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MARY AILEEN D. BACALSO

Mary Aileen Diez-Bacalso is presently the Secretary-General of the Asian Federation Against

Involuntary Disappearances (AFAD). As the former Chairperson of the Families of Victims ofInvoluntary Disappearance (FIND)-Philippines, she initiated inviting representatives of

organizations of families from Asia, Latin America and Africa in 1997 that eventually resulted in

the conceptualization and birth of what is now the AFAD.

She started her human rights advocacy at 16, when she was then a freshman student of St.

Theresa's College, Cebu City where she graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Arts Major in

Mass Communication. She was an associate editor of STC official publications, the Star and theCatalyst.

It was during her college years where she was exposed to the life of the poor, deprived, the

oppressed in the slums of Cebu City, the Philippines' second urban center. Her strong Catholicfoundation, coupled with her exposure to the squatters areas and to the farmers in the hinterlandsof Babag, Malubog, Sibugay and Sirao where she did her thesis on a Golf Course Complex then

being constructed (resulting in land grabbing and eviction of poor farmers) had challenged her to

opt for the road less trodden the option for the poor.

Then a fresh college graduate, she worked as Publications Officer of the then Visayas Secretariatof Social Action (VISSA-NASSA), social action arm of the Catholic Bishops Conference of the

Philippines from June 1983 - February 1986. During which, she immersed herself with the poor

people of the different dioceses of the Visayas, one of the country's major islands. It haddeepened her commitment and dedication to the cause of the downtrodden.

A couple of years later, many church people in the Philippines were persecuted during the peak

of harsh repression especially during the last years of the tyrannical and rapacious Marcos

regime. The call of the times urged her join the core of the organizing committee of thePromotion of Church People's Rights - Visayas. Hence, after the historic 1986 People Power and

EDSA revolution, she moved to another job as Executive Secretary of the then newly-established

organization that aimed to respond to the heightening persecution of Church people in the

country. During which, she organized chapters in thirteen major provinces of the region wherechurch people were organized to defend their rights to serve the little ones of God's flock.

She was forced to leave the Cebu City in November 1988. Then newly married to her husband,

Edsil V. Bacalso whom she met when they were both student activists and members of theStudent Catholic Action of the Philippines (SCAP), she had to face security risks when her

husband involuntarily disappeared. On November 17, 1988, exactly two months after marriage,

her husband was nabbed by seven armed men in Colon St., the heart of Cebu City in broad day

light and forced to take a red car without a plate number. Accompanied by her parents andbrothers in-law, she searched daily for her husband in all military camps only to be always

denied the information of the victim's whereabouts. The military published news reports stating

that her husband, accordingly an alleged rebel, was in the order of battle and must have been

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