The Four Logics of Disappearances in Mexico
The Observatory on Disappearances and Impunity in Mexico is an international academic and advocacy collaborative established in 2015 to investigate, analyze, and combat patterns of impunity regarding enforced disappearances in Mexico. Its three principal investigators, HRP Director Barbara Frey, Professor Leigh Payne of Oxford University, and Professor Karina Ansolabehere of the Institute for Legal Research (IIJ-UNAM) and the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Mexico) have been working with undergraduate students, graduate students and alumni to explain disappearances in México as a means to bring an end to this terrible pattern of human rights violations.
This spring the Human Rights Program will be publishing a comprehensive web-based report and database discussing the UMN-based team's component of the project. The virtual launch of this website and the Human Rights Program’s findings will take place on Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 12:00 Central Time. Leading up to the report release, we feature a three-part series of blog posts written by key members of the Observatory team, originally posted to Observatorio Sobre Desaparición E Impunidad En México in Spanish and English. This final blog installment by Leigh Payne covers the four logics of disappearance. The English version is being reposted here with permission from the Institute for Legal Research at UNAM and FLACSO-México.
Four Logics of Disappearance
(originally posted 11/11/2020)
In October 2020, the British Academy Proceedings Series of Oxford University Press accepted for publication a book that features ODIM’s work on post-transition disappearances. In addition to Mexico, the phenomenon is explorein three other Latin American countries (Brazil, El Salvador, and Argentina) through the work of scholars, practitioners, and relatives. The book reveals the dynamics of disappearance in each context while also looking at patterns across the region. It further develops a set of tools used by families and their advocates in the search for the missing, truth, justice and guarantees of non-repetition. Several ODIM researchers have authored chapters in the volume.
A central argument made in the volume is that the classic notion of ‘enforced disappearance’ may not be as applicable today as it was for addressing violations during the Holocaust and the Southern Cone authoritarian regimes of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the emergence of democratic legislation, norms, institutions, political participation, and social mobilisation, disappearances continue in post-transition Latin America. Four logics explain the persistence of disappearance: its clandestine nature; the construction of a ‘disposable’ person; the political economy utility; and ambiguous loss as social control. The book contends that to address the forms disappearance takes in the post-transition era requires an understanding of the logics behind them and efforts to undermine them.
Four Logics of Disappearance
Clandestine Acts of Disappearance. Democratic states, even more than their authoritarian predecessors, attempt to avoid the costs associated with political violence. Such states are pressured to comply with human rights standards. Thus, by hiding violations, through 6clandestineacts of violence, states lower potential international reputation and legal costs.Domestically, such acts can also defuse the costs associated with protests by mobilised citizens and groups and institutional checks and balances. Where democratic states may continue to engage in political violence directly or indirectly, it will most likely be through clandestine, rather than overt human rights violations, to avoid costs. The level of disappearances may paradoxically increase after the transition, to hide political violence, as we observe in some countries in the region.
Constructing Disposable Peoples. To further avoid costs, the disappeared are not typically among the elite, powerful, and mobilised populations of the region. As the ODIM study shows, the disappeared person tends to be from humble backgrounds: socially, economically, and culturally marginalised. Who is disappeared is further associated narratively with transgressive or deviant acts. A language develops that serves as an explanation for their disappearance: ‘they are involved in something’ (está metido en algo). The disappeared person is blamed for the disappearance. They lose value as a person, voice and rights and protection as a citizen. They are, thus, ‘disposable’; there is no reason to provoke concern or outcry for this loss. Constructing the missing as ‘disposable’ creates a permissible environment in which disappearance persists unaddressed and with impunity.
The Political Economy of Disappearance. Related to ‘who’ is disappeared isa corresponding logic of ‘why’. The findings from the ODIM and other studies link contemporary disappearances to labour. The unemployed and the underemployed may be lured into exploitative work for organised crime groups. Workers with particular skills –such as, mechanics, engineers, bricklayers, truck drivers --are forced to work in illegal production and trafficking operations, building tunnels and transporting commodities. Once these workers have exhausted their utility (eg, the work is complete or the person becomes unable to work), they are disposable. They are disappeared to hide the illegal activity. One operating cost for illegal enterprises is avoiding investigation and closure. Such enterprises can buy favours or silence from security forces, incorporate state officials into the business, or use violence or the threat of violence to avoid repercussions. Disappearances in remote 7mining regions, agricultural areas, and urban sweat shops may follow this logic. Disappearance of sex workers, human rights defenders, and indigenous peoples provides a way to hide and continue illegal activity with impunity. The political economy of disappearance can take another form when criminal groups remove their adversaries, or competition, by killing and disappearing them. By doing so, they consolidate territorial and economic control in certain regions. Accompanying the clandestine act of disappearance is the conspiracy of silence and violent retaliation against those who try to escape or dare to reveal what they know or witnessed. Because of clandestine linkages within the state security apparatus, those who report to authorities heighten risks to their own personal security.
Social Control through Ambiguous Loss. Ambiguous loss is the uncertainty and lack of information about a missing person; it acts as a form of social control. The missing person is both present and absent. The lack of closure or ability to move forward thwarts the grieving process. Psychologists have found that ambiguous loss resulting from the absence of information can have a paralysing effect on relatives of the disappeared. The findings from ODIM suggest that ambiguous loss also weakens claim-making. Basic information--what happened, to whom, by whom—disappears with the person. State officials can ignore or discount claims of wrongdoing when they lack substantiation. They are even more likely to do so when they associate the disappeared person, or the relative, with a class of ‘disposable persons’. The four logics behind disappearance converge to create triple victimhood: the loss of a loved one; the assumed association with a deviant; and the inability to denounce the act because of lack of evidence.
New Disappearances and New Tools
The absence of knowledge –the clandestine nature of the act and the disappearance of facts with the person --prevents us from claiming that contemporary Latin American states are engaged in systematic and enforced disappearances. The ODIM study, for example, confirms that disappearances in Mexico are widespread, that the logics behind them used 8during authoritarian periods still prevail, and that state officials at every level of the security apparatus have been identified in isolated acts of disappearance. That information –while extremely troubling –is not sufficient to determine that the Mexican state has engaged in systematic enforced disappearances.
Instead, it suggests that researchers need to examine a different kind of state involvement in post-transition disappearances. The novel approach that the book promotes is examining post-transitional states’ acquiescence in disappearance. This involves treating relatives with dignity, to take their claims of disappearance seriously, to prompt immediate searches for the missing person, to hold state officials accountable when they impede or obstruct such processes, to investigate the full details of the acts, to hold perpetrators –within the state or outside –accountable.