Women who search for the disappeared are changing what it means to be a victim

A protester cries while holding a sign during the social uprising in Bogotá, Colombia, June 2021. The sign reads: “Wanted for torture and disappearance. Long live the national strike.” Photo © Daniela Diaz.

Reportage • Daniela Díaz • August 30, 2024 • Leer en castellano

There is a small bird in Colombia that’s famous for fighting off large hawks to protect its young: the sirirí.

This is the origin of the name of “Operation Sirirí,” which is what Fabiola Lalinde christened her tireless effort to learn the truth about the disappearance of her son, Luis Fernando, in 1984. Her work prompted the first international condemnation of Colombia for forced disappearance in 1987.

Lalinde's story is not unlike that of thousands of mothers, daughters, sisters, wives and friends who have led searches for the disappeared in Colombia. Cases like hers number in the hundreds of thousands in Latin America, a land filled with beauty and tragedy.

Colombia’s ongoing internal armed conflict has led to a serious underreporting of disappeared persons and government institutions and NGOs do not agree on how many there are. The final report of the Truth Commission, which came out of the 2016 Peace Agreement with the FARC rebels, acknowledges more than 210,000. This number includes civilians, members of the military and guerrillas, but the report only covers 31 years (from 1985 to 2016).

Most Colombians expected that the 2016 peace deal would lead to an end of disappearances, but the conflict has been reconfigured. New armed groups have emerged and pushed enforced disappearances back into the national discussion.

The searchers

Disappearances occur in many places and in many ways, but there is a common thread: the work of searching for the disappeared is feminized. This is true from north to south, in the more than 160 search collectives in Mexico to the Migrant Families Network in Central America to the iconic Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.

Colombia’s internal armed conflict has posed enormous challenges for women searchers. They not only face obstacles and criminality from the state, but they are also subject to violence by non-state armed groups, who harass, surveil, threaten to kill, and physically and sexually assault them as they search rural areas for victims’ remains.

As with the number of the disappeared, no one knows exactly how many search groups there are in Colombia. Initial mapping done by the International Commission on Missing Persons indicates that there may be over one hundred.

Most of these groups are NGOs that were created in the context of the armed conflict from the 1980s to the 2000s. The most recently formed groups were founded in 2021, in the context of the social uprising, massive nationwide demonstrations and the severe police repression that led, in some cases, to forced disappearances.

Yaneth Bautista, director of the Nydia Erika Bautista Foundation, and Pilar Navarrete, who is a member of National Movement of Victims of State Crimes (MOVICE, in its Spanish acronym) are familiar with the many obstacles that searchers face and how they have been overcome.

Navarrete’s husband, Héctor Beltrán, was disappeared in 1985 in the Palace of Justice incident, when M-19 guerrillas took over Colombia’s parliament. The army stormed the building in an event known colloquially as the “retaking.” In the midst of the ensuing chaos, hundreds of civilians were disappeared and killed.

Since then, Navarrete, who has deep blue eyes and a powerful presence, has not stopped seeking justice for Beltrán and for the thousands of others disappeared in Colombia. She says that the work has not been easy, either emotionally or physically. Most of the organizations dedicated to searching hang on by a thread, operating with limited resources in the midst of violence.

Yaneth Bautista is the sister of Nidya Erika Bautista, also an M-19 militant, whom soldiers sexually assaulted, tortured and disappeared in 1987. Today, Bautista is one of the best-known figures in the struggle for the disappeared in Colombia.

In more than two decades of work, Bautista, her daughter and her nephew, Nidya's son, have suffered persecution and threats and even had to go into exile. She states proudly that her foundation currently supports the families of over 500 victims.

Navarrete, Bautista and other family members and organizations have been fighting for economic, political and social guarantees for their work as searchers. They face threats as they search for their loved ones on land, in rivers and at sea due to the armed conflict, economic precariousness, and the enormous emotional toll.

