This week in history: International Day of the Disappeared

This week in history: International Day of the Disappeared

by: Special to PeoplesWorld.org
August 29 2016



The International Day of the Disappeared on August 30 was created to draw attention to the fate of individuals imprisoned at places and under poor conditions unknown to their relatives and/or legal representatives. The impulse for the day came from the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of Detained-Disappeared (Federación Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos, or FEDEFAM), a non-governmental organization founded in 1981 in Costa Rica as an association of local and regional groups actively working against secret imprisonment, forced disappearances and abduction in a number of Latin-American countries.

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One of the best known expressions of protest against the practice of "disappearing" people is the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have congregated since 1977 in a historic public space in Buenos Aires with signs and pictures of desaparecidos, their children, who were subject to forced disappearance by the Argentine military in the Dirty War. People perceived to be supportive of subversive activities - that would include expressing left-wing ideas, or having any link with these people, however tenuous - would be illegally detained, subject to abuse and torture, and finally murdered in secret. Young pregnant women would be kept alive until they gave birth, then murdered, their children given to military families eager to adopt a baby. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo took advantage of the symbolic importance of the Plaza to open the public's eyes to what the military regime was doing.

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Here is a haunting version of Holly Near's song "Hay una mujer desaparecida" about the missing women of Chile during the Pinochet junta, sung by a French women's chorus.

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