In this work, I analyze diverse material produced by groups of the families of political prisoners and the 'missing', as well as other organizations active in the resistance of Southern Cone military regimes, in an attempt to show how emotions and genders are intertwined in a rhetoric that appeals to the feelings of public opinion with political objectives. In much of their material, the organizations and associations made gender an agent in order to touch on public sentiment, constructing a rhetoric that approximates and encompasses the issue of Human Rights so as to combat, on the one hand, the torture and extermination of political militants, and on the other, to help discredit and weaken the military regimes, having contributed to their downfall throughout the 1980s in the entire Southern Cone.