El giro de la desaparición: Borders and Boundaries from Argentina and Armenia to Colombia and Mexico¹
Perhaps the most widely studied case of disappearances² is that of the last cívico-militar dictatorship in Argentina. The number of disappearances is generally recognized as 30,000. Resistance to this regime of terror has been influential domestically and internationally, from the human-rights report Nunca Más to the Madres de Plaza de Mayo.
Tiles in Plaza Armenia. Buenos Aires. April 29, 2022. Photo by the author.
Today, the streets of Buenos Aires are dotted with multicolored tiles that honor the memory of the disappeared. In Buenos Aires’s Plaza Armenia, tiles from 2015 bear the names of Argentines of Armenian descent who were disappeared under Argentine state terrorism.³ The tiles, which prominently feature the Madres’ iconic white head scarves, connect the dictatorship’s beginning in 1976 to the centenario of the genocide of Armenians in 1915. The tiles bring together seemingly disparate situations through the category of disappearance. I propose thinking through this as indicative of el giro de la desaparición. This giro is a methodological trend (as in the “linguistic turn,” “material turn,” etc.) that speaks to the theorizing inherent to cultural products constellating around disappearance. I claim that women—as searchers, as activists, and as cultural producers—authorize the implicit and explicit connections in thinking with, through, and about el giro de la desaparición. I will begin by discussing disappearances in contemporary Mexico in conversation with the tiles in Plaza Armenia, before moving to a recent Argentine novel about disappearances that sends readers to Colombia. In this way, I aim to perform the motion of el giro de la desaparición, passing through Armenia, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico.
Argentina is associated with the dictatorship-driven disappearances of Latin America’s 1970s and 1980s. Today, the highest rates of disappearance are taking place in a democracy: Mexico. The country crossed the threshold of 100,000 officially recognized disappearances in 2022. Disappearances in Mexico are quite different from those of Argentina—in terms of the actors involved, the methods used, the people targeted. A major factor in Mexico’s disappearances is migration. Yet, with the Argentine tiles in mind, let us point out that forced migrations catalyzing disappearance in Mexico are also part of the story of Armenians’ arrival in Argentina: many of the Argentines of Armenian descent today are third- or fourth-generation immigrants who form part of the genocide-driven diaspora. Without creating facile equivalencies, many of the disappeared in Mexico are either Mexican migrants headed to the US or Central American migrants passing through Mexico on their way to the US. Central drivers of these migrations and the conditions that allow groups to carry out disappearances of migrants are intertwined, including the Guerra contra el narcotráfico in Mexico, US gun laws, US migration policies, US imperial history, and US-Mexico collaborations such as the Iniciativa Mérida.⁴
El ahuehuete la Glorieta de las y los desaparecidos. Mexico City. June 10, 2022. Photo by the author.
There is another part of this story that contemporary Mexican disappearances make front and center. While men account for the majority of those who disappear, women constitute the vast majority of those who search. The disappeared are present through women’s resistance. If disappearance also entails political presence, this is because of women’s resistance (Denyer Willis 22).⁵ The gendered separation of spheres of work is part of the story of women’s search; the recurrent undervaluation and appropriation of that work, and of the types of marginalization built on and through such systemic undervaluation and appropriation, should not be separated from the eccentric motion of the giro de la desaparición.
Women’s search for the missing is “striking” (Edkins xiii); and it is not confined to Mexico. Women have demonstrated that disappearance is at once a strategy of terror and a cultural idiom that ruptures boundaries—epistemic, geographic, temporal. Part of a continuum that includes the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the searching collectives in Mexico demand consideration of the relationship between contemporary modes of understanding and contesting disappearance—materially and discursively—in relation to those used in the aftermath of dictatorship-driven disappearances.
One example of a cultural product that sees in disappearance at once a strategy of terror and a cultural idiom that ruptures boundaries is a 2019 novel by Argentine writer Mariana Enríquez. Nuestra parte de noche complements the cultural work of the tiles in Plaza Armenia with an expansive literary account that illustrates the giro de la desaparición. Enríquez’s text opens under the last cívico-militar dictatorship and blends the historical with the fantastic. In the opening section, we are introduced to Juan, a medium who is forced to work for the Orden, a cabal set on immortality. Juan’s access to the Oscuridad, the other world, has seemingly been inherited by his son, Gaspar. The novel is perhaps a national allegory: Juan attempts to save Gaspar from being used as a medium by the Orden, whose clandestine torture centers evoke those of the Argentine State; Gaspar’s coming-of-age story, in parallel, mirrors the country’s democratic transition.
A striking feature of this Argentine novel is the narrative gravity of events in Colombia. On November 13, 1985, mud and debris from the Nevado del Ruiz volcano covered the Colombian town of Armero, killing more than 20,000 people. The world watched in horror as a 13-year-old, Omaira Sánchez Garzón,⁶ suffered on live television, her agony protracted across three days as rescue workers were unable to save her. Omaira’s tragic death figures prominently in Nuestra parte: the novel’s core group of young friends become “obsesionados” with her suffering (251). Is the trauma of witnessing Omaira’s death an allusion to the trauma of post-dictatorship Argentina amid 30,000 disappearances?
