Enforced Disappearance
Description
In this podcast with Aurora Perez Flores and Busra Sarac, we talk about the serious issue of enforced disappearance—when people are secretly taken, often by authorities, and never seen again. They share their personal experiences working with families who are left with no answers, living in pain and uncertainty. Enforced disappearances are commonly seen in places with conflict or oppressive governments. Aurora and Busra also highlight through their regional expertise of Latin America and Middle East how hard it is to work in this field with the lack of consistent information and the lack of coordination.
Guests
Aurora Marcela Pérez Flórez is a Colombian-Mexican forensic anthropologist with over ten years of experience working in Mexico. She is currently a newly appointed professor and researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), specifically at the National School of Forensic Sciences, where she works in the Forensic Anthropology and Odontology Laboratory. Trained as a biologist and physical anthropologist, her work focuses on bone trauma analysis, the bioarchaeology of violence, and human identification, both in archaeological and contemporary forensic contexts. Over the past decade, Aurora has worked as a forensic anthropologist for public institutions such as the Attorney General’s Office of the State of Quintana Roo and the Extraordinary Forensic Identification Mechanism, supported by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). She has also collaborated with international organizations such as GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) and USAID (United States Agency for International Development) on projects addressing human identification and violence in contexts of conflict and disappearance. Throughout her career, Aurora has participated in interdisciplinary research with institutions and specialists from Colombia, Guatemala, the United States, and Germany, and has provided training in trauma analysis, forensic taphonomy, and osteological methods to experts and officials across Mexico.
Dr. Busra Nisa Sarac is a Senior Lecturer in International Security and Gender Studies in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (SCCJ) at the University of Portsmouth. She holds a PhD in gender and terrorism from University of Portsmouth in 2022, with a particular focus on the gender based violence against Yazidi women under the so-called Islamic State.She coordinates a module titled ‘Contemporary Terrorism and the Global Response’ and a Master’s level (DL) course titled ‘ Terrorism and Security Management’. She has written journal articles, book reviews and blog posts in the area of terrorism, security, gender, and the media, and she is the winner of the Shirin M Rai Prize for the Best Dissertation Award in IR from the Political Studies Association (PSA) for her PhD thesis in 2023.