Esther Ballestrino de Careaga was a Paraguayan biochemist and political activist. She is most notable for her connection to the future Pope Francis and her forced disappearance in Argentina by the military dictatorship of the National Reorganization Process (1976–1983). She had helped found Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which organised protests by the mothers of missing children taken by the authorities.

Pope Francis is the Pope and head of the Catholic Church, the bishop of Rome and sovereign of the Vatican City State. He is the first pope to be a member of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), the first from the Americas and the Southern Hemisphere, and the first born or raised outside Europe since the 8th-century papacy of the Syrian Pope Gregory III.