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extraordinary rendition
Trump's Lawlessness Comes From Seeds Planted by Bush-Cheney
The federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump.
Apr 21, 2025
In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their “black sites.” For those too young to remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), “black sites” was the name given to clandestine CIA detention centers around the world, where that agency held incommunicado and tortured men captured in what was then known as the Global War on Terror. The black site in this case was the notorious Salt Pit in Afghanistan. There el-Masri was, among other things, beaten, anally raped, and threatened with a gun held to his head. After four months he was dumped on a rural road in Albania.
It seems that the CIA had finally realized that they had arrested the wrong man. They wanted some other Khalid el-Masri, thought to be an al-Qaeda associate, and not, as Amy Davidson wrote in the New Yorker, that “car salesman from Bavaria.”
El-Masri was not the only person that representatives of the administration of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney mistakenly sent off to another country to be tortured. In an infamous case of mistaken arrest, a Canadian citizen named Maher Arar was detained by the FBI at JFK Airport in New York while on his way home from a vacation in Tunisia. He was then held in solitary confinement for two weeks in the United States, while being denied contact with a lawyer before ultimately being shipped off to Syria. There, he would be tortured for almost a year until the Canadian government finally secured his release.
An “Administrative Error”
I was reminded of such instances of “extraordinary rendition” in the Bush-Cheney era when I read about the Trump administration’s March 2025 deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego García to a grim prison in El Salvador. Because of threats against him and his family from Barrio 18, a vicious Salvadoran gang, Abrego García had fled that country as a young teenager. He entered the U.S. without papers in 2011 to join his older brother, already a U.S. citizen.
He was arrested in 2019, while seeking work as a day laborer outside a Home Depot store and handed over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which accused him of being a member of another Salvadoran gang, MS-13. This proved a false claim, as the immigration judge who heard his case agreed. While not granting Abrego García asylum, the judge assigned him a status — “withholding from removal” — which kept him safe in this country, because he faced the possibility of torture or other violence in his homeland. That status allowed him to work legally here. He married a U.S. citizen and they have three children who are also U.S. citizens.
Then, on March 12, 2025, on his way home from his job as a sheet-metal apprentice, he was suddenly stopped by ICE agents and arrested. They told him his status had been revoked (which wasn’t true) and promptly shipped him to various detention centers around the country. Ultimately, he was deported to El Salvador without benefit of legal assistance or a hearing before an immigration judge. As far as is known, he is now incarcerated at CECOT, the Center for the Confinement of Terrorists, a Salvadoran prison notorious for the ill treatment and torture of its inmates. While built for 40,000 prisoners, it now houses many more in perpetually illuminated cells, each crammed with more than 100 prisoners (leaving about 6.5 square feet of space for each man. It is considered “one of the most dangerous prisons in the Western Hemisphere” with “some of the most inhumane and squalid conditions known in any carceral system.” Furthermore, among the gangs reported to have a substantial presence at CECOT is Barrio 18, the very crew Abrego García fled El Salvador to escape so many years ago.
The Trump Justice Department has now admitted that they made an “administrative error” in deporting him but have so far refused to bring him home. Responding to a Supreme Court ruling demanding that the government facilitate his return, the Justice Department on April 12th finally acknowledged to the D.C. district court that he “is currently being held in the Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador.” Its statement continued: “He is alive and secure in that facility. He is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador.” On April 14, 2025, in contemptuous defiance of the supreme court, President Trump and his Salvadoran counterpart Nayib Bukele made it clear to reporters that Abrego García will not be returning to the United States.
Previously, the government’s spokesman, Michael G. Kozak, who identified himself in the filing as a “Senior Bureau Official” in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, had failed to comply with the rest of Judge Paula Xinis’s order: to identify what steps the administration is (or isn’t) taking to get him released. The judge has insisted that the department provide daily updates on its efforts to get him home, which it has failed to do. Its statement that Abrego García “is detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador” suggests officials intend to argue that — despite paying the Salvadoran government a reported six million dollars for its prison services — the United States has no influence over Salvadoran actions. We can only hope that he really is still alive. The Trump administration’s truth-telling record is not exactly encouraging.
