Disappearances: concept, history and experience

Abstract

The enforced disappearance is a technique of State violence that was implemented in a counterinsurgency context between the 1960s and 1980s in Latin America, and in that same process, the concept that allows explaining it as a repressive phenomenon and judging it as a crime was configured. Nowadays the disappearance of people continues as a practice of political repression; but also articulated with other processes, such as criminal economies, with devastating political and human consequences. These transformations would have an impact on the configuration of the concept of enforced disappearance, and therefore its necessary revision. This essay discusses some criticisms made about the concept of enforced disappearance, particularly from sociology, pointing out, from the historiographical point of view, the risks, both epistemological, political, and ethical, that the conceptual revision of enforced disappearance implies, and for which responsibility must be assumed.

Keywords History of the present; History of the concept; Enforced disappearance