The desaparecidos, a Spanish term which literally means “disappeared”, are people illegally arrested by the dictatorial regimes and eliminated extrajudicially. The World Day of the Desaparecidos established by the United Nations is celebrated on 30 August. The bodies of these people are made to disappear and families are given no communication. The regime that was responsible for the largest number of disappearances is the Argentine military dictatorship, in power from 1976 to 1983. The arrests were carried out by paramilitary groups, which generally threw the bodies into the sea with special flights of death. To investigate the disappearance and protest for the fate of the disappearance since 1977 the movement of the mothers of Plaza de Mayo arose. The Argentine military regime, however, was not the only dictatorship responsible for extrajudicial disappearance. Crimes of the same genre were committed by the Chilean dictatorship of Pinochet and some regimes of other continents. To raise public awareness on the topic, in 2010 the United Nations (UN) set up the World Day of the Desaparecidos, which celebrates us every year on August 30th.
The drama and the meaning of desaparecidos
By desaparecidos we mean people made illegally disappeared by the safety forces of a country. The Spanish term desaparecidos literally means “made disappearance” because the verb desaparecer, of which Desaparecido is past participle, is transitive (unlike the Italian verbs “disappear” and “disappear”, which are uncompromising). The arrests of the desaparecidos take place secretly, without any communication to family members. The secrecy of detention allows you to exercise any form of abuse and torture on them. After detention, prisoners are almost always eliminated in an extrajudicial way (without a public and regular process). The bodies are then thrown into the sea or disappear in another way.
The term desaparecidos refers to the victims of the Latin American military dictatorships, primarily the Argentine one of the years 1976-1983, although other regimes have also made themselves responsible for crimes of the same kind.
The desaparecidos in Argentina
The Argentine dictatorship ascertained in power in 1976, when a military coup d’état overturned the government led by Isabela Martinez de Perón (wife of the former president Juan Domingo Perón). The power was taken by a military junta made up of representatives of the various armed forces, including the army general Jorge Rafael Videla was the most visible exponent. The dictatorship was established within the Condor Plan, an operation put in place in various countries of Latin America with the support of the United States, which wanted to contrast the presence of progressive parties and movements. The Argentine junta remained in power until 1983, when it was replaced by Democratically elected President Raúl Alfonsín.
In the years in which they were in power, the military operated a very hard repression against members of left movements. The opponents, or people suspected of being such, were secretly arrested by paramilitary groups, locked up in clandestine detention centers and subjected to torture, generally through electrical discharges. Most of the prisoners was then eliminated with the death flight system: they were sedated, loaded on a plane and thrown into the Atlantic Ocean after the belly had been opened with a stab
The junta made the opponents disappear, instead of eliminating them in a public and “regular”, to avoid protests. The military were in fact aware that other repressive actions, such as those that took place in Chile after the 1973 coup d’état, had aroused international disdain and wanted to avoid being in the same situation. Consequently, the government eliminated the opponents of secret and denied being aware of their fate. Only in a few cases the arrested were freed after a period of detention.
To protest against disappearances, a courageous movement was formed since 1977, that of the mothers of Plaza de Mayo, that is, women who publicly claimed news of their disappeared children, challenging the junta. The movement, although subject to a strong repression, had the merit of bringing the question of desaparecidos to the attention of public opinion. However, only after the return of democracy in 1983 the government recognized that the junta had made thousands of opponents disappear and established a specific Comisión Nacional Sobre la Desaparición de personas in charge of investigating disappearances. The Commission drafted a report, entitled Nunca Mas (never again), who was fundamental for the celebration of the processes against the leaders of the military junta and the managers of the killings. The Commission has identified almost 9000 cases of disappearance, but other sources believe that the desaparecidos have been about 30,000.
The Argentine junta also made himself responsible for another type of disappearance: the kidnapping of infants, children of opponents, who were then given for adoption to soldiers and members of the paramilitary groups. The movement of the Plaza de Mayo grandmothers, also founded in 1977, is fighting against this other kind of disappearance.
The desaparecidos in other countries: Chile and other cases
Other regimes also made opponents disappear. In Latin America, such crimes were committed by the Chilean dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet, ascended to power with a coup d’état in 1973 and remained in the government until 1990. The dictatorship eliminated a part of the opponents publicly, for example by transforming the national stadium, in Santiago del Chile, into a large prison. However, the regime also used disappearances. A recent study has estimated the overall victims of the Chilean regime, including deaths and desaparecidos, were over 40,000 but, also in this case, there are no precise data. Disappearances of opponents also took place in terms of different Latin American ones, such as the Iraq of Saddam Hussein and, recently, the Al-Sisi Egypt.
