after the meeting, Trump raised the prospect of applying new sanctions on Russia after its assault on Kyiv last week, questioning whether Putin is interested in peace.

“There was no reason for Putin to be shooting missiles into civilian areas, cities and towns, over the last few days,” Trump wrote. “It makes me think that maybe he doesn’t want to stop the war, he’s just tapping me along, and has to be dealt with differently, through ‘Banking’ or ‘Secondary Sanctions?’ Too many people are dying!!!”

The meeting occurred just outside the Baptistry Chapel, which is inside St. Peter’s Basilica near its entrance, and the talk hadn’t been telegraphed in advance.

Ahead of the US president’s brief visit to Rome, officials had downplayed the prospect he would meet with Zelensky or any other world leaders, pointing to the truncated time frame for the trip and its solemn purpose of memorializing the late pope.

Trump had originally selected Saudi Arabia for his first stop abroad of his new term and will visit there next month. But when Francis died those plans changed, and instead Trump made his first foreign stop in Europe, a continent he’s railed against frequently.

The seating chart and crush of fellow leaders made brief interactions possible, including with leaders Trump had seemingly been avoiding since taking office. He engaged briefly with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, with whom he hadn’t spoken at all since returning to office amid trade and defense disputes with the European Union.

The seating protocol — arranged alphabetically by country name in French — dictated Trump’s position alongside the Estonian and Finnish leaders, with whom he interacted briefly.

In other cases, Trump exchanged pleasantries with other leaders who have been working on parallel efforts to help resolve the Ukraine war. He shook hands with French President Emmanuel Macron during the funeral mass’s sign of the peace (Ukraine’s Foreign Minister also posted a photo of Macron and Zelensky meeting Saturday).

The US has been applying more pressure on Ukraine after threatening last week it could walk away from the talks “within days” if it becomes clear a deal cannot be reached.

Trump said Friday that Russia and Ukraine are “very close to a deal” that would end the conflict, which Russia launched in 2014 and escalated with its full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022.

The president’s special envoy Steve Witkoff met with Putin for three hours on Friday, according to Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov, who said the talks were “constructive and very useful.”

Before leaving Kyiv for Rome on Friday, Zelensky suggested a number of compromises with the goal of advancing peace talks.

“In the coming days, very significant meetings may take place — meetings that should bring us closer to silence for Ukraine,” he said.

“We are ready for dialogue, I emphasize again, in any format with anyone,” he said, but “only after a real signal that Russia is ready to end the war. Such a signal is a complete and unconditional ceasefire.”

Kyiv and Moscow have not met directly since the early weeks of Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of its smaller neighbor. Any direct talks would likely require further discussion and add delay to the diplomacy the Trump administration has hoped will yield results in a matter of days.

Accepting that Ukraine would not join NATO in the foreseeable future, Zelensky said: “I think we have to be pragmatic. We have to understand what security guarantees Ukraine needs.”

Zelensky said those guarantees might include a military contingent from Europe and what he called a “backstop” from the United States.

“For us, the backstop does not necessarily have to be boots on the ground in Ukraine,” Zelensky said, but could include cyber defense “and above all Patriot air defense systems.”

On Thursday, Kyiv was hit by the largest wave of Russian missile strikes since July last year. Twelve people were killed.

Zelensky also spoke Friday of what he called “constructive” proposals drawn up in London this week between Ukrainian and European officials.

A copy of those proposals was obtained by Reuters. Titled “Ukraine Deal Framework,” it proposes a full and unconditional ceasefire in the sky, on land and at sea, as Ukraine has previously agreed to.

Monitoring of the ceasefire would be led by the US and supported by third countries, according to the draft obtained by Reuters. CNN has confirmed its contents.

The draft proposed Ukraine would receive “robust security guarantees including from the US … while there is no consensus among Allies on NATO membership.” Those would be similar to those in NATO’s Article 5, under which all members are obliged to assist an attacked nation.

One part of the draft that is likely to be opposed by Moscow says that “the guarantor states will be an ad hoc group of European countries and willing non-European countries.” There would be “no restrictions on the presence, weapons and operations of friendly foreign forces on the territory of Ukraine,” nor on the size of the Ukrainian military.

The draft says negotiations on territory would begin after the ceasefire comes into effect, and their starting point would be the current frontlines. But it adds that Ukraine would regain control of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which has been occupied by Russian forces since March 2022.

On the proposed minerals agreement between the US and Ukraine, which would give the US access to billions of dollars-worth of rare metals, the draft says Ukraine will be fully compensated financially, including through Russian assets that will remain frozen until Russia compensates damage to Ukraine.

Moscow is also likely to oppose that.

The draft obtained by Reuters does not specifically mention Crimea. Witkoff’s plan proposed the US recognize Crimea as part of Russia, but did not suggest that Ukraine also had to. Recognizing Russian control of Crimea, which Moscow illegally annexed in 2014, would cross a major red line for Ukraine and its European allies, and would be in breach of established international law.

Zelensky rejected the idea, saying there was “nothing to talk about” as such a recognition would be against Ukraine’s constitution. He told reporters Friday: “I agree with President Trump that Ukraine does not have enough weapons to regain control of the Crimean peninsula by force of arms. But the world has sanctions opportunities, other economic pressure.”

CNN reported this week that Trump was getting frustrated with the stalling talks and has privately told advisers that mediating a deal has been more difficult than he anticipated.

Saturday’s talks came as Putin announced that Russia has regained control of Kursk, the border region where Ukraine launched a surprise offensive last year.

“The Kyiv regime’s adventure has completely failed,” Putin said, congratulating the Russian forces that he said defeated the Ukrainian military in the region.

But the General Staff of Ukraine’s Armed Forces said in a Telegram post that Putin’s claim was “not true.”

“The defensive operation of the Ukrainian Defense Forces in the designated areas in Kursk region continues. The operational situation is difficult, but our units continue to hold their positions and perform their assigned tasks,” the Telegram post said.

CNN is unable to independently verify battlefield reports.