Extraordinary Rendition
The technical term for such detainee transfers is “extraordinary rendition.” “Rendition” involves sending a prisoner to another country to be interrogated, imprisoned, and even possibly tortured. Rendition becomes “extraordinary” when it occurs outside of normal legal strictures, as with the cases of el-Masri and Ahar decades ago,, and Abrego García today. Extraordinary rendition violates the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which explicitly prohibits sending someone to another country to be mistreated or tortured. It also violates U.S. anti-torture laws. As countless illegal Trump administration acts demonstrate, however, illegality is no longer a barrier of any sort to whatever its officials want to do.
Two other flights left for El Salvador on the day Abrego García was rendered. They contained almost 200 people accused of being members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, and were similarly deported under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 without any hearings. Are they actually gang members? No one knows, although it seems likely that at least some of them aren’t. Jerce Reyes Barrios, for example, was a Venezuelan soccer coach who sought asylum in the U.S. and whose tattoo, celebrating the famous Spanish soccer team Royal Madrid, was claimed to be evidence enough of his gang membership and the excuse for his deportation.
Andry José Hernández Romero is another unlikely gang member. He’s a gay makeup artist who entered the United States last August to keep a pre-arranged asylum appointment. Instead, he was arrested and held in detention until the Tren de Aragua flights in March. The proof of his gang membership? His “Tres Reyes” or “Three Kings” tattoos that were common in his hometown in Venezuela.
In fact, all 200 or so deportees on those flights have been illegally rendered to El Salvador in blatant defiance of a judge’s court order to stop them or return those already in the air. None of those men received any sort of due process before being shipped off to a Salvadoran hellhole. In response, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele tweeted, “Oopsie… Too late” with a laughing-face emoji.
Even U.S. citizens are at risk of incarceration at CECOT. After Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with President Bukele, the State Department’s website praised his “extraordinary gesture never before extended by any country,” an offer “to house in his jails dangerous American criminals, including U.S. citizens and legal residents.” Trumpreiterated his interest in shipping “homegrown criminals” to El Salvador during his press conference with Bukele. As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance has observed, “If it can happen to Abrego Garcia, it can happen to any of us.”
It Didn’t Start with Trump
It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001. In their wake, the hastily-passed Patriot Act granted the federal government vast new detention and surveillance powers. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established a new cabinet-level department, one whose existence we now take for granted.
As I wrote more than a decade ago, after September 11th, torture went “mainstream” in the United States. The Bush administration cultivated an understandable American fear of terrorism to justify abrogating what, until then, had been a settled consensus in this country: that torture is both wrong and illegal. In the face of a new enemy, al-Qaeda, the administration argued that the requirements for decent treatment of wartime detainees outlined in the Geneva Conventions had been rendered “quaint.” Apparently, wartime rights granted even to Nazi prisoners of war during World War II were too risky to extend to that new foe.
In those days of “enhanced interrogation,” I was already arguing that accepting such lawless behavior could well become an American habit. We might gradually learn, I suggested, to put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side,” and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us to torture people.
The very fact that they were willing to torture prisoners was proof that those people must deserve it — even though, as we now know, many of them had nothing whatsoever to do with al-Qaeda or the September 11th attacks. (And even if they had been involved, no one, not even a terrorist, deserves to be tortured.)
If you’re too young to remember (or have been lucky enough to forget), you can click here, or here, or here for the grisly details of what the war on terror did to its victims.
The constant thrill of what some have called security theater has kept us primed for new enemies and so set the stage for the second set of Trump years that we now find ourselves in. We still encounter this theater of the absurd every time we stand in line at an airport, unpacking our computers, removing our shoes, sorting our liquids into quart-sized baggies — all to reinforce the idea that we are in terrible danger and that the government will indeed protect us.
