Today, August 30th, marks the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, a day dedicated to remembering those who have vanished under repressive regimes.
This day was first observed 15 years ago by the United Nations (UN) in 2011. The UN defines an enforced disappearance occurring when: ”persons are arrested, detained or abducted against their will or otherwise deprived of their liberty by officials of different branches or levels of Government, or by organized groups or private individuals acting on behalf of, or with the support, direct or indirect, consent or acquiescence of the Government, followed by a refusal to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the persons concerned or a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of their liberty, which places such persons outside the protection of the law.”
However, the United Nations today highlighted a related anniversary.
2026 marks the 20th anniversary of the adoption of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances, the only universal treaty specifically dedicated to preventing and eradicating enforced disappearances. Under the slogan “Victims first. Actions now” , the anniversary puts victims and their rights to truth, justice and reparation at the centre, while calling on States and other stakeholders to act to prevent enforced disappearances.
In Cuba, the reality of enforced disappearances is mostly shrouded in silence, as the Cuban dictatorship has skillfully concealed its crimes and instilled fear in families, preventing many from speaking out. Despite this, the voices of those who dare to demand justice cannot be completely silenced.
Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter today highlighted the case of four Cubans who are victims of enforced disappearances.
The blog entry also shared the experience of mathematician and human rights defender Francisco Chaviano, who was imprisoned for 13 years, his “crime”? Attempting to document Cubans who had gone missing. They stand as a testament to the resilience and courage of the Cubans who continue to fight against state-sponsored terror and the erasure of their loved ones.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s maxim “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” has been shown to be true with regards to Cuba. The international community looked the other way as Cuba’s dictatorship murdered, disappeared, tortured and jailed Cubans over nearly seven decades. The Cuban regime successfully exported its model to other Latin American nations, and the patterns of repression are now being repeated there.
Caracas Chronicles reported in 2024 on them in Venezuela. “According to the last official figures to the time of writing, 2,229 people have been detained during the last month. Marino Alvarado, one of the coordinators of human rights NGO Provea, says that about 80% of them have been victims of enforced disappearance of short duration.” They also mention a United Nations report, but unmentioned in the Caracas Chronicle article is that Cuban agents are playing a role in Venezuela’s repression providing training in intelligence, repression, and torture.
Due to the Cuban dictatorship’s long history of violating human rights, including enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings, accountability and transparency are crucial, and a lack of these has allowed these violations to proliferate trans-nationally.
We urge that justice be done and that the victims’ and their families’ stories be heard on this day in solidarity with them.
Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter, August 30, 2026
International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances: Some of the forgotten Cubans
When human rights defenders are silenced, who will stand up for the rights of all? – Amnesty International
Today, August 30th, is International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, and marks 15 years since the observance was established.
Today also marks the 20th anniversary “of the adoption of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances, the only universal treaty specifically dedicated to preventing and eradicating enforced disappearances. Under the slogan “Victims first. Actions now” , the anniversary puts victims and their rights to truth, justice and reparation at the centre, while calling on States and other stakeholders to act to prevent enforced disappearances.”
Havana has not ratified the relevant UN convention, but independent monitors treat the prohibition as customary international law.
Human-rights groups have documented a recurring pattern of short-term enforced disappearances in Cuba, often used to intimidate protesters, activists, journalists, and political prisoners. Cubalex recorded 53 such cases during the first half of 2026, followed by another 15 in July alone. Most people were held for several hours or a few days, while their families were often denied any information about their whereabouts—even after they resurfaced at a police station or prison.
Foto © Yunaykis Linares Rodríguez en Facebook
Named cases from the past year include:
- Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, the artist and San Isidro Movement co-founder. State Security removed him from Guanajay prison on 7 July 2026, shortly before his five-year sentence expired. His whereabouts were concealed for roughly ten days until he was sent into forced exile in the United States on 18 July.
