While the rest of the country troop to cemeteries to honor their departed loved ones on November 1 and 2, there are families without graves or headstones to visit, families who are in limbo about the fate of their kin. They are the families of victims of enforced disappearance, a crime that has left them in perpetual anguish, and denies them closure. These families have been gathering annually on the 2nd of November, bound by a determination that their missing kin are not forgotten, that the search for them has not been abandoned and that their quest for justice continues.
This year, the gathering led by Desaparecidos (Families of the Disappeared for Justice) took place at the Claret School Chapel in Quezon City, where a Mass with special intentions was held, followed by a brief program where families of the disappeared spoke to call for the surfacing of their missing kin and for the perpetrators to be held to account.
The participants wore white and had headscarves inscribed with “Surface All Desaparecidos.” The scene was reminiscent of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, mothers of those who were forcibly disappeared during Argentina’s dirty war who wore white headscarves and held vigil at the public square in front of the Argentine presidential palace every Thursday to demand the surfacing of their missing children.
In the Philippines, said Desaparecidos chair and spokesperson JL Burgos, enforced disappearance is a continuing scourge, despite the enactment of a law against it as far back as 2012 (RA 10353 or the Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act). “Under Benigno Aquino III under whose regime the law was enacted,” he said, “there were nine documented cases of enforced disappearance, 20 under Duterte and 15 so far under Ferdinand Marcos Jr. They join more than 1,900 victims of enforced disappearance since the Marcos Sr. regime.”
Enforced disappearance, by definition, is a state-perpetrated or -sanctioned crime, stressed Burgos, where perpetrators are shielded by an impenetrable shroud of impunity. It is this impunity, he said, that is behind the fact that enforced disappearances continue to this day.
For the families, the agony of not knowing the fate of their missing kin is compounded by the fact that so-called protective writs like amparo and habeas data and even the writ of habeas corpus that compels state authorities to produce in court victims of unlawful detention, have so far failed to result in the surfacing of the disappeared and the prosecution, let alone conviction, of the perpetrators. In the most recent development, the Ombudsman dismissed the criminal and administrative complaints filed by abduction survivors Jonila Castro and Jhed Tamano against government and military officials responsible for their kidnapping and illegal detention in September 2023 and who staged a press conference where the two were to be presented to the media as “surrenderers.”
The charges filed in 2024 by Jhed and Jonila, which ranged from arbitrary detention and grave coercion to violations of the Anti-Torture Law, was also the first case filed under the Anti-Enforced Disappearance Act. The dismissal of the charges at the prosecutor’s level was another shameful demonstration of impunity.
It thus comes as no surprise that successive Philippine regimes have failed to ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, ironically citing the existence of a domestic law against enforced disappearance that has not deterred the crime at all. On top of this, the Philippine government has even sought, since 2019, to delist more than 600 cases from the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, again citing an allegedly “strong legal framework and institutional mechanisms to address enforced disappearances.”
“With the government dead set on denying us the truth, the November 2 gathering is ultimately an act of defiance,” averred Burgos. “We declare that we have not forgotten our missing loved ones, we have not stopped searching for the truth behind their disappearance and calling for them to be surfaced, and we will not yield to the state’s attempts to threaten, harass or intimidate us.”
