Disappearing people

Back in 2012, in the southern Peruvian city of Ayacucho I found myself carrying a small white coffin containing the remains of a man named Alejandro Aguilar.

As I recounted at the time in a blog post for the London Review of Books, Aguilar had been an itinerant wool trader and was one of the victims of a 1984 guerrilla massacre of more than 100 Peruvians.

Twenty-eight years later, his remains had been exhumed from a mass grave and were being returned to his wife and other family members, who had travelled to Ayacucho by bus from their village more than 700 km away.

As we marked the International Day of the Disappeared on August 30, countless families across Latin America have yet to attain closure.

In Peru itself, an estimated 16,000 people disappeared during the violence of the 1980s and 1990s. Their remains are reportedly contained in more than 6,000 unmarked graves across the country, the vast majority of which have yet to be excavated - although a new law will supposedly facilitate the process.

But Peru is just the tip of the iceberg: A veritable realm of the disappeared encompasses much of the hemisphere, from Argentina and Uruguay to Brazil and Guatemala.

Argentina racked up an estimated 30,000 forcibly disappeared persons during its so-called “dirty war”, which began in 1976; Guatemala’s own lengthy war is thought to have disappeared 45,000, on top of the hundreds of thousands killed outright.

Meanwhile, estimates range from 15,000 to 109,000 disappeared during Colombia’s protracted conflict (PDF). Figures depend on the organisation doing the counting - and the year they started counting from.

Across Latin America, the process of uncovering the truth about the fates of legions of disappeared people has generally been characterised by a great deal of inertia and antagonism on the part of authorities.

Why? In many places, the state’s reluctance to dig up the crimes of the past has to do with the state’s own complicity in many of those crimes.

Right-wing Latin American governments, it bears reiterating, presided over conditions of socioeconomic misery and inequality, thus contributing in no small part to the very rise of the leftist guerrilla movements and other forms of opposition that then allegedly had to be stamped out at all cost.

Even now, political, military, and other elites with physical and/or ideological ties to past atrocities are still entrenched in various Latin American nations, exerting pressure to keep the truth dead and buried - to replace forced disappearance with forced amnesia.

Under the pretence of leaving old wounds alone in the interest of peace, the discouragers of transparency are perfectly happy to condemn family members of the disappeared to gaping psychological wounds for the rest of eternity.

As with many a nefarious undertaking across the globe, the United States deserves more than a little blame for the quantity of disappeared in Latin America.

After all, it was none other than that ubiquitous American statesman Henry Kissinger who in the 1970s gave the green light to the Argentine military junta, which then went on to launch its signature programme of dropping suspected opponents from aircraft into the sea.

US-orchestrated coups in Guatemala and Chile - in 1954 and 1973, respectively - ushered in periods of brutal violence in both locales.

Meanwhile, US support for the larger Operation Condor - a collaborative effort to exterminate leftism in the Southern Cone - translated into an endorsement of transnational state-sponsored murder and disappearance.

And while Argentina, for one, has made strides to prosecute some of the officials responsible for the atrocities of the Condor era, it goes without saying that Kissinger & Co are among those perpetually immune from justice.

Indeed, US meddling in the hemisphere is nothing new, and is in fact a tradition almost as old as the nation itself. Since unilaterally appropriating Latin America into its official “backyard” in the 1800s, the US has often regarded genuine manifestations of democracy in the vast territory as obstacles to enrichment opportunities for US business elites - and therefore, in many cases, downright national security threats.

Human bodies themselves can be obstacles, which helps to explain US support for brutal regimes intent on disappearing folks agitating for a dignified existence.

And until a meaningful reckoning with the gruesome past-turned-present takes place, every day in Latin America is a Day of the Disappeared.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘In Latin America, people disappear but crimes remain’. Courtesy: Aljazeera.com