- Maykel Castillo Pérez (“Maykel Osorbo”), also a San Isidro co-founder. He was taken from Kilo 8 prison around 10 July 2026 without notice to his family and remained unaccounted for nearly 48 hours before confirmation that he had been transferred to Guanajay.
- Javier Ernesto Martín Gutiérrez (“Spiderman”), an athlete and activist. He was detained on 24 April 2026 after protesting from his home in Marianao; police initially denied holding him and his location was unknown for hours.
- Yunaykis Linares Rodríguez, a former 11 July 2021 political prisoner. She was arrested on 2 June 2026 during protests in Santa Amalia, Havana; relatives received contradictory or no information about her location and legal status.
- Frank Correa, an independent journalist. Detained on 19 August 2026 while conducting an interview in Jaimanitas, Havana, he was held incommunicado, then abandoned in a remote area of Candelaria, Pinar del Río. His family publicly declared him disappeared until he returned home the next day.
You don’t hear much about Cubans who went missing and never reappeared, the permanently disappeared in Cuba. The Cuban dictatorship has been successful in concealing its tracks and terrorizing most families from speaking out, but not all.
These are a sample of those cases, and the cost paid by one activist for documenting them.
There is the case of Omar Darío Pérez Hernández, a Cuban independent journalist who went missing in Cuba in December 2003. He was just 39 years old at the time of his disappearance. They said that the secret police were threatening him with prison and that he and three others had set out to leave the country on December 7, 2003 but they were never heard from again.
There have been others that stretch back decades.
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Andrew de Graux Villafana was just 19 years old when he went missing on September 18, 1962. Andrew had fought in the Escambray hills against the Castro dictatorship, and was wounded and captured.Andrew had a successful surgery carried out by Dr. Miguel Rodriguez Marcoleta. However when the surgeon went to visit his patient, he could not find him. He went to the morgue to try to see the body, but it was not there. Days later State Security came and asked Dr. Rodriguez Marcoleta to sign the death certificate of Graux Villafana, but he refused. Decades later Andrew’s sister, Mary de Louise de Graux Villafaña, continues to search for her brother and expresses concern for other missing youth who took up arms against the Castro dictatorship.
Less than five years later Adolfo Chamiso Sayas went missing, relatives believe he tried to leave Cuba illegally on March 5, 1967 and was gunned down by government agents.
There are other, and more recent, cases such as opposition activist Enrique Mustelier Turro, who was jailed for his opposition activities.
Enrique Mustelier Turro was the president of the Democratic National Liberation Party. He was released from prison in July 2007, having served a 17-year sentence on charges of piracy and espionage.
He was re-detained. In April 2013, while held in a Havana prison, he began a hunger strike. Afterward he vanished.
The wife of the jailed activist went to prison to visit him, she was told by prison officials that Enrique Mustelier Turro had escaped. No one has seen or heard from him since 2013.
Officials informed the family he had escaped from a high-security cell described as a “calabozo rodeado de agua” (dungeon surrounded by water). His son, Enrique Mustelier Sosa, has publicly rejected that version as unbelievable given the prison’s isolation and his father’s diabetes and weakened condition.
His son is convinced his father died in the prison, and that regime agents refuse to acknowledge the death.
He has received threats from State Security in an effort to silence him, as have others dealing with other missing loved ones.
Lawyers have warned him that if he tries to open an investigation that he could be the next to go missing.
This is not an idle threat.
The cautionary tale of Francisco Chaviano
Francisco Chaviano: Jailed 13 years for documenting the missing.
There is not much documentation on the disappeared in Cuba because human rights defenders that have attempted to investigate these kind of cases have paid a high price. Francisco Chaviano González, a former mathematics teacher, and human rights defender was the president of the National Council for Civil Rights in Cuba (Consejo Nacional por los Derechos Civiles en Cuba – CNDCC), an organization that was trying to investigate the cases of a number of Cubans who had gone missing.
