wfn.org | Disappeared Persons in Uruguay

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CONTACT: 	Linda Bloom
(10-21-71B){149}
		New York (212) 870-3803		      March 13, 1998

Relatives of 'disappeared'
seek truth in Uruguay

	NEW YORK (UMNS) -- In 1975, when Javier Miranda was 11 years
old, his father became one of the "disappeared" in Uruguay, vanishing
without a trace after being taken for interrogation by military
officers.
	Today, Miranda is a lawyer, involved in pressing the cases of
the 165 Uruguayans who disappeared between 1973 to 1985 with his own
government and through international human rights channels.
	The relatives of the disappeared have the support of both
Catholics and Protestants in Uruguay, including the Methodist Church
there.
To help with international support, the U.S. National Council of
Churches (NCC) arranged for Miranda and two other relatives, Hortencia
Pereira and Sabina Arigon, to meet with government officials and human
rights groups March 9-13 in Washington, D.C., and New York.
	"Our claim is basically a humanitarian claim," Miranda said
during a March 12 talk at NCC headquarters here. "We demand that they
(Uruguayan government) tell us what happened with each one of our
relatives."
	Reconstructing the memory of those incidents also could bring
closure to a difficult chapter in the country's history and serve "as a
prevention tool (to guard against) new violations in the future," he
added.
And while the adults who disappeared are presumed dead, the infants and
small children who vanished probably are alive and unaware of their true
family heritage, according to Miranda.
The disappearances occurred after a 1973 military coup and continued
until democracy was restored in Uruguay in 1985.
	Miranda's father -- a law professor, notary public and member of
the Communist Party, a legal political party in Uruguay -- was taken for
interrogation on Nov. 30, 1975.
"We never knew anything more about him," Miranda said.
	Arigon was 12 years old when her father, a bookstore employee
and Communist Party member, was detained in 1977. Her mother tried
desperately to find out where he had been taken.
"Every place that she asked, they said, 'We don't have him,'" Arigon
recalled.
	Pereira's husband, a trade union leader, disappeared on July 13,
1976, while in Argentina.
"He had been kidnapped with a lot of witnesses," Pereira said. "He was
in a bar when the police came and took him."
	Later, she had reports that he had been "severely tortured." The
last information came that August, when he was taken somewhere on a
truck.
Many of the disappeared Uruguayans were kidnapped while in Argentina.
The repressive regimes of Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Chile
all cooperated with each other during this period, according to the Rev.
Oscar Bolioli, director of the NCC's Latin America and the Caribbean
Office.
	But while the other countries formed truth commissions or opened
archives about their own disappeared, "Uruguay is the only country in
this region that didn't do anything on this issue," Miranda said.
	Bolioli, himself an Uruguayan Methodist, is working with the
relatives and the churches there on both national and international
strategies to bring pressure on the government to open an investigation.
# # #

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