Sadly, all too many of us became inured to the idea that prisoners could be sent to that infamous offshore prison of injustice at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, perhaps never to be released. (Indeed, as of January 2025, of the hundreds of people incarcerated there over the years, 15 war on terror prisoners still remain.) It should perhaps be no surprise, then, that the second time around, Donald Trump seized on Guantánamo as a possible place to house the immigrants he sought to deport from this country. After all, so many of us were already used to thinking of anybody sent there as the worst of the worst, as something other than human.
Dehumanizing the targets of institutionalized mistreatment and torture proved to be both the pretext for and a product of the process. Every torture regime develops a dehumanizing language for those it identifies as legitimate targets. For example, the torturers employed by the followers of Augusto Pinochet, who led Chile’s 1973 military coup, typically called their targets “humanoids” (to distinguish them from actual human beings).
For the same reason, the Israel Defense Forces now refer to just about anyone they kill in Gaza or on the West Bank as a “terrorist.” And the successful conflation of “Palestinian” with “terrorist” was all it took for some Americans to embrace Donald Trump’s suggestion that Gaza should be cleared of its people and turned into the “Riviera of the Middle East” for Israelis, Americans, and foreign tourists.
Trump’s representatives have used the same kind of language to describe people they are sending to that prison in El Salvador. His press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, referred to them as “heinous monsters,” which is in keeping with Trump’s own description of his political opponents as inhuman “vermin.” At a rally in New Hampshire in 2023, Trump told the crowd, “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” Here he was talking not only about immigrants, but about U.S. citizens as well.
After years of security theater, all too many Americans seem ready to accept Trump’s pledge to root out the vermin.
It Can Happen to You
One difference between the Bush-Cheney years and the Trump ones is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a genuine and horrific emergency. Trump’s version of such an emergency, on the other hand, is entirely Trumped-up. He posits nothing short of an immigration “invasion” — in effect, a permanent 9/11 — that “has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years.” Or so his executive order “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” insists. To justify illegally deporting alleged members of Tren de Aragua and, in the future (if he has his way), many others, he has invented a totally imaginary war so that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used during World War II to justify the otherwise unjustifiable internment of another group of dehumanized people in this country: Japanese-Americans.
Donald Trump has his very own “black site” now. Remember that El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is perfectly willing to receive U.S. citizens, too, as prisoners in his country. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Jackson, made that point in a statement that accompanied that court’s recent order requiring the Trump administration to facilitate Kilmar Abrego García’s return to the United States. They wrote, “The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.”
As the justices remind us, it can happen here. It can happen to you.
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Tortured Guantánamo Prisoner Ramzi bin al-Shibh Unfit for 9/11 Trial, Says Military Judge
"This decision by the military judge today does mark the first time that the United States has formally acknowledged the CIA torture program produced profound and prolonged psychological harm," said al-Shibh's lawyer.
Sep 22, 2023
A U.S. military judge on Thursday found Guantánamo Bay prisoner Ramzi bin al-Shibh—who stands accused of being a key 9/11 organizer—unfit to stand trial because he suffers from mental illness his attorney says was caused by CIA torture years ago.
Air Force Col. Matthew McCall severed al-Shibh, a 51-year-old Yemeni, from the conspiracy case involving four other defendants who allegedly organized the cell of militants in Hamburg, Germany who hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and flew it into the north tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. Al-Shibh had been charged as an accomplice in the case.
"This decision by the military judge today does mark the first time that the United States has formally acknowledged that the CIA torture program produced profound and prolonged psychological harm," David Bruck, al-Shibh's lead defense attorney, told reporters at Guantánamo Bay on Thursday evening. "This is exactly what the CIA promised would not happen."
