Friends Who Disappear

14 October, 2025 (Tuesday), 10:00 – 11:30 JST
Microsoft Teams (Online)

About the Lecture

Friends Who Disappear is about the practice of forced disappearance through the story of Dr. Marvyn Perez’s childhood abduction, disappearance and torture by Guatemalan security forces in 1982. Marvyn’s story of survival, flight to the US, struggle for political asylum and his relentless pursuit of justice are a blueprint for peacebuilding and carried out by survivors of human rights violations. It is also the story of local US press accounts connecting immigrant rights and migration to US Cold War policies, the US sanctuary movement and the lawyers and immigration activists supporting refugees and stopping intervention in Central America.
Friends Who Disappear begins in 1984 with 16 year old Marvyn at the United Nations telling UN Undersecretary Robert Mueller and Bishop Desmond Tutu about his forced disappearance and the 15 days of torture he endured at the hands of Guatemalan police, army and death squad thugs when he was 14. In the 1980s, Marvyn, an undocumented high school student in Los Angeles, shared his story in 36 cities throughout the US as a part of Children of War – an international peace movement of child survivors. Marvyn and 25 other teenagers from around the world shared their experiences of survival in U.S. schools, churches, synagogues, union halls and rotary clubs in dozens of cities across the country.
Marvyn’s story sheds light on a fascinating, mostly forgotten chapter in American history. His was the first Guatemalan family to receive asylum in the United States in 1989 after a seven-year battle. While Friends Who Disappear is about human rights violations and how authoritarian governments use violence to hang on to power, it is also about the interconnectedness of refugees and citizens creating sanctuary, and the triumph of truth. It is a story of human rights and how peace and rule of law are built by ordinary people challenging impunity.
Friends Who Disappear is an eye-opening window into a Guatemalan clandestine jail and the Kafkaesque U.S. asylum system. It is the chronicle of the author’s 30-year friendship with Marvyn, an inspirational story of remaking life and a call to peaceful action.

About the Speaker

Dr. Sanford is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow, a Harvard-Radcliffe Fellow and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Advanced Genocide Research at the University of Southern California. She is the Lehman Professor of Excellence at Lehman College, City University of New York, Professor in the Department of Anthropology, and the founding Director of the Center for Human Rights & Peace Studies. She is a founding board member of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity at the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also a member of the Doctoral Faculty in Anthropology. She has given expert testimony on the Guatemalan Genocide in international courts and is frequently featured in major media in the U.S. and abroad – including National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, the New York Times and El Pais. She has published op-eds in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of seven widely acclaimed books, including Buried Secrets: Truth and Human Rights in Guatemala and Textures of Terror: The Murder of Claudina Isabel Velasquez & Her Father’s Quest for Justice. For more information, see https://www.victoriasanford.info/