The Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance (FIND) was born on 23 November 1985 amidst the escalating mass protest against the then moribund Marcos dictatorship. As it commemorates its 21st Founding Anniversary today, it has twenty and one reasons to rejoice, and twenty and one reasons as well to rage.

FIND is one organization that looks forward to the day when it can reinvent itself and reorient its programs having lost the reasons for its being – because there are no more desaparecidos to search for and justice had been served to all victims and their families.

FIND anticipates the day it would disappear as families of victims of involuntary disappearance and reappear triumphantly probably as Families Involved in National Development. The undeniable upsurge in the incidence of disappearances – 61 reported victims for the last nine months of this year alone, bringing the total under the Gloria Macapagal Arroyo administration to 167, thwarts this dream.

The latest case FIND has documented involves cousins Heherson Medina and Nicolas Sanchez who belong to the Aeta community in Capas, Tarlac.

Colonial intervention and the dearth of appropriate local intervention have ironically and painfully driven the country’s aborigines to the mountains and the hinterlands. The disappearance of Medina and Sanchez, whose only fault it seems is their being part of a family that lives along the road and cannot deny water or food or shelter for the night to passersby who are suspected by government security forces to be rebels.

The untold anxiety brought upon the poor Aeta family intensifies the pain of their socio-economic and political marginalization. This dramatizes the terrifying error of the government’s war on terror.

FIND rages against the unabated commission of enforced disappearance and extrajudicial executions that have been spawned by government’s all-out war on insurgents and terrorists.

FIND strongly urges government to stop all forms of state repression that assault human dignity, and to respect the basic human rights of indigenous peoples who have been consigned to the margins of society.

Enact the anti-disappearance law before the 13th Congress adjourns.

Immediately ratify the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance after its adoption by the United Nations General Assembly.