The Ongoing Crime

As human rights lawyers, we generally don’t rank the crimes we document. But after interviewing the families of countless victims over the years, I’m convinced there’s no crime more cruel than the “disappearance” of a human being.   In 2003, during one of my first research trips to Mexico, I interviewed women in Guerrero state who had lost family members during the country’s “dirty war” in the early 1970s. Their missing loved ones were presumed to be among the hundreds of people the military executed and tossed from planes into the sea. But the families weren’t sure—and this uncertainty was why…

© Human Rights Watch - mardi 27 novembre 2018