Before answering this question, we must note that Colombia’s 1985 was tumultuous. The country dealt with the tragedy in Armero one week after the (also) highly televised siege on the capital city’s Palacio de Justicia⁷ (November 6-7). The events at the Palacio de Justicia are a key part of the discussion on disappearances in Colombia. At least twelve people who survived the attack were subsequently disappeared by government forces. And the events of November 1985 in Bogotá and Armero unfolded in the midst of the country’s internal armed conflict. This armed conflict⁸ left more than 120,000 officially recognized disappeared persons. Thus, the emphasis on Omaira, who appears several times throughout Nuestra parte, becomes a way to speak about suffering in both countries. The hypervisibility of her pain connects two contexts plagued by disappearances.
Exposition on Las Buscadoras la búsqueda de los desaparecidos tiene rostro de mujer. Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación (Bogotá). September 1, 2022. Photo by the author.
There remains critical potential in the giro de la desaparición, and the references to Colombia are part of a larger project in which Nuestra parte is immersed. The novel also depicts the horrors of colonial violence in East Africa and genocidal campaigns of Argentine nation-building (gobernar es poblar); is this an argument for gobernar es desaparecer, as was the case for the disappearances under Ríos Montt in Guatemala? I read the novel as reinforcing the role of employing differential literacies to understand what disappearance makes thinkable together, without forsaking key contextual specificities. This is what disappearance offers as a cultural idiom, and its giro from Buenos Aires to Armero, from Armenia to Mexico, indexes the power of those who resist disappearance to reveal unexpected links across transhistorical forms of violence and to shape new ways to tell stories that point to a future without disappearance.
¹ All photos are property of the author.
² Note that discussions of disappearance tend to refer to the legal category known as enforced disappearance. International legal consensus of this crime’s definition can be found in the 2010 UN Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance. Per this Convention, a case of enforced disappearance is defined as “the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law” (Article 2). The disappearances in Argentina are a classic example of enforced disappearances. However, herein I use the term disappearance (sans the qualifier enforced) because the category, while linked to many cases of enforced disappearance, circulates today in contexts that do not adhere to this legal definition. See, for instance, Mexico’s 2017 law on expansive law on disappearance, which from its very title combines multiple types of disappearance (i.e., enforced disappearance of persons and disappearance committed by “particulares”). For further discussion of the variety of contexts in which the category is used, see Gabriel Gatti’s powerful study Desaparecidos: cartografías del abandono (2022). Gatti follows the “rumor” of the “desaparecido” (rather than the rumor of “desaparición forzada”) in a multisite study that evinces the theoretical power of the category of disappearance today (45).
³ For more on this connection, see the 2012 documentary Diálogo sin fronteras, in which Ana Arzoumanian and Adriana Kalaidjian discuss the Armenian genocide and the last dictatorship in Argentina.
⁴ Thousands of Mexican migrants have disappeared, leaving the devastating effects of NAFTA-era policies that depressed prices of Mexican grain, coupled with redistributed migration patterns and international policies (i.e., US drug policies and US consumer demand for drugs) that, among other things, interrupted circular migration. Moreover, US policies have created spaces filled by narcotrafficking corporations in Mexico and led to the importation of US guns. In Central American nations, the US has a painfully long history of destabilizing democratic regimes, and US policies have fueled gang violence.
⁵ Note that Denyer Willis refers to the Brazilian context.
⁶ Some sources write her name “Omayra.” However, per Colombian official records, such as in the Ley 1632 de 2013, her name is spelled Omaira.
⁷ A brief selection of representations of these events includes: Miguel Torres’s play La siempreviva (2010), Miguel Jiménez, José Jiménez, and Andrés Cruz Barrera’s graphic novel Los Once (2014), and Laura Mora Ortega’s film Antes del fuego (2015).
⁸ Officially recognized as taking place between 1958 and 2016.
About the Author
Joseph Wager is a PhD Candidate in Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University, where he is writing a dissertation on disappearance in Colombia and Mexico. He holds a master's in Literary Studies from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and a bachelor's in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley. He has taught at the Universidad Nacional and Stanford. Recent publications include a review of Gabriel Gatti's Desaparecidos, a study of Wayuu cultural practices, clean-energy discourse in Colombia, law, and sound studies, and “¿Cómo es ser una mosca? La ética y la escala en la literatura de Augusto Monterroso”. He also works with organizations assisting people seeking asylum in the United States.
Works Cited
Denyer Willis, Graham. Keep the Bones Alive: Missing People and the Search for Life in Brazil. U of California P, 2022.
Edkins, Jenny. Missing: Persons and Politics. Cornell UP, 2011.
Enríquez, Mariana. Nuestra parte de noche. Editorial Anagrama, 2019.
Gatti, Gabriel. Desaparecidos: Cartografías del abandono. Editorial Turner, 2022.
United Nations. International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, 2006 (revised 2010).