Where Are They? The Disappeared: When Remembering is a Political Act of Resistance
AUGUST 30, 2021
BY JAMES PHILLIPS
August 30 each year is commemorated as the Day of the Disappeared in many parts of the world. In Honduras, labor unions, students and teachers organizations, human rights and women’s groups and others typically mark the day with a massive public march through some of the main streets of Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital. The march can stretch for a mile or more and last for three hours. But why such an outpouring for those who have disappeared?
Every day, people disappear in many parts of the world. Some of these disappearances are investigated by police and the family of the disappeared. But too often the perpetrator is not a criminal or a gang, but rather the police or other agents of a nation state or a government. We have many examples of these sorts of disappearances in the past. The military dictatorships of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in the 1970s disappeared thousands of people. We have seen how mothers of those whom the Argentine state disappeared continued for years to demonstrate and vigil in the Plaza de Mayo in central Buenos Aires with a demand for accountability from the authorities: “Donde están?” Where are they? In Chile during the Pinochet dictatorship, mothers would make the rounds of hospitals, prisons, and morgues looking for their disappeared loved ones. Many of them met in these places and began to form a network that quickly became a movement similar to that in Argentina. These older mothers and grandmothers became so powerful with their witness, that a police officer said to one of the mothers, “We made a mistake in not disappearing you, too.”
Today, relatives of Central American migrants who disappear while crossing Mexico to reach the U.S. border continue to demand investigation and accounting from Mexican authorities. Receiving little support from the authorities, relatives and friends try to arrange their own investigations with the help of international organizations. Today, in the United States and Canada, Native American tribes and First Nations suffer the disappearances of many young Native women, and they have begun the Red Dress movement—an ongoing denunciation of the disappearances and a way to honor the disappeared. Recently, the mass graves of Native children have been found near the “Indian boarding schools” the Canadian government forced them to attend. In most cases, even after decades, the schools and the authorities never told the parents what had happened to their children.
In the early 1980s in Honduras, the military government, applying the national security doctrine—the idea that the security of the state was more important than the rights of people—began detaining many leaders and members of teachers and student groups, labor unions, and political parties. In many cases, people detained in police or military custody were never seen or heard from again. The number of such detained and disappeared people was said to be as many as two hundred, but that is widely believed to be a serious undercount because of the fear of families to report these events or the inability of poor families to know how to access help. The Honduran military operated what many called a “death squad” (Battalion 316). Detention in military or police custody was very likely to lead to disappearance, torture, and death. But relatives of the disappeared never knew for sure the fate of their loved ones.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/08/30/where-are-they-the-disappeared-when-remembering-is-a-political-act-of-resistance/
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