Francisco was warned by state security to stop his human rights work and leave Cuba or he would be arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He refused to leave, continued to investigate cases of missing Cubans and was detained on May 7, 1994, drugged and subjected to a military trial and sentenced to 15 years in prison of which he served 13 years in terrible conditions suffering numerous beatings and the denial of healthcare which led to a wholesale decline in his health. Amnesty International recognized him as a prisoner of conscience. He was released in August of 2007, and went into exile in 2012.
A partial accounting of the forcibly disappeared
Partial estimates reported by the BBC in 2016 placed the number of permanently disappeared in Cuba for political reasons at 123.
The 2025 book “Los desaparecidos del castrismo: Cuba desde 1959” by political scientist and historian Daniel I. Pedreira of Florida International University presents over 600 documented cases. Each case includes names, short biographies and historical context. The work draws from a range of sources: the Cuba Archive, the Instituto de la Memoria Histórica Cubana contra el Totalitarismo, the Asociación de Familiares de Cubanos Desaparecidos (AFACUDE), personal testimonies, and other independent research. The book frames disappearances as a method of repression and social control in Cuba.
Both numbers, 123 and 600, need to be placed in the context of a totalitarian dictatorship that does not tolerate investigations into Cubans that have gone missing for political reasons.
Can We Finally Talk about Maduro’s Desaparecidos?
Latin America’s political memory abounds in thoroughly documented narratives about the right wing dictatorships disappearing people. The Chavista regime joined that club of horror years ago
Desaparecidos. There are books, songs, films, murals; it’s almost a genre in Latin American culture, a thick corpus of stories where a car with no plates spits out a squad of fast and efficient security officers who knock down a door in the middle of the night and rips out a family by taking a human being with them, and throws them to a dark limbo that might include isolation, torture, rape and death, where there’s no official record, no accountability, and in many cases no end: not even a body to bury and mourn.
The legal term is enforced disappearance: a complex, encompassing form of human rights violation that deprives citizens of their freedom to keep them incommunicado, sometimes forever. It involves physical brutality, weaponizes bureaucracy and imposes silence on a space where there was a voice claiming for justice.
Amnesty International defines its victims as persons who are removed from contact with their loved ones and their community when State agents—or those acting under consent of the State—detain them and then deny the apprehension, and/or refuse to say where they are. “In any case, enforced disappearance is always a crime under international law,” notes Amnesty.
Now, what has been happening in Venezuela since July 28 could be recorded as the first time in recent history that we have enforced disappearance in the Americas in massive numbers.
Not all dictators have cases of forced disappearances on their record, but each regime that does it, is not a democracy.
The United Nations designated August 30 as the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. The date was established in 2010 to honor victims and promote memory, truth, justice, and reparations, as well as measures of non-repetition, especially in Latin America, where enforced disappearances were common practice during military dictatorships, especially— but not exclusively —in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in the 1970s.
Now, what has been happening in Venezuela since July 28 could be recorded as the first time in recent history that we have enforced disappearance in the Americas in massive numbers.
According to the last official figures to the time of writing, 2,229 people have been detained during the last month. Marino Alvarado, one of the coordinators of human rights NGO Provea, says that about 80% of them have been victims of enforced disappearance of short duration. “Massively, as it has occurred in Venezuela, I would say that it has no precedents since Pinochet’s coup in Chile (almost 51 years ago). There are worrying situations of recent forced disappearances in Cuba and Nicaragua, but not involving thousands of people, as happened in Venezuela,” says this longtime human rights activist, who worked to denounce abuses committed in the country after the wave of looting and repression of 1989 and the Chavez coup attempt of 1992.
The patterns and the investigations
The most significant precedent of mass enforced disappearances in modern Venezuela took place in 1989 after the Caracazo, extensively documented by the Committee for the Families of Victims of February-March 1989 (Cofavic). These cases were among the first recognized in Venezuela and drew attention from institutions like the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
In December 1999, when Chavez was already president, another four notable forced disappearances occurred in the wake of the Vargas disaster, such as Oscar José Blanco Romero’s. In 2007, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the Venezuelan State responsible for his disappearance and ordered the government to take measures to address the violations, including reparations to the victims’ families.
