International Day of the Disappeared

WHEN a relative or friend bids farewell to relocate to a foreign land, all know of his safe departure; when one falls gravely ill and dies, the family has the solace of burying the loved one in a burial site where the departed can be visited at any time. However, when one is forcibly disappeared, the family is left in torment not knowing where the desaparecido was secluded, how excruciatingly he or she was tortured, and whether the disappeared was summarily killed. Not even a makeshift cross marks the victim's grave.

Decades after my younger brother Hermon, a labor and human rights lawyer during martial law, was forcibly disappeared, my mother Cecilia, founding chairperson of the Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance (FIND), would still repeatedly tell us, "I always imagine Mon coming home." But in a split second she would rage and burst out, "His military captors must have tortured him to death; they must have ordered him to dig his own grave." This anxious vacillation between hope and despair is a shared sentiment among family members of the disappeared. Indeed, the painful absence of closure is not tempered by the passage of time.