By Elaine Patricia Cruz*
From 2019 to 2021, more than 200,000 people disappeared in Brazil, giving an average of 183 daily disappearances.
The data are from the study Map of the Missing in Brazil, released today (22) by the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety.
The numbers, however, maybe even higher.
This is because Brazil does not have a national registry for these cases.
“This is a very high number, and when we check, for example, the reunion rates of people produced by the police, they are much lower.”
“That is, we can’t even measure the number of people who are effectively missing in Brazil,” said Samira Bueno, executive director of the Brazilian Forum of Public Safety, in an interview with Agência Brasil and TV Brasil.
During this period, 112,246 people were located. The number seems high.
However, according to Samira, it is important to highlight that the people in this period did not necessarily disappear between 2019 and 2021.
“In the last year, we had 34,000 people located, a 16.6% rate. But, you see, almost twice as many [people] go missing every year.”
“And we have one more problem in this statistic: when we look at the number of people located, we need to be clear that this person did not necessarily disappear that year.”
“So, we can’t calculate the total number of people who went missing that year and the total number of people who were located because those people who were located may have been missing for more than ten years,” she said.
PROFILE OF THE MISSING
Of the missing persons in 2019 and 2021, almost 30% were children and adolescents between 12 and 17.
“This population group goes missing the most in Brazil.”
“This can be linked to a multiplicity of phenomena because it encompasses everything from that teenager who is a victim of some kind of crime and ends up kidnapped, a victim of slave labor or sexual exploitation to those cases of voluntary disappearances in which the teenager leaves home due to mistreatment or family disagreements.”
The study also revealed that most missing persons are male (62.8%) and black (54.3%l).
“When we look at the profile of the missing and see that they are mostly young, black and brown, male, many of whom are in a vulnerable situation, it is another factor that leads us to have to prioritize these cases because this can include criminal components such as homicides, kidnappings, and attempted homicides.”
“Many times, we will only find these people later in clandestine graves or cemeteries, ” said the director of the Forum.
Another interesting fact is that during the Covid-19 pandemic, the number of missing persons dropped by 22.3 percent in 2021 compared to 2019.
“In the pandemic, all states showed a reduction in missing persons.”
“But it had an age group that showed growth [in this period], which was the age group between 40 and 49 years, especially men,” Samira pointed out.
According to her, this may be related to the homeless population.
“One of the hypotheses we bring to the growth of the 40 to 49-year-old population is that unemployment increased, income fell, and many people became homeless.”
“We had a significant growth in the population living on the streets in Brazil during this period, and it is common that people who lose their jobs and income, become ashamed and, finally, having no one to ask for help, end up living on the streets,” she said.
NATIONAL POLICY
According to the Map of the Missing, the study showed that two serious problems make locating people in Brazil even more difficult.
The first is the lack of a unified database that integrates the states and the information about missing people in the country.
“We can see from the available statistics that every year, the number of missing people is much higher than the number of people located.”
“And since we don’t have a national database consolidating this information, we can’t measure how many people are missing in Brazil today.”
For Samira, another difficulty is that disappearance in Brazil is not a crime.
“A missing person is every person whose whereabouts are unknown, whether this disappearance was voluntary.”
“What happens is that this typification is very broad and is not a penal type; that is, the disappearance is not a crime.”
“As the disappearance is not a crime, there won’t necessarily be a police report that will lead to an investigation or an inquiry.”
“So this will depend a lot on the priority given by that police station.”
Without public policies and a national registry, and hoping that a police station will investigate a certain case, the result is that many parents end up in a long search for their missing children.
This is the case of Ivanise Esperidião da Silva, who founded the Mães da Sé movement after her 13-year-old daughter disappeared a few meters from her home in 1995.
In an interview with TV Brasil, Ivanise said she is still waiting for her daughter’s location.
“I’m dealing with pain and a lonely search. I speak to you with the experience of a mother who has been searching for an answer to what happened to her daughter for 27 years and has had no answer until today.”
” I have met more than 12,000 mothers in the movement, and all have the same feeling of neglect, abandonment, and invisibility.”
“The disappearance – in my opinion as a mother and cause activist – should be treated as a public security problem.”
“But it is not. Our children are just part of a statistic: they are just a number,” she lamented.
NATIONAL LAW
The federal government sanctioned the National Missing Persons Search Policy Act in 2019.
This law provided for the creation of a national registry that is not yet in operation.
“In 2019, we had the sanction of a law that creates the National Policy for Searching and Locating Missing Persons and determines the creation of a missing person registry.”
“However, we did not have budgetary highlights for this policy.”
“Although the policy was sanctioned in 2019, it had no budgetary resources between 2019 and 2022.”
In practice, if you have no financial resources to implement the policy, nothing happens,” said Samira.
For Ivanise, if the registry had been in operation, it would have helped many families. “But we don’t even have that,” she criticized. She also defended the typification of disappearance.
“Because disappearance, legally speaking, is not considered a crime, the problem is treated with disregard and invisibility.”
“People don’t see the crimes that happen behind a disappearance.”
“And so we live at the mercy of our luck because we don’t have, until today, public policies focused on the cause of the disappearance.”
“My daughter was a 13-year-old teenager. So the State owes me this answer.”
“The Constitution is very clear when it says that children and adolescents are the responsibility of the State, society, and family.”
“But when something like this happens, it is as if the family is the only one responsible.”
“The State, on the other hand, is absent, negligent, and omitted.”
“And society prefers to look at us with a pitying look.”
“We don’t want this. We want empathy with our cause”, added Ivanise.
When contacted by Agência Brasil, the Ministry of Justice and Public Safety did not comment on the study, nor did it comment on creating a unified registry until the publication of this text.
*Edited by Denise Griesinger
With information from Agência Brasil
News Brazil, English news Brazil, Brazilian society
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