Born to a Catalan theater producer father, Fernando Flaquer, and Guatemalan opera singer mother, Olga Azurdia, she spent her childhood travelling and living throughout Central and South America.
In 1970, a car bomb was set off as she opened the door, injuring her hand and leaving her deaf in one ear.
Her son, Sergio, who had been sent to live in a kibbutz in Israel in 1970 after the grenade incident, had received menacing, anonymous phone calls in Israel after his mother's disappearance for two years, claiming that she had gone crazy and was living in a basement.
The Inter American Press Association investigated the case of Irma Flaquer as part of its impunity project, and the case was the first that the IAPA brought to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, which ruled that the Guatemalan government was responsible for her disappearance, at the very least by not protecting her as a public figure.
The investigation also led to a book Disappeared, A Journalist Silenced by June Carolyn Erlick (Seal Press, 2004).