By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO

SANTIAGO, Chile - On the morning of April 30, 1976, Ana Gonzalez and her husband, a Communist Party member named Manuel Recabarren, were in a rush to get out of the house.

It was the third year of the murderous Chilean dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. Two of the couple’s sons, Luis Emilio and Manuel Guillermo, along with Luis Emilio’s pregnant wife, Nalvia, had failed to return from work the evening before. Ominously, their 2 1/2-year-old son had shown up later that night crying on a neighbor’s lawn.

Mrs. Gonzalez was eager to get to her job at the water company to ask her manager for an advance on her pay and temporary leave, so she could look for her children. But she volunteered to stay behind to look after another grandson while her husband searched.

“You go ahead, and I’ll come later with the child,” she said.

She never again saw her husband, or her sons and daughter-in-law, nor did she hear a word about their fates. All four are believed to have been “disappeared” by the Pinochet regime, which came to power in a bloody 1973 coup that claimed the life of Chile’s Socialist president, Salvador Allende.

In the 34 years that followed, Mrs. Gonzalez transformed her outrage and grief into a tireless advocacy for answers about the estimated 3,000 people who were killed or disappeared under the Pinochet dictatorship from 1973 to 1990.

She participated in hunger strikes and sit-ins during the Pinochet years, pushed judges to investigate suspected atrocities and traveled to the United States seeking to pressure Chile’s military government to release information about the missing.

Mrs. Gonzalez’s soothing voice, cutting sense of humor and unrelenting optimism helped break through the indifference of the many Chileans who were unaffected by the years of violence, human rights leaders said.

“They never thought that a woman, a housewife who didn’t know anything, not even where the courts were located, would take up the battle cry,” said Mrs. Gonzalez, now 84 .

Last year, her grandmotherly image landed on posters and in television advertisements as part of a government campaign to link DNA samples from family members with the scattered remains of presumed victims of the regime’s torture centers.

The new campaign was part of an effort by the departing president, Michelle Bachelet, herself a torture victim of the military regime, to revamp a DNA-matching program that previously had misidentified remains. The campaign Mrs. Gonzalez participated in urged Chileans who lost loved ones during the regime to submit DNA samples that experts could then match with unidentified remains.

“She represents the voice of somebody with no hatred,” said Jose Miguel Vivanco, the Americas director for Human Rights Watch. “She talks about her case and human rights in Chile in a calm, serene way. She has been able to speak to many Chileans who never suffered in the dictatorship or who publicly supported the repression.”

“They never thought that a woman … would take up the battle cry.’’ / TOMÁS MUNITA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES