WUNRN
http://www.ipsnews.net/2012/05/no-celebration-for-mothers-of-the-missing-in-mexico/
"Where are they?" ask mothers looking for their missing sons
and daughters.
Credit:Daniela Pastrana/IPS
MEXICO
CITY, May 15, 2012 (IPS) - Emma Veleta and Toribio Muñoz were married 40 years
ago and had seven children, four boys and three girls. They lived in the town
of
Armed men
wearing federal police uniforms stormed into their house and took away Muñoz, a
retired railway worker, and all of his sons, a nephew, a son-in-law, and a
grandson. Veleta has never seen them again.
"I
thought that if I came to
Guadalupe
Aguilar, a retired nurse, is also searching for a missing loved one: her son José Luis. The
last she knew of him was on Jan. 11, 2011, when the 34-year-old went to meet
his brother in the city of
"It
was a 12-minute drive, but he never got there. His car turned up later in
Colima (a neighbouring state)," said Aguilar, who on Sept. 7 managed to
speak to President Felipe Calderón when he visited Guadalajara, and asked him
for help finding her son.
Calderón
"told me to go to the Procuraduría de Víctimas (
Veleta,
Aguilar and many other women in this country did not celebrate on May 10, which
is Mother’s Day in
"We
came (to the capital) to remind
The first
group of women set out on Monday May 7 from violence-stricken cities in
After a
2,000-km drive, they reached the capital on Wednesday May 9, where they met
with the mothers who have come together in the Committee of Relatives of Dead
and Missing Migrants of El Salvador (COFAMIDE), which has documented 319 cases
of Salvadoran migrants who have gone missing in
On Friday
May 11, they met with Attorney General Marisela Morales to express their main
demands: federal investigations and an immediate search for all of the missing
persons, as well as the creation of a national database on cases of
disappearance, a special prosecutor’s office on disappearances, and a federal
programme to assist the families of victims.
They also
called for the implementation of a protocol on the procedures to be followed in
investigations of disappearances, and of United Nations recommendations in
cases of forced disappearance.
The
interior minister, Alejandro Poiré, cancelled the meeting the mothers had
scheduled with him.
"Where
are they?" the mothers-turned-activists ask at every door they knock on.
In the
caravan, they were accompanied by members of HIJOS, an organisation made up of
the sons and daughters of victims of forced disappearance of
"Don’t
lose faith," they were told by Senator Rosario Ibarra, founder of the
Committee for the Defence of those Imprisoned, Persecuted, Disappeared and Exiled
for Political Reasons (known as the Eureka Committee).
"Don’t
ever think that they are dead. Look for them as hard as you can, fight as hard
as you can. I have been fighting since 1975, I’m already old now," said
Ibarra, who visited the mothers at the camp they set up on Thursday May 10 at
the Ángel de la Independencia monument, a focal point for protest in Mexico
City.
Most of the
women are indirect victims of the war on drugs and crime launched by President
Calderón at the start of his term in December 2006. Since then, the groups that
organised the caravan have documented more than 800 disappearances.
There are
no official figures. The only indication of the magnitude of the phenomenon has
come from the National Human Rights Commission - an independent government body
- in April 2010, when it reported that it had received 5,397 reports of people
who have gone missing since the start of the Calderón administration, and that
nearly 9,000 dead bodies had never been identified.
Nitzia and
Mita, 16-year-old twins, are looking for their mother, Nitzia Paola Alvarado,
who was detained by members of the military on Dec. 29, 2009 along with their
uncle José Ángel and their cousin Rocío in the town of
Due to
harassment and threats, 37 members of the family were forced to flee the state.
The
caravan, which returned north over the weekend, received a letter from victims’
relatives who formed the group LUPA (the Spanish acronym for Struggle for Love,
Truth and Justice), in Nuevo León, one of the states hit hardest by the
spiralling violence, where 49 decapitated and dismembered bodies were found
along a highway on Sunday.
"There
are no words to describe the pain that mothers feel when a son or daughter
disappears…but if we had to try to describe it, if we had to find words, we
would tell you it is a terrible ordeal, a via crucis that never ends, unending
agony," says the letter.
"Our
pain and our struggle for our missing sons and daughters are heightened when we
see that part of society is indifferent, when we see a government that also
contains corrupt authorities who are in league with criminal elements,"
LUPA adds.
These women
who have lost sons and daughters and who don’t know what to tell their
grandchildren when they ask what happened to their father or mother have
decided to channel their pain into the struggle for justice.
