THE DISAPPEARED

You’re abducted, taken at home, on the street, or from a vehicle. After a good beating you're thrown in prison, but the State and its representatives refuse to acknowledge your whereabouts. You've been disappeared. You're outside the protection of the Law; in fact, the men who snatched you represent the Law. You're tortured during interrogation, but you still don't understand what they want and as they mutilate your body you’re unable to answer their question. After they remove your eyes they will kill you in a manner whereby your corpse can be disposed of to escape discovery. You simply vanish. Forever.

 Disappearances work at many levels. They silence critics of the State, create uncertainty and fear, and engender feelings of complicity among the subject population. How can you fight a government that murders in secret? Isn't it easier to pretend that everything is normal? Disappearances violate fundamental human rights, the right to liberty, due process, equal protection, the presumption of innocence, and humane treatment. Illegalities, however, are only the beginning. You’ve been eliminated, denied a burial, the victim of a collective slaughter, executed not because you are an individual with a family, hopes, and dreams, but because of your class, race, or politics. You die in a disgraceful manner, gassed, beaten, tossed from an airplane into the sea, or shot in the back of the neck. Disappearances not only crush the disappeared, they also ruin their families and friends (many of whom spend the rest of their lives grieving with no closure, searching for clues about the murder of loved one).

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In many parts of the world, disappearances are a fact of life. For example, during the 1992-97 Algerian Civil War 17,000 people disappeared. During Argentina's 1976-83 Dirty War, 30,000 people disappeared. Pregnant women had their children taken at birth. The mother was then executed, the infants given to families with close ties to the military. Captives were drugged, loaded onto aircraft, and thrown alive into the Atlantic Ocean (vuelos de la muerte). In Chile, following the 1973 overthrown of President Salvador Allende, 2,279 persons disappeared. Columbian prosecutors reported in 2009 that more than 28,000 disappeared during various internal conflicts. According to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, the civil war that began in 1978 in El Salvador led to 8,000 disappearances. An estimated 200,000 individuals, many of them indigenous people, were disappeared by Guatemalan military and security forces between 1954 and 1996. Tens of thousands of people disappeared in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. According to National Commission of Human Rights, 5,397 individuals disappeared between 2006 and 2011 in Mexico. Amina Masood Janjua, Chairperson of Defense of Human Rights Pakistan, reports more than 5000 cases of forced disappearances. Russian civil rights groups estimate there have been 5,000 forced disappearances in Chechnya since 1999. The United Nations workgroup for Human Rights reported in 2013 that between the Spanish Civil War and the end of Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975), an estimated 114,226 people disappeared. The report also documents the systematic kidnapping of more than 30,000 children. According to a United Nations 1999 study, 12,000 Sri Lankans have gone missing after being detained by security forces (these figures are less than the current Sri Lankan government's own estimate of 17,000 people missing). According to Human Rights Watch, 17,000 people disappeared during Hafed al-Assad's 30-year rule in Syria; and Turkish human rights groups accuse the Turkish security forces of being responsible for the disappearance of more than 1,500 civilians of the Kurdish minority in the 1980s and 1990s.

Time doesn’t heal the death of a loved one, it covers the loss with scar tissue. What remains are memories. Memories are what we are, without memories we’re lost. Never-ending uncertainty, however, slowly renders invisible our memories of the disappeared. To make matters worse, a collective amnesia surrounds us, our friends and neighbors are afraid to talk about the disappears, they want to move on with their lives and pretend that nothing’s wrong. It’s impossible to find out what really happened. Our first reaction is shock and disbelief, but as time passes, and they do not return, and we do not know what’s happened to them, a profound sadness sets in. We keep expecting them to show up. Later, of course, guilt begins, as if it’s our fault they disappeared. We regret the last things you did, or didn’t do, or what we said or didn’t say, we even feel guilty about certain feelings; for example, anger because they abandoned us, even though we know they didn’t do it on purpose. This anger turns on us, and then against God. That triggers a new host of worries and fears. We feel anxious, hopeless, and insecure, realize we’re mortal and have to face the rest of our life alone, without them. A deep fatigue is set in motion, nausea, lowered immunity, weight loss or weight gain, aches and pains and insomnia, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

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