McCall's ruling—which does not directly attribute torture as the cause of al-Shibh's afflictions—came after a three-member military "sanity board" diagnosed the defendant with post-traumatic stress disorder with secondary psychotic features and persecutory delusional disorder. This, the board said, renders him "unable to understand the nature of the proceedings against him or cooperate intelligently in his defense."
According toLawdragon editor-in-chief John Ryan:
Al-Shibh has long claimed that the detention facility guard force has subjected him to noises and vibrations, continuing his torture from CIA black sites... In recent years, his lawyers have also claimed that al-Shibh feels stabbing and other painful sensations that he experiences as directed invisibly at parts of his body. The government has denied the allegations.
"The totality of the facts demonstrates an accused who is wholly focused on his delusions," McCall wrote in his ruling, according to The New York Times. "Again and again, he focuses his counsel's work on stopping his delusional harassment, (which) demonstrates the impairment of his ability to assist in his defense."
Military prosecutor Clayton Trivett Jr. acknowledged that al-Shibh is delusional but insisted "he has the capacity to participate" in his defense, and that his refusal to do so is "really just a choice."
Citing al-Shibh's cooperation with his defense team, Trivett added that "this does not look like someone who is incompetent."
While McCall ordered pretrial proceedings to continue Friday for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—the alleged mastermind of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on 9/11—as well as three co-defendants, what comes next for al-Shibh is unknown.
All five of the 9/11 defendants—Mohammed, his nephew Ammar al-Baluchi, Walid bin Attash, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, and al-Shibh—were captured in Pakistan in late 2002 and early 2003 before being turned over to the United States. Hassan bin Attash, who was captured with bin al-Shibh in Karachi, has testified that they were both sent via extraordinary rendition to the notorius "Salt Pit" outside Kabul, Afghanistan, where suspected militant Gul Rahman was tortured to death in November 2002.
Like Rahman, al-Shibh says he was shackled naked to a ceiling in a painful "stress position" for days on end. He was then reportedly sent to Jordan, where one witness told Human Rights Watch he was subjected to "electric shocks, long periods of sleep deprivation, forced nakedness, and being made to sit on sticks and bottles."
Al-Shibh told the International Committee of the Red Cross that he was kept naked and shackled to the ceiling for a week at a black site in Poland, where he was also deprived of solid food for three to four weeks.
According to the CIA's own documents:
The interrogation plan proposed that... al-Shibh would be subjected to "sensory dislocation." The proposed sensory dislocation included shaving al-Shibh's head and face, exposing him to loud noise in a white room with white lights, keeping him "unclothed and subjected to uncomfortably cool temperatures," and shackling him "hand and foot with arms outstretched over his head (with his feet firmly on the floor and not allowed to support his weight with his arms)".
The CIA torture plan also included near-constant interrogations, slamming into walls, hard slaps to the face and abdomen, stress positions, sleep deprivation beyond 72 hours, and the interrupted drowning torture known as waterboarding.
Al-Shibh was also held at a black site in Morocco for three-and-a-half months, where Moroccan agents allegedly tortured him under CIA supervision. Moroccan interrogators videotaped some of the interrogations and handed the footage over to the CIA.
This isn't the first time that torture played a role in derailing the prosecution of an alleged 9/11 plotter. In 2009, Susan J. Crawford, the top George W. Bush administration official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantánamo prisoners to trial, declared that the U.S. "tortured" Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged would-be 20th 9/11 hijacker, and declined to green light his prosecution.
Col. Stuart Crouch, a Guantánamo prosecutor whose Marine Corps buddy was a pilot on one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, refused to prosecute Mohamedou Ould Slahi—who allegedly helped organize the plane's hijacking—because he was tortured.
Additionally, numerous Guantánamo officials have resigned over what they claim is a corrupt military commission system. Former lead prosecutor Col. Morris Davis—who called trials there "rigged from the start"—stepped down in 2007, claiming he was told by top Bush lawyer Jim Haynes that acquittals were unacceptable.
"I now understand that the commissions were doomed from the start. We used new rules of evidence and allowed evidence regardless of how it was obtained."