The Maduro regime’s response to demonstrations in 2014 and 2017, and the ongoing political persecution of civilians and military officers, both in opposition organizations or formerly chavista groups, produced more cases. In a report released in 2020, the Venezuelan NGO Foro Penal and Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, a nonprofit organization based in the United States, documented 200 cases of enforced disappearances in 2018 and 524 in 2019. “Our report details the unmistakable pattern of state-sponsored terror by the Bolivarian regime, the high cost of impunity, and the urgent need to stop these massive crimes now,” said Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights.
Enforced disappearances have been documented also in the gold mines in Bolívar state, perpetrated by state and non-state actors.
In September 2019, the United Nations Human Rights Council established the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. The mandate has been extended until September 2024. This Mission has presented four reports, documenting cases that the experts have reason to believe are crimes against humanity, including torture and Sippenhaft: a German term that defines a Nazi practice of punishing several members of a family to force certain persons of interests to submit themselves to the government. The investigation of the International Criminal Court also includes enforced disappearance “committed by State authorities on the territory of Venezuela”.
Enforced disappearances have been documented also in the gold mines in Bolívar state, perpetrated by state and non-state actors.
“Authorities not only failed to prevent and investigate such abuses, but the Mission has received information indicating collusion between state and NSA actors in parts of Bolívar state,” said the UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission in 2022. At least 150 stories were documented by the Fosas del Silencio project, including the murder of Indigenous leaders and sex workers, human trafficking, child slavery, and clandestine mass graves reported by NGOs in a region marked by massacres and the violent blattle for the control of gold. You can read some of these stories here.
Alcedo Mora was a social and political activist known for involvement in various leftist movements. Before his disappearance in 2015, he had been actively denouncing corruption and fuel smuggling involving officials from the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), and members of the Mérida state government. According to Provea, Bolivarian Intelligence Service (Sebin) officials are allegedly responsible.
The particular pattern in Venezuela, after the presidential election, is enforced disappearance of short duration: the victims remain incommunicado for several days until their relatives or lawyers find out where they are being imprisoned.
Another example is Hugo Marino’s disappearance in April 2019. Marino, an Italian Venezuelan diver and underwater diving expert, provided services to various official entities in Venezuela, including work related to investigating aircraft accidents. His family and human rights organizations have accused the Venezuelan government, particularly Sebin. Neither Mora’s or Marino’s whereabouts or remains have been located.
Most recently, UN experts reported on April 30 reported an “alarming increase” of this crime in Venezuela. From January 2023 to March 2024, the United Nations documented at least 18 enforced disappearances. Most of the individuals affected were charged with conspiracy, terrorism, treason, and money laundering.
In the last ten years, short-term enforced disappearances have been the trend, but with increasing violence.
The particular pattern in Venezuela, after the presidential election, is enforced disappearance of short duration: the victims remain incommunicado for several days until their relatives or lawyers find out where they are being imprisoned.
This practice has been increasingly reported in various contexts, during demonstrations and security operations around the world. However, “it does not matter how long the disappearance lasts: if the authorities do not inform where the detained person is, it is an enforced disappearance,” insists Alvarado. For the Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, “there is no time limit, no matter how short, for an enforced disappearance to occur. Every minute counts when a person is placed outside the protection of the law. And when a person has disappeared, every minute of anguish spent by his or her relatives without news is too much,” as they stated in 2016.
This is the situation of Americo De Grazia, an opposition leader from southern Venezuela, detained on August 7th. His family still does not know his location. Several other political opposition figures have been subjected to this human rights violation.
Marino Alvarado points out that, in the case of the 2,229 detentions announced by Nicolás Maduro, “practically 80% suffered forced disappearance because it took up to 10 days for the relatives to learn where their loved ones were. This has become a policy where every politically motivated detention involves enforced disappearance. No one is spared.”