(Photo by Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos via Flickr/CC BY 4.0 DEED)
Over the past 45 years, tens of thousands of individuals have disappeared across 115 countries around the world. Last year saw the highest increase in disappeared persons in the last two decades, with 56,559 new cases recorded in 2024.
The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED) defines enforced disappearance as “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State.”
The Fight for Recognition
In Mexico, Türkiye, Uruguay, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Argentina, and many other countries, enforced disappearances have been and continue to be an ongoing struggle. All too often, state personnel quickly dismiss cases and refuse their obligation to initiate searches. It tends to be up to family members to keep the search alive.
In the face of government impunity and inefficiency, mothers conduct their own searches for their missing loved ones. Despite economic hardships and social stigma, many have transformed into leaders of grassroots movements fighting against states responsible for the disappearances. Yet, their contributions remain largely unrecognized.
Reshaping Motherhood as a Political Act
Patriarchal societies have historically reduced the roles of women as caregivers. Government institutions frequently undervalue and dismiss the political work of many mothers because it is rooted in care and emotionality, qualities traditionally coded as feminine. However, as sociologist Megan Scribe explains in Making Space for Indigenous Feminism, societies create, maintain, and reproduce caregiving roles and expectations. Therefore, care is inherently political.
Some researchers have argued that motherhood provides women a strategic space to use their roles to challenge the state, especially under authoritarian states that traditionally mark mothers and their bodies as sites that need state protection. With this in mind, many searching collectives leverage their hypervisibility and tactfully employ highly visible forms of public protest. Instead of grieving in silence, women have organized around their identity as mothers to reclaim public spaces, demand justice for the disappeared, and redefine what their political participation can look like.
Mothers in Protest: From Argentina to Mexico
One of the most paradigmatic examples of this type of hypervisible protest is the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of Plaza de Mayo), who marched every Thursday protesting Argentina’s military regime in the late 1970s to demand the return of the 15,000 to 30,000 people who were disappeared. Dressed in white head scarves symbolizing their children and the white dove of peace, the mothers marched with their missing children’s photographs around their necks. This movement was groundbreaking, marking one of the first organized protests specifically led by mothers united in their fight against state oppression.
Their powerful visibility attracted significant international attention, which played a key role in advancing international human rights and criminal law. It paved the way for landmark developments such as the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the 1994 Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons, and the adoption of the ICPPED convention in 2006. Today, that convention stands as a critical legal framework for preventing and acknowledging enforced disappearances. The Madres de Plaza de Mayo have become a model for human rights movements around the world.
Inspired by the protest tactics of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, hundreds of Madres Buscadoras march in cities across Mexico every year on May 10th, Mexico’s Mother’s Day, since the early 2010s. They hold pictures of their lost children and demand effective government responses.
These demonstrations have transformed Mexico’s Mother’s Day into a national movement known as Marcha de la Dignidad Nacional (March for National Dignity), raising awareness of the over 100,000 missing people in Mexico. The movement combats the stigma that missing persons are unworthy of attention and breaks the imposed silence around enforced disappearances.
Personal Grief into Collective Action
Shared grief can provide an avenue for building solidarity and demanding justice. As feminist scholar Judith Butler argues, public expression of grief can lead to a new type of political community and organizing. Mothers from all walks of life, affected by enforced disappearances, have sought each other out and formed grassroots collectives and organizations to demand structural change. They have built communities of mutual support and autonomous organizing.
Grassroots collectives conduct search operations in remote areas for clandestine graves. Their persistent efforts have uncovered numerous mass graves and obliged authorities to acknowledge the magnitude of the crisis. Mothers’ involvement in these grassroots collectives stemmed from a shared sense of solidarity among women, enabling them to cope with the aftermath of violence while advocating for the dignity of the victims.
Case Studies: Mothers’ Movements for Justice
In Türkiye, the group Cumartesi Anneleri (Saturday People/Mothers) has gathered in Istanbul every Saturday since 1995 for 30-minute sit-ins. Despite periods of state-imposed bans and interruptions, they seek justice for forced disappearances and political murders in Türkiye. What began as a small circle of about 30 individuals—mostly mothers and relatives of the disappeared—has evolved into a massive social movement involving thousands of people. Their weekly demonstrations have drawn support from people mourning loved ones lost to state violence and others who oppose the government.
Joining the movement makes many participants feel less alone in their loss. As a result, the Cumartesi Anneleri have grown beyond their original focus. They have become a broader platform for confronting a wide range of state-led injustices, uniting multiple generations in a collective struggle for justice and human rights.
Mothers have transformed their personal grief into collective action and turned violent memories of repression into concrete projects that seek comprehensive justice for state crimes. In Bangladesh, the Mayer Daak (Mothers’ Call) has collaborated with Odhikar, a local initiative documenting human rights violations, and international groups to collect detailed information about state-abducted victims during Sheikh Hasina’s rule.
Similarly, mothers in the collective Madres y Familiares (Mothers and Family) in Uruguay have worked with Sitios de Memoria (Sites of Memory). This collectivist project digitizes, publicizes, and democratizes access to all available information on the dictatorial period.