Julia
Ramírez has 12 children. Alejandro, the oldest, decided to migrate to the
"My
children told me there would be a mother’s day festival. It was really hard for
me to leave them, but I have to continue the search; they’re at home, but their
brother isn’t," she said.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
WHEN THE MISSING DON'T RETURN
- October 17, 2013
- Some call it ‘frozen loss,’ a point
in time that families and relatives find almost impossible to extricate
themselves out of, even years after their loved ones have disappeared.
“The
families of the missing get into a [state of] tunnel vision,” says Bhava
Poudyal, mental health delegate for the International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) in Azerbaijan. He is talking about the thousands of families still
searching for their loved ones who have gone missing in his native Nepal, or in
Sri Lanka, Azerbaijan and dozens of other countries.
It’s a
situation that does not let go of its captives easily. “Their lives are
dominated by the missing, there is no release,” he tells IPS. “They live with
the ambivalence of hope and despair day in and day out.”
“Everyone seeks answers all the
time, the state of ambiguous loss is torture."
It’s a
condition Santhikumar, a bicycle repairman in his forties in Oddusudan village
of the Mullaitivu district in Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, is all too
familiar with. It has been four years since his brother-in-law went missing
during the final stages of the Sri Lankan military’s war against the rebel
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in April 2009.
Santhikumar
has been helping his sister and her two daughters make ends meet even as he
joins them in the search for the breadwinner of their family. He has visited
every official detention centre in the north and nearby areas, but with no luck
so far.
“People come
and tell us that they saw him on this location on this day. So we go looking
for him there,” he says. “But we have not found anything concrete yet.”
The family
has got used to the never-ending search, he adds. “There are good days and bad
days. Mostly we are okay, but there are days when my sister just stares
aimlessly for hours, or when her daughters break down crying. Birthdays are the
hardest, the girls have so many memories of appa (father).”
Some 2,300
km and a whole country away, Rena Mecha shares the same feeling of despair in
the Jalthal village of Jhapa district in eastern Nepal. The 36-year-old mother
of a boy and girl, 16 and 14 respectively, has been searching for her husband
who went missing during the pro-democracy movement in the country in 2006. “I
lost everything when he went missing,” she tells IPS. “Nothing can bring that
life back.”
The current
ICRC documentation shows that around 1,400 people have been missing in Nepal
since the 2006 peace agreement. In the country’s rural areas, the wives of the
missing men desist from calling themselves widows, as that would entail a whole
new set of complications, like having to dress in white and being considered a
‘bad presence’ by others.
In southern
Sri Lanka too, the immediate community has ostracised women who have accepted
that their missing husbands are dead, accusing them of betraying their husbands,
says Ananda Galappatti, a medical anthropologist who works with the families of
the missing in the country.
In
Azerbaijan, says Poudyal, many families continue to cook meals and set a plate
for a missing person even long after their disappearance. Close to 4,600 people
went missing during the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between the republics of
Azerbaijan and Armenia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
“It is the
constant state of waiting which makes closure very difficult, if not
impossible,” Zurab Burduli, the ICRC protection delegate in Sri Lanka, tells
IPS.
Galappatti
says the families are assailed by an identity crisis that can be exacerbated by
the social environment. “Am I a married woman or a widow? Am I a child without a
father? Am I a parent whose daughter is dead? Planning for the future
becomes extremely difficult in this situation,” he tells IPS.
In Sri
Lanka, the number of missing persons is a contentious issue. A presidential
task force set up to investigate the southern insurrection by the Janata
Vimukhti Peramuna (JVP) in the late 1980s recorded at least 30,000 cases of
missing people in 1995. The ICRC has a current caseload of 16,090 missing
persons in Sri Lanka dating back from 1990.
According to
Burduli, the first step in assisting these families is to recognise their
complex situation and devise assistance plans targeting them.
“The ICRC’s
experience around the world shows that because of the complexity of the needs
and their multi-disciplinary nature, coordinative national mechanisms are best
suited to address those needs in a comprehensive and consistent manner,” he
says.
In Nepal,
the families of the missing admit that once the national tracing programme
began following the 2006 peace agreement, their situation improved slightly.
“I was the
only one in my village with someone missing, I felt so alone,” says Mecha. “Now
at least there are people who understand my situation.”
Grassroots
groups provide families psychosocial support here, something that is yet to
take root in Sri Lanka.
“It is
imperative that any public process also includes the psychosocial accompaniment
of families – with sensitive and skilled practitioners on hand to support
families as they prepare for or go through these processes,” says Galapatti.
At the same
time, officials with the Nepali Red Cross who work as tracing officers warn
that the process of dealing with the families is slow and time-consuming.