At least four other military prosecutors—Maj. Robert Preston, Capt. John Carr, Capt. Carrie Wolf and Darrel J. Vandeval—requested to be removed from the military commissions because they also felt that the proceedings were unfair.
In 2021, seven out of eight members of the military jury convened to hear the case against Guantánamo detainee and alleged terrorist plotter Majid Khan recommended total clemency after the defendant testified how he endured torture including rape, being hung from a ceiling beam, and being waterboarded while he was held at a CIA black site in Afghanistan.
Earlier this year, Ted Olson—the former Bush administration solicitor-general who then argued against basic legal rights for Guantánamo Bay prisoners and defended their indefinite detention and torture—made a stunning admission, saying the military commissions don't work and should be shut down, and the government should strike plea deals with 9/11 defendants held at the prison.
"In retrospect, we made two mistakes in dealing with the detained individuals at Guantánamo," Olson wrote. "First, we created a new legal system out of whole cloth. I now understand that the commissions were doomed from the start. We used new rules of evidence and allowed evidence regardless of how it was obtained."
Defense and prosecution attorneys had been negotiating a possible plea deal that would have spared the defendants the prospect of execution. However, earlier this month the White House said that President Joe Biden would not approve or deny such a request because he "was unsettled about accepting terms for the plea from those responsible for the deadliest assault on the United States since Pearl Harbor," according to The Associated Press.
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Unveiling Shadows: Guantánamo Prisoners and the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances
This August 30, the United States should reflect on its own violence, so there can finally be some semblance of accountability—including acknowledging wrongdoing, repairing the harm to the victims, and putting mechanisms in place that prevent this violence from recurring.
Aug 30, 2023
Despite the fact that the United States has routinely and openly violated the human rights of its own citizens as well as communities across the globe, the government rarely has any qualms about condemning the violations of other countries. These condemnations, almost always hypocritical, however, often do more to shine light on its own abuses and the lack of accountability.
Like clockwork each year, the United States issues statements commemorating various human rights days highlighting particular abuses. Last year, for example, Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement through the State Department on the occasion of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. The statement reads in part that “the United States renews its commitment to addressing enforced disappearance and calls on governments around the world to put an end to this practice, hold those responsible to account, reveal the whereabouts or fate of loved ones who have been disappeared, and respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons.”
This year, the U.S. government will almost certainly release yet another statement to commemorate the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on August 30, once again erasing its own crimes. Although disappearances have less typically been associated with the United States, the U.S. has long deployed this abuse in the War on Terror—often disguising the practice through euphemisms and denials. After two decades plus of the War on Terror, however, it is imperative to shed light on the unresolved issue of Guantánamo prisoners’ disappearances and the CIA’s disturbing rendition, detention, and interrogation program that operated in the earlier days of the war.
Obscured Realities: Rendition and Disappearances
In the early days of the War on Terror, the CIA was given the licence to render and detain people in countries across the globe who were willing to host black sites. The program operated from 2002-2009, with at least 119 individuals enduring the violence of the CIA. Some never returned home; others were sent to Guantánamo Bay. Although the U.S. government has continued to use the term “render” as in render to justice, in practice, many of those subjected to this violence have effectively disappeared—leaving their families in an abyss of uncertainty, all while the U.S. government refuses to reckon with this legacy.
On the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the United States should reflect on its own violence, so there can finally be some semblance of accountability—including acknowledging wrongdoing, repairing the harm to the victims, and putting mechanisms in place that prevent this violence from recurring.
Enforced disappearances are a particularly brutal form of state violence. Not only do the victims fear never being found, the families of the victims live in perpetual uncertainty with constant denials of information from the government about their loved ones’ fates. The pain of not knowing whether a family member is alive or deceased, free or imprisoned, makes closure impossible.