Structural Barriers to Truth and Justice
Searching for a forcibly disappeared person involves fighting against structural discriminatory barriers to receive justice. Women who choose to follow this path often face threats and attacks from those who want to evade responsibility for what happened.
State repression has been one of the main challenges to mothers’ search efforts. State authorities not only fail to launch adequate investigations into cases and find those responsible, but also threaten mothers for denouncing state crimes and demanding justice. Mothers, initially seeking the state’s help for retribution, become targets of more state violence. In 2018, police responded to a peaceful gathering led by the Cumartesi Anneleri in Istanbul with pepper gas and rubber bullets, and arrested over 50 participants.
Impunity, Stigmatization, and the Risks of Resistance
Another challenge related to enforced disappearance is ongoing impunity, or exemption from punishment. Mothers have searched under governments with systematic policies to forcibly disappear dissidents. Authorities accuse victims of enforced disappearances of being violent and brand them with stereotypes.
In many cases, authoritarian regimes create narratives to legitimize their power, positioning leftist activists as criminal and subversive individuals deserving of state violence. This rationalization conveniently ignores the state’s record of murders and disappearances, not to mention the history of police and military personnel implicated in numerous cases. Despite this, the national security legislation shields the state.
Members of a search collective in Tamaulipas, Mexico, reported that the state attorney general’s office threatened to file a criminal case against them after they recovered three bodies. Bibiana Mendoza, part of the Brigada Independiente de Búsqueda (Independent Search Brigade) in Guanajuato, Mexico, stated, “It’s a matter of political control. No one wants us, women, to find graves independently.”
Mothers risk their own lives through bodily exposure and create communities of resistance that challenge dominant constructions of mothers being passive and docile. Perpetrators and those who benefit from enforced disappearances see the process of community building as a threat since it increases the search capacities of impacted family members.
Mothers Leading Searches and Pushing for Change
Refusing to remain silent, mothers have become self-taught forensic investigators and legal advocates. Forming grassroots search collectives dedicated to locating mass graves and exhuming human remains. In these groups, mothers often rely on anonymous trips to guide them to possible burial sites and coordinate searches across dangerous terrain. Alongside leading searches in the field, these women build networks of care and support one another in a system that has left them to search on their own.
Indigenous mothers in Chiapas, Mexico, face systemic neglect, as the state frequently ignores and obstructs investigations involving Indigenous victims. The Indigenous-led collective Madres en Resistencia de Chiapas (Mothers in Resistance Chiapas), led by Maya, Tzotzil, Tzeltal, Zoque, and Ch’ol mothers, has been instrumental in advocating for the 2017 General Law of Enforced Disappearances. They also helped establish a Citizens’ Council—a body intended to involve relatives in search processes.
Despite the law’s enactment in 2019, the Chiapas government has yet to establish a Citizens’ Council in Chiapas. “This body has to do with the participation of the victims, and I believe that what the State wants least of all is for them to participate. What it wants, on the contrary, is for them to wear themselves out and stop searching,” says Griselda Pineda Herrera from Voces Mesoamericanas.
Defying Obstacles and Continuing the Search
In October 2024, the mayor of Berriozábal, Chiapas, Jorge Arturo Acero Gómez, denied the Madres en Resistencia de Chiapas permission to conduct search efforts for missing persons in the municipality, citing “insecurity.” This effectively blocked searches indefinitely. Authorities would only permit entry once they judged the searching area to be safe—a condition the collective considered unlikely given the ongoing violence.
Despite all these obstacles, mothers in Chiapas continue their search efforts. On March 25, 2025, Madres en Resistencia de Chiapas conducted a field search in a remote ravine in San Andrés, Chiapas. The mothers uncovered signs of a recently burned site, scattered clothing, and shoes. With direct coordination from the National Guard (Guardia Nacional) and the Comisión de Búsqueda (Search Commission), these mothers led the investigation themselves, demanding a formal excavation and official accountability for authorities destroying evidence.
The search was part of a broader mobilization against state neglect and obstruction in cases of forced disappearance. The collective had previously denounced authorities for removing search notices from public streets and called out attempts to erase their work. Madres en Resistencia de Chiapas spokesperson Isabel Torres even revealed that a public prosecutor once directly threatened them, saying, “This prosecutor threatened to make us disappear if we continued insisting on results in the investigations.”
Unyielding Hope in the Quest for Justice of the Disappeared
Governments’ failure to provide answers about the whereabouts and fate of their loved ones sparked protests and independent searches for justice. Hope for the disappeared lies in the relentless dedication of searching mothers, not in the empty promises of state authorities. These courageous women overcome countless obstacles, driven by unwavering determination to uncover the truth. While state authorities conceal the crimes, mothers mobilize their stories and bodies to expose state-perpetrated violence.
What’s clear is that the mothers of forcibly disappeared persons remain committed to justice and preserving the memory of their loved ones alive. Mothers explore every avenue because giving up is not an option. As Sanjida Islam, a coordinator at Mayer Dak, says: “We raised our voices and realized that if we stopped, we would never get back our loved ones.” Their resilience and hope continue to inspire and drive change.
Edited by Gabrielle Andrychuk
