© CEDI/Caroline Amar
This International Women’s Day, centred around the theme of ‘Accelerate Action’, we at MaGPIE take this opportunity to acknowledge the women who, in the face of loss and pain, take it upon themselves to search for their disappeared loved ones.
Across the globe, enforced disappearance remains a pervasive crime used to instil fear and silence entire communities. More often than not, it is men who are forcibly disappeared, leaving behind mothers, wives and children. While there is no obligation to take up the search, time and again, women take action, filling a void left by an indifferent, complicit or unable State. For many of these women, their lives were previously confined to the private sphere, but the disappearance of a loved one forces them into public action. With minimal official support, or sometimes even in direct opposition to the State, they come together to create grassroots organisations and networks, not only leading the search for the disappeared but also providing critical support to families, including (but by no means limited to), psycho-social support, memorialisation, forensic search, data gathering, research, advocacy, art, and even financial and legal aid.
It is precisely the identity of the Mother that enables these groups their strength and influence. States often underestimate the power that this identity construction has, allowing these women to mobilise and gain momentum under the radar. A grieving Mother’s voice also carries a unique moral weight, often garnering global attention that may otherwise have been overlooked (Kovras 2017; Muehlmann 2024). Women, whose children have been forcibly disappeared are sometimes then positioned as ‘Mothers of the nation’ adding to their moral authority.
Such grassroots, women-led organisations have played a pivotal role in shaping international responses to enforced disappearance since the crime was first recognised during the 1980s and 1990s in Latin America. Women in Chile in 1977 led a hunger-strike in the United Nations Headquarters in Santiago to protest against the disappearance of their relatives, part of a series of protests that are said to have contributed directly to the delegitimisation of Pinochet’s dictatorship (Salgado 2018). A group of mother’s of the disappeared in Mexico in the 1990s created La Lista, a then novel Excel spreadsheet containing details of disappeared young women in Ciudad Juarez. Its presentation during the occupation of the mayor’s office not only forced authorities to acknowledge the crisis but also to set a precedent for public engagement in forensic knowledge and accountability (Cruz-Santiago 2020). Groups, including the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, were instrumental in bringing attention to the severity of this atrocity which ultimately led to the creation of the Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance in 2006 (Kovras 2017). The impact of grassroots efforts of women is also evident in the creation of Colombia’s Law, the first of its kind in the world, that serves to protect women searchers of the missing (Amnesty International 2024). Furthermore, the unwavering commitment of groups like the Saturday Mothers in Turkey, who have held weekly sit-in protests in Taksim Square since 1995, stands as a powerful testament to the tenacity, persistence and action of women-led movements throughout history and across the world (Kaya et al. 2024).
Women Accelerate Action in every facet of society, and this is particularly evident in the courageous efforts of women who come together to search for their missing loved ones.
Emily Fisher
References
Amnesty International., 2024. Colombia: Transforming Pain into Rights. Amnesty International. Available from: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr23/8752/2024/en/ [Accessed on 4 March 2025].
Cruz-Santiago, A. 2020. Lists, Maps, and Bones: The Untold Journeys of Citizen-led Forensics in Mexico’. Victims & Offenders, 15 (3), 350–369.
Kaya, O., Acar, Y, G., Agar, C, C., and Neville, F., 2024. Resistance from generation to generation: The Saturday Mothers in Istanbul. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology, 34 (4), 1–16.
Kovras, I., 2017. Grassroots Activism and the Evolution of Transitional Justice: The Families of the Disappeared. London: Cambridge University Press.
Muehlmann, S., 2024. Call the Mothers: Searching for México’s Disappeared in the War on Drugs. University of California Press.
Salgado, A., 2018. Communism and human rights in Pinochet’s Chile: the 1977 hunger strike against forced disappearance. Cold War History, 18 (2), 169-186.
