Over 200,000 People in Latin America Have Been Victims of Enforced Disappearance

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – On August 30th, the International Day of the Disappeared, from Mexico to Argentina, relatives and human rights organizations remembered the people on the subcontinent who have disappeared after imprisonment. According to the United Nations, forcible disappearance “has frequently been used as a strategy to spread terror within the society. The feeling of insecurity generated by this practice is not limited to the close relatives of the disappeared, but also affects their communities and society as a whole.”

Rafael Barrantes of the International Red Cross for Mexico and Central America points out that the high number of victims in Latin America is the result of many causes: armed conflicts, the actions of state authorities, clashes between security forces and organized crime, or as fate on the run to the United States for economic and social reasons. One major problem is the unreliability of official figures, “which are an indicator of the problems of control mechanisms”.

Despite inaccurate surveys, human rights organizations consider that at least 200,000 people in Latin America have forcibly disappeared. Known contexts of systematic disappearances include Operation Condor, the armed conflicts in Guatemala and Colombia, and the Mexican war on drugs.

Operation Condor was the code name of the state-terrorism secret service operations of several South American states in the 1970s and 1980s, whose goal was to crush the left-wing opposition to the military dictatorships of the time. The secret services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay cooperated in the systematic repression, while the secret services of Colombia, Peru and Venezuela participated selectively. According to what is known today, Operation Condor was actively supported by the US and French secret services.

According to the Guatemalan Truth Commission, up to 45,000 citizens of that country are considered to have disappeared as a result of the civil war that lasted from 1960 to 1996. After the coup against President Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán organized by the CIA in 1954, internal turmoil escalated from 1960 to a civil war between leftist guerrillas and the armed forces supported by death squads. A total of 200,000 people died, mostly indigenous people. Under Efraín Ríos Montt, who ruled as military dictator from 1982 to 1983, there was open genocide of the indigenous population.

The Colombian National Center for Historical Memory (CNMH) estimates the number of violent disappearances in the country at over 80,000. Between 1964 and 2016 the Colombian state and right-wing paramilitaries fought against left-wing guerrillas. Over 200,000 people died in the conflict. In 2016 the Colombian government signed a peace treaty with the largest guerrilla organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP). But even since the signing of the peace treaty, at least 466 people have disappeared, mainly trade unionists, human rights activists and dissident FARC members, according to the International Red Cross.

Official figures show that over 70,000 people in Mexico have disappeared by force. After taking office, the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, ordered a reassessment of the official statistics as he suspected that his predecessors had whitewashed the situation. By April 2018, the official number had risen to just under 43,000. During the decades of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rule, many opposition members disappeared without a trace. Since the escalation of the war on drugs, disappearances also became common practice among drug cartels. The case of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa who disappeared in September 2014 made international headlines. Investigations to date point to cooperation between state authorities and organized crime.

The International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances was initiated by the Latin American Federation of Associations for Relatives of Detained-Disappeared (FEDEFAM), a transnational non-governmental organization founded in Costa Rica in 1981. On December 21st, 2010, the United Nations General Assembly voted to declare August 30th as the International Day of the Disappeared.

In a communication, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, calls on the world’s nations “to step up their efforts to prevent enforced disappearances, locate the victims and provide support to victims and their families.” He also urges the member states of the United Nations to sign the UN Convention against Enforced Disappearances.

The UN Convention was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 20th, 2006 and came into force in December 2010. Latin American human rights activists, who after the end of the military dictatorships in Argentina and Chile demanded clarification regarding the whereabouts of missing opposition members, were the instigators of the convention. Worldwide, 98 states have signed the treaty and 61 have ratified it, thereby recognizing the UN Committee against Disappearances as a supervisory body. In Latin America, only El Salvador and Nicaragua have not signed the convention. In El Salvador, civil organizations are now demanding the government to sign the convention and ensure its implementation.

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