"If I die, don't cry for me--because I was fighting for what I love."--Irma Flaquer On a quiet October evening in 1980, Guatemalan journalist Irma Flaquer, returning to her downtown apartment after a visit with her four-year-old grandson, was dragged from her car, never to be seen again. Founder of the first Guatemalan Human Rights Commission, she was a crusading reporter who did not tolerate corruption or repression. Best known for her weekly column that ran for over twenty years in various Guatemalan newspapers--Lo Que Otros Callan or "What Others Don't Dare Write"--Flaquer criticized presidents, politicians, and the heads of the Roman Catholic Church, and championed the rights of the disenfranchised, in some cases, making and breaking political regimes. A tenacious detractor of the U.S.-backed, corrupt Guatemalan governments, Flaquer survived government-organized beatings, a car bomb that riddled her body with shrapnel, and drive-by shootings of her newspaper office, refusing exile and continuing her call for freedom and democracy until her abduction. "Disappeared" paints a gripping and complicated portrait both of a vibrant woman with a passionate vision and of an emerging nation, struggling against the strictures of Cold War politics and behind-the-scenes U.

S. involvement.