Pain turned into strife: project helps families of missing loved ones

Did you know that one person goes missing every three minutes in Brazil? In total, there are more than 200,000 missing persons per year. According to the Federal Senate, there is no obligation to wait 24 hours to report a person missing, on the contrary: the sooner the report is made, the sooner the search begins and, consequently, the greater the chances of finding the person, alive or not. However, often the competent authorities do not see a missing person as a case to be investigated urgently.

Ivanise Esperidião da Silva, founder and president of the Associação Mães da Sé (Mothers of the Sé Association), who had her 13-year-old daughter disappear in December 1995, says that the police officers generally know that mothers or relatives who go register the disappearance of a relative are lay people in relation to the law. She says that when she arrived at the police station to report her daughter missing, what she heard was: “she must be with some boyfriend, go home and wait.” And so Ivanise waits until today.

At the time, the disappearance of people was a phenomenon that nobody knew about, nor did the media talk about it. This problem only came to light in 1995 through the soap opera Explode Coração, on Globo. Authored by writer Glória Perez, the plot sought to emphasize the disappearance of people in Brazil and had the participation of Ivanise and other mothers, with the group “Mães da Cinelândia”. After the recordings, Ivanise still returned to São Paulo with a great expectation of finding her daughter, but it did not happen.

The next day, she was approached by two major São Paulo newspapers to tell her experience in the soap opera. “I explained and took advantage of that moment to vent, I told my lonely trajectory in this megalopolis that is São Paulo, looking for my daughter and nobody knew about it. I talked about the absence of public policies, the omission of the State and, in the last paragraph of my interview, I said that if anyone was going through the same thing as me and wanted to call me, they should contact me. The next morning my phone started ringing. They were family members who had their loved ones missing,” says Ivanise.

The creation of the organization

Ivanise organized a meeting with the people who contacted her. The place chosen was the stairways of Praça da Sé, where, in the 1990s, large acts and manifestations took place. It was March 31, 1996 and it was at that meeting that the Movimento de Mães e Familiares de Desaparecidos (Movement of Mothers and Relatives of the Disappeared) was created, later called Mães da Sé (Mothers of the Sé). From that day on, Ivanise turned her pain into a fight. Today the association is a reference in the search for missing persons in Brazil.

The pain of uncertainty

There are more than 11,000 missing persons registers in Brazil, but there is no unified system for registering missing persons, as there is for stolen cars. “At the time of the interview, more than 5,000 people had been located. This result was only possible because someone recognized the face of the missing person in question in a publication – but there are still more than six thousand mothers looking for their children,” says Ivanise.

She ends by saying that having a missing child is worse than death.

“When they are buried, a cycle ends, the pain of mourning and longing comes, but with the passage of time, it is overcome. But when they disappear the wait is eternal, the person lives in the pain of uncertainty. Life becomes a question mark,” she says.

The disappearance of people is an invisible problem in the eyes of society and the authorities, mainly because it is not considered a crime, but an atypical fact. The organization needs society to be its eyes, it depends on this humanized look so that they can succeed in the searches.

Mães da Sé (Mothers of the Sé) needs your help

When a person loses a loved one, there is also a financial loss. Fathers, mothers and relatives have lost their jobs because of frequent absences from work – and many of these people are unable to afford transportation and other expenses.

The encounters promoted by the project take place fortnightly on Sundays, on the stairwells of Praça da Sé, Sé neighborhood, downtown São Paulo. If you own a company, what do you think about partnering with Mães da Sé (Mothers of the Sé) by putting the photo of missing people on your product packaging?

You can follow Mães da Sé (Mothers of the Sé) on Instagram and visit the organization’s website for more information. It is also very important to share and disseminate posts and photos in order to help find missing persons.