This scenario is not new. “Women who are family members of a disappeared person are particularly vulnerable to serious adverse social and economic effects, as well as to suffering violence, persecution and reprisals as a result of their efforts to locate their loved ones,” warned the United Nations Committee on Enforced Disappearances in 2016.

Unity is strength 

Pilar Navarrete poses in her home next to an altar in honor of her disappeared husband. Bogota, Colombia, April 2022. Photo © Daniela Díaz.

Bautista knows that searchers are stronger together. She brought together women from different territories to push for the passage of a law to bring searchers and their work out of the shadows. “We are going to turn our pain into rights,” she told Ojalá.

Eight organizations of women searchers, among them “Mothers for Life” from Buenaventura, “Network to Live” from Montes de María in Bolívar and relatives of the disappeared from the San Basilio Indigenous Resguardo in Putumayo joined forces with a common goal. They sought to unite processes led by diverse women searchers: Black, Indigenous, peasant, and rural. Some have cases dating back decades, whereas others have family members who have become victims in recent years.

Their work bore fruit on June 18 when, after many attempts, the Congress of the Republic passed a law that protects searchers and also takes a crucial symbolic step by recognizing them as peace builders. The ruling party promoted Law 2364 in congress and, after 17 months of delay tactics by the rightwing, a majority approved it.

One of its articles orders the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to solicit recognition from the UN General Assembly and to make October 23 the International Day of Women Searchers.

Navarrete sees this as a tribute to years of resistance. “Most of us who have thrown ourselves heart and soul into responding to different facets of the armed conflict, such as displacement or forced disappearance, have been women,” she said in a telephone interview.

"We have found our place. We no longer call ourselves relatives of victims of forced disappearance, but women searchers,” Bautista said. "That is a social recognition for all of us. The next step is for the state to protect us and give us a political place as actors for peace,” she explains.

It has taken years of pain to be recognized. For a long time, the topic of forced disappearance was taboo in Colombia. Equitas is one organization that has seen the mettle of these women. It specializes in forensic science and has been working hand in hand with the searchers since 2005. 

“Disappearance was denied for a long time,” said Angie Fernández, Equitas director, in an interview with Ojalá. “This happened in different ways. Recognizing the work [of searchers] is to recognize that the disappearances happened and continue to happen.”

The work of women searchers

Yaneth Bautista poses with a photo of her sister who disappeared three decades ago. Bogota, Colombia, August 28, 2024. Photo © Daniela Díaz.

The fact that women predominantly perform the work of searching makes everything more complex. Women searchers bear a triple burden: care work, their salaried jobs, and the work of finding loved ones. In fact, many are so dedicated to searching that they give up their careers and devote themselves completely to humanitarian labor. This is true of Yaneth and Pilar.

“Many of the women who lead searches are also in charge of supporting their families, of being heads of household, of sustaining their homes economically,” said Fernández.

At 65-years old, Bautista feels that the state still owes many debts to the searchers and to the victims of disappearances, including one that is the most difficult to achieve: justice.

Navarrete agrees and adds another great challenge: truth. For her, reconciliation and peace are possible only if there is truth and memory. She refuses to give in to forgetting, not only of her family members, but also of the burden that state negligence has imposed on hundreds of women who, like her, have dedicated their lives to searching, and who are forced to leave their careers, which impacts their family’s wellbeing.

She is grateful for Yaneth Bautista’s sustained push to get a law passed. This may enable others, perhaps future generations of searchers, to carry out their work under better conditions. Little by little, she says, their battle has been gaining ground and inserting itself in national debates, now they want concrete results that improve their daily lives. 

“Our work now has a place at the political level,” says Bautista.

After decades of steadfast struggle, Colombia’s women searchers have created a place for their struggle and for the disappeared in the memory of an entire country. Bautista is confident that the community of hope, as she calls the new generations of social movements organizing for peace, will carry on these women’s legacy and that they’ll do so with more and better protections.