MARY AILEEN D.

BACALSO
Mary Aileen Diez-Bacalso is presently the Secretary-General of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD). As the former Chairperson of the Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance (FIND)-Philippines, she initiated inviting representatives of organizations of families from Asia, Latin America and Africa in 1997 that eventually resulted in the conceptualization and birth of what is now the AFAD. She started her human rights advocacy at 16, when she was then a freshman student of St. Theresa's College, Cebu City where she graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Arts Major in Mass Communication. She was an associate editor of STC official publications, the Star and the Catalyst. It was during her college years where she was exposed to the life of the poor, deprived, the oppressed in the slums of Cebu City, the Philippines' second urban center. Her strong Catholic foundation, coupled with her exposure to the squatters areas and to the farmers in the hinterlands of Babag, Malubog, Sibugay and Sirao where she did her thesis on a Golf Course Complex then being constructed (resulting in land grabbing and eviction of poor farmers) had challenged her to opt for the road less trodden the option for the poor. Then a fresh college graduate, she worked as Publications Officer of the then Visayas Secretariat of Social Action (VISSA-NASSA), social action arm of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines from June 1983 - February 1986. During which, she immersed herself with the poor people of the different dioceses of the Visayas, one of the country's major islands. It had deepened her commitment and dedication to the cause of the downtrodden. A couple of years later, many church people in the Philippines were persecuted during the peak of harsh repression especially during the last years of the tyrannical and rapacious Marcos regime. The call of the times urged her join the core of the organizing committee of the Promotion of Church People's Rights - Visayas. Hence, after the historic 1986 People Power and EDSA revolution, she moved to another job as Executive Secretary of the then newly-established organization that aimed to respond to the heightening persecution of Church people in the country. During which, she organized chapters in thirteen major provinces of the region where church people were organized to defend their rights to serve the little ones of God's flock. She was forced to leave the Cebu City in November 1988. Then newly married to her husband, Edsil V. Bacalso whom she met when they were both student activists and members of the Student Catholic Action of the Philippines (SCAP), she had to face security risks when her husband involuntarily disappeared. On November 17, 1988, exactly two months after marriage, her husband was nabbed by seven armed men in Colon St., the heart of Cebu City in broad day light and forced to take a red car without a plate number. Accompanied by her parents and brothers in-law, she searched daily for her husband in all military camps only to be always denied the information of the victim's whereabouts. The military published news reports stating that her husband, accordingly an alleged rebel, was in the order of battle and must have been

taken by military men not under the Visayas command and due to the military's compartmentalization policy, they had no idea of his whereabouts. After a week of anguished search, one detainee who was with her husband in the same secret detention center, escaped and who fortunately informed her of her husband's whereabouts. Immediately, she informed the military that she was told by the person who escaped. Afraid that the escapee would testify, the military was forced to release her husband in a cemetery near his parents' house. It was later learned that her husband was transferred from one military camp to another and finally put in a secret detention center and was physically and psychologically tortured. Such effects of torture he continues to suffer up to the present. The traumatic experience had forced the couple to move to Manila wherethey had to work underground. After which, she later landed a job in the Church Data Center as Assistant to the Executive Director. A year later, she was invited to join the Families of Victims of Involuntary Disappearance (FIND) where she worked as Secretary-General and later as Co-Chairperson. It was then that she profoundly immersed herself with the struggle of the families of the disappeared in her country. Convinced of the global magnitude of the problem of enforced disappearances, she highly contributed to the enrichment of the organization's international work. Having integrated herself with families of the disappeared in other countries, she led in the formation of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances. In the course of her work, she immerses herself with the families of the disappeared in Asian countries, even in areas less trodden because militarization and intense repression. She dared to go to the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir. She also visited some of the members of the Tiananmen Mothers in their homes and listened to their stories. These and many more had convinced her never to turn her back to these agonizing families of the disappeared. She consistently and actively participated in the three-year drafting and negotiation process of the then United Nations Inter-Sessional Open-Ended Working Group To Elaborate a Draft Legally-Binding Normative Instrument for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances in Geneva, Switzerland from 2003-2005. She is presently the focal person of the International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances (ICAED).