TO REMEMBER IS TO RESIST: End Enforced Disappearances! Surface All Desaparecidos!

August 30, 2025

On this International Day of the Disappeared, Katribu Kalipunan ng Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas stands with families, colleagues, and communities in remembering the many activists and human rights defenders who have been abducted and forcibly disappeared under the reign of state terror.

Each name taken from us bears not only the unbearable weight of loss, but also the unbreakable call for truth, justice, and accountability.

We continue to search for our missing colleagues: Dexter Capuyan and Bazoo de Jesus, Felix Salaveria Jr. and James Jazmines, James Balao, and Jonas Burgos. Their disappearance is a constant reminder of how the state targets Indigenous Peoples, advocates, and community organizers by ripping them from their families and silencing their voices. 

Enforced disappearances are not random acts of cruelty. It is a crime against humanity. They are cold, calculated weapons of repression wielded to instill fear, crush resistance, and protect the interests of those who plunder our ancestral lands and trample our rights. Each disappearance reveals the ruthless machinery of militarization, criminalization, and impunity that sustains this system.

Recently, the Court of Appeals granted a writ of amparo to the families of Dexter Capuyan and Bazoo de Jesus, following the earlier grant of a writ of amparo and habeas data to the daughters of Felix Salaveria Jr.

These hard-won legal victories are important steps forward in the struggle for justice. But they also lay bare an undeniable truth: state security forces are directly involved in these abductions. Even worse, they have brazenly refused to carry out any genuine or comprehensive investigation into these disappearances. Their deliberate inaction, denial, and cover-ups are not only proof of guilt but also perpetuate the crime itself. Such is complicity, making them part of the crime itself. These crimes must not go unpunished.

Katribu stands unwavering with the families of the disappeared, with fellow defenders of human rights, and with Indigenous communities under relentless attack. To remember them is to resist the system that made them disappear. To speak their names is to indict the forces of repression. To demand their surfacing is to demand an end to state terror.

Until every desaparecido is surfaced, until every perpetrator is put to justice: we will not stop remembering, and we will not stop resisting.

Reference: 

Beverly Longid

National Convener

Katribu Kalipunan ng Katutubong Mamamayan ng Pilipinas