“Everyone
seeks answers all the time, the state of ambiguous loss is torture,” says Shubadhra
Devkota from the Nepali Red Cross.
____________________________________________________
WUNRN
http://www.ammsa.com/content/missing-and-murdered-aboriginal-women
CANADA - CALL FOR INVESTIGATION INTO MISSION NATIVE/ABORIGINAL WOMEN
& GIRLS
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
WUNRN
The
Russia-Chechnya - Women with Photos to Mourn
"Disappeared" Relatives
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
WUNRN
INDIA-KASHMIR - MOTHERS OF THE DISAPPEARED SEARCH & SUFFER
"I can't describe how each day passes. I keep taking medicines
every single day to control my tension. At night, I'm awake. I just can't
sleep," Ahangar says.
She's felt this way, she says, ever since the day 21 years ago when she
lost her son.
"My teenaged son, Javed, was picked by the security agencies in
1990," she says.
"Security men came to our Batmaloo home to pick him up, saying they
were taking him for interrogation. We pleaded with them, saying he couldn't
have done anything wrong, that he had just passed his matriculation. But they
didn't listen and took him to the interrogation center at Pari Mahal. We never
saw him again."
Ahangar's husband fell ill because of the trauma, and gave up working.
He remains in poor health today.
Ahangar lives in the India-administered state of
She has scoured the
Many other women in the
"I can't describe how
each day passes. I keep taking medicines every single day to control my
tension. At night, I'm awake. I just can't sleep," Ahangar says.
She's felt this way, she
says, ever since the day 21 years ago when she lost her son.
"My teenaged son, Javed,
was picked by the security agencies in 1990," she says.
"Security men came to
our Batmaloo home to pick him up, saying they were taking him for
interrogation. We pleaded with them, saying he couldn't have done anything
wrong, that he had just passed his matriculation. But they didn't listen and
took him to the interrogation center at Pari Mahal. We never saw him
again."
Ahangar's husband fell ill
because of the trauma, and gave up working. He remains in poor health today.
They say they've sold land, homes, jewelry; exhausted every asset in the
search for their children.
Never Giving Up'
Ahangar provides leadership for many of them through the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), which she co-founded in 1996.
"I have decided never to give up this nonviolent protest of ours
until my last breath," she says.
On its website, the APDP describes the problem of "enforced
disappearances" as starting in 1989, when a group of young men took up
arms against the Indian state in support of the longstanding popular movement
for self-determination in Kashmir, which began in 1947 after the creation of
"In the name of national security and state interest the massive
Indian security apparatus in the state has been operating in a climate of
impunity shielded by emergency legal provisions like the Disturbed Area Act and
Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which grant immunity against being held
accountable," says the site.
Ahangar began her organization after a small group of parents, all of
whom had undergone the trauma of having their children taken away from them and
then found missing, came together.
Support has been building.
This year, she was nominated for the Frontline Human Rights Defenders
Award 2011. Civil libertarians in
The once-tiny group now has offices in almost all districts of the
She is currently trying to prosecute security forces for the
disappearance of her son through a lawsuit in the High Court with a prominent
lawyer, Zafar Shah, volunteering to represent her.
"I could not have afforded a lawyer," says Ahangar.
"Fortunately for me, Zafar sahib is not charging me. In fact, there are
many lawyers in the state who have taken up the cases of missing children
without charging a paisa (a cent) because they realize that we are not in a
position to pay and the issue is a crucial one that needs to be redressed. It
is an outrage that while we continue to suffer, those responsible for the crime
have not been booked and are, in fact, roaming about freely."
The Same Question
The APDP members have met numerous prominent political leaders of the
Ahangar says she asks all of them the same question: How would they feel
if their own young sons were picked up and never seen again?
When Radha Kumar, the government appointed interlocutor, visited the
APDP office in Srinagar, Ahangar says she asked her to ask all the high-ranking
female politicians in New Delhi how they would react if their innocent children
were to be picked up and tortured by security agencies.
The APDP has long argued that over 8,000 men have gone missing in the
The state government has now even offered to conduct DNA profiling on these
bodies in order to identify them.
Ahangar, however, refuses to be diverted by the issue of unmarked
graves.
"I know this whole issue of unmarked graves is a very serious
one," she says, "but don't link the missing with that issue because
then attention will get diverted. This is what the government authorities want;
they don't want attention to be focused on our missing children."
She points out how, over the years, misleading facts and figures have
been put out for public consumption, but the truth has always remained hidden.
With no closure in sight, Ahangar says there is no APDP member who will
ever give up.
"I just pray to Allah to give me the 'himmat' (courage) to carry on," she says.
__________________________________________________