34 Rites are a way of helping the next of kin to recover. The absence of the remains means that the victim’s family cannot conduct the usual rites. Rites help to make a separation between life and death; they help alleviate the damage caused by the impact of separation and achieve some acknowledgement by society. The rite allows people to express solidarity and a person can feel accompanied in their sorrow. In the case of disappearance, this form of recovery is blocked, because the next of kin who have not recovered the remains of their loved ones are unable to conduct rites. Often, the next of kin who consider conducting this type of ceremony feel guilty, because it is as if they are accepting the death or “killing” of the family member who has disappeared. The lack of clarification of the facts generates uncertainty among the next of kin. One factor that helps them progress towards concluding the mourning process is being certain about the facts, not merely hearing different versions. The next of kin need to understand why the event happened and know who the perpetrators were. Public recognition helps to free up the pain locked up inside the person, which causes a “privatizing of the damage.” The next of kin’s feelings of guilt are very frequent in cases of forced disappearance. If there is no social response, acknowledging the facts and the dignity of the victims, the interiorization of the damage will be much greater. From a psycho-social perspective, ways should be sought to alleviate the damage caused by the disappearance. Accordingly, measures must be taken to provide healthcare and psychological support, and also to ensure acknowledgement, recovery of reputation, and forms of collective memory. From the psycho-social perspective, this case is characterized by being a collective case, which has a greater impact than an individual case. It has the particularity that, first, one group of individuals was disappeared, and then two more people were disappeared during the effort to search for the former. This has meant that the remaining next of kin have had to halt any effort to discover the truth, because they have seen the consequences of that effort for two people who tried to find the disappeared. The “meaninglessness” of disappearance in this case is much greater, because there is no connection between the activities those individuals carried out and forced disappearance. The alleged victims were young men, with elderly fathers and small children in most cases. There has been a general pattern of very serious emotional pain and suffering. The disappearance has had considerable impact on the stress levels of the mothers, who have had to take charge of their families alone, and have had to assume the role of both mother and father, and also of the sisters of those who disappeared, who have had to take on the care of the family. Most of the next of kin of the victims have had symptoms of traumatic memories and recollections associated with a feeling of profound emotional agitation, as effects of repressing their emotions and “emotional anesthesia.” The latter refers to the mechanisms that the next of kin adopted to protect themselves from an indeterminate pain, such as pretending they were all right or making a tacit agreement within the family not to talk about what had happened. As a result, each member of the family endures his or her own private personal feelings without knowing what the other members of the family are going through. “Emotional