Disappearing War on Terror Prisoners
The post-9/11 and the War on Terror waged by the United States transformed many parts of the world into war zones, cemeteries, and prisons. Lives were forever lost or shrouded in obscurity, while entire families were erased. Gul Rahman, an Afghan citizen, is just one name among the countless individuals whose fate became tragically entwined with the secret operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, vanishing into CIA black sites, never to emerge alive. Among the torture Rahman endured was being handcuffed to the ground, put in a diaper, and placed in a cell with freezing temperatures—which lead to his untimely death by hypothermia. Rahman’s family was never formally informed of his death, and, despite their fighting to have his body returned for a proper burial, the United States has denied their request.
Detention by the CIA was not the only way War on Terror prisoners have been effectively disappeared. When the first Muslim men were taken to Guantánamo in January 2002, only the nationalities of prisoners were disclosed. Not only because the U.S. didn’t actually know the identities of many of the men, but because they were so dehumanized, that the U.S. government didn’t prioritize sharing the names with the International Committee of the Red Cross or any other agency or institution—especially any that would hold them accountable. It wasn’t until 2004 that the names of the men detained were finally revealed—although many with incomplete names documented, leaving their families in prolonged darkness about their whereabouts. Names were only disclosed by monitoring websites like Alasra and the Britain-based CagePrisoners.
Guantánamo became synonymous with secrecy, human rights abuses, and the plight of countless detainees. Many were held there for years, unaccounted for, like ghosts in the system. Families were left in a perpetual state of uncertainty, not knowing whether their loved ones were dead or alive. In addition, nine prisoners died while at Guantánamo—a harrowing and violent conclusion to their detention—especially since the deaths occurred years after many of the men last saw their families.
As a Guantánamo survivor myself, I spent around six agonizing years at Guantánamo before my family knew anything about my whereabouts. Another family came to know about their son in 2016; a lawyer contacted the family and let them know.
Continuing Injustice: Recent Cases
The injustices extended beyond the walls of Guantánamo. In many cases, after being transferred, detainees vanished for months, disappearing into solitary confinement in their home countries in Saudi Arabia or in third-party nations like the United Arab Emirates. Constituting a violent ebb and flow of being lost and found, War on Terror prisoners have been forced to endure the possibility of being disappeared again and again.
Ghassan al-Sharbi’s case represents a more recent chapter in this ongoing tragedy. Forcibly repatriated to Saudi Arabia, he vanished into obscurity. Despite attempts to locate him, his whereabouts remain unknown. The lack of response from both the Saudi government and the State Department exemplifies the prevailing indifference to the plight of former detainees.
Another former prisoner, Asim al-khalaqi, was released to Kazakhstan in 2015, but died tragically four months later due to mistreatment and medical negligence. The Kazakh government failed to inform Asim’s family of his death, denying them the chance to retrieve his body or hold a proper burial—thus constituting a symbolic disappearance. He was buried in an unknown cemetery and an unknown grave.
In solidarity with victims and their families, we must reaffirm our collective determination to create a world where no one vanishes, justice prevails, and human dignity is inviolable.
The stories of Gul Rahman, Asim al-khalaqi, Ghassan al-Sharbi, and countless others stand as painful reminders of the enduring impact of CIA rendition, Guantánamo Bay, and the “War on Terror.” While the black sites and detention camps have garnered international criticism, their legacy continues to cast a long shadow over the lives of those affected. Families have been denied closure, and the cycle of suffering perpetuates even after release. The world must remember these names, demand accountability, and work toward a future where such gross violations of human rights are truly left in the past. Until then, the War on Terror will endure as a haunting testament to the cost of sacrificing justice for security.
On this international day, let us demand an end to enforced disappearances and the practices that perpetuate them. Let us hold nations accountable for their actions and demand transparency. In solidarity with victims and their families, we must reaffirm our collective determination to create a world where no one vanishes, justice prevails, and human dignity is inviolable. By doing so, we honor the disappeared, restore justice, and ensure that no one is condemned to obscurity or denied their humanity.
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