A Brief Genealogy of Disappearance and Murder
A Brief Genealogy of Disappearance and Murder
November 23, 2015
by Julian Vigo
The notion of disappearance has existed throughout time involving the absence of an individual or group of people and can be found throughout historical tales and literature. Originally disappearance took place during the Roman Empire as a means of discursive disappearance: damnatio memoriae (literally “damnation of memory” in Latin), was a form of dishonor that was used by the Roman Senate upon Roman elites and Emperors who were found to be traitors to the state. This would result in the seizure of property and the erasure of their names from sculptures and historical records. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, “disappeared” came refer to the explainable loss of human life such as in the case of Amelia Earhart, however the more common use of the term refers to people who are taken from their families and communities through a pre-meditated act of political aggression, such as in the disappearance of García Lorca who was shot in 1936 and his body dumped in a mass grave. Disappearance, in this context, is specific to a willed removal of human life along with a conterminous effort to efface all traces and details of that specific life and death.
The invocation of this expression in Spanish, desaparecidos, maintains a specific reference to the forced disappearance of a specific group of people for political purposes and has become the historical reference point for the definition of this term today. Desaparecidos, first coined during the military junta of Argentina’s guerra sucia, literally meaning “dirty war,” (1973-1986), is a term which reflects the lives lost due to the political repression of the military dictatorship under Jorge Rafael Videla. Before and conterminous to Videla’s rule, many right-wing governments dominated the Southern Cone from the 1950s through the 1980s and together these governments, with encouragement and support of the CIA, organized a political campaign, Operation Condor (Operación Cóndor), aimed at deterring the left-wing presence and influence in the region, likewise disintegrating the democratic processes of organization and resistance. In addition to the US government’s direct involvement, the “Chicago Boys”
Organized in the mid 1970s, Operation Condor was a covert political campaign which specifically used disappearance as a tool of physical repression involving the intelligence and security branches of these member states: Videla in Argentina (1976-1981); Pinochet in Chile (1972-1992); Ernesto Geisel in Brazil (1974-1979); Breno Borges Fortes, in Uruguay (1972-1976); Hugo Banzer in Bolivia (1971-1978); and Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay (1974-1987). Organized on 25 November 1975 by the military intelligence agencies of Argentina, security agencies from Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina met with the head of Chile’s secret police DINA (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional of Chile), Manuel Contreras, in Santiago de Chile officially creating “Plan Condor.” Brazil signed on six months later. This “plan” promoted cooperation between these governments in fighting left-wing movements and also extended previous agreements made between various South American countries (ie. la Conferencía de Ejércitos in Caracas in 1973) which encouraged the exchange of information about leftist movements and individuals. Operation Condor should be contextualized in light of the Cold War and the fear of the United States’ government that a Marxist or Leftist revolution in the region was imminent; hence Operation Condor had explicit approval from the United States since organizations such as the ERP, the Tupamaros, the MIR and the Montoneros were in the cross-hairs of the CIA and the right-wing elite of the Southern Cone. According to French journalist Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la mort, l’école francaise (2000), the development of Operation Condor must also be partly attributed to General Rivero, an Argentine intelligence officer who was a student of the French government. French military involvement in Operation Condor has recently come to light where, for instance, Direction de la surveillance du territoire (DST) trained the Argentine security forces in torture and disappearance between 1973 and 1984, with General Contreras having stated, “C’est la DST qui a le plus coopéré. C’était un service de renseignement ami” (“It was the DST which cooperated most. It was a friendly intelligence service.”) Many of the agents involved in disappearance received their training from French former military who had honed their torture skills in Algeria during the French occupation. Evidence of cooperation is well-documented and is demonstrated in the “vols e la mort” which from 1976 on were used by Chile’s DINA and Argentina’s SIDE (Secretaría de Inteligencia de Estado) in order to remove vast numbers of people by leaving no trace of the corpses.
Many countries that were not directly involved in disappearances in the Souther Cone took part indirectly. For example, Peru voluntarily cooperated in handing over intelligence information to security services of these countries and participated in the 1975 Santiago de Chile meeting for Plan Condor. More evidence of inter-country cooperation was found on 22 December, 1992, when a Paraguayan judge, José Fernández, discovered the “Archives de la Terreur” detailing the fate of thousands of political prisons from the Cône du Sud, most of whom had been kidnapped, tortured and murdered by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. This archive evidenced 30,000 desaparecidos and further demonstrated cooperation by the governments of Colombia, Peru and Venezuela. Since the nature of disappearance is ontologically bound to not leaving behind physical evidence (ie. both the body and all historical records) except in this rare case of the “Archives de la Terreur”, it is unsure how many victims resulted from Operation Condor. It is clear that Operation Condor disappeared tens of thousands of people until the official end to its operations with the ousting of Argentina’s dictatorship in 1983. In recent years, various national truth and reconciliation commissions produced evidence of the disappeared: during the 21 years of dictatorship in Brazil there were 339 documented cases of government-sponsored political assassinations or disappearances; in Uruguay there are 180 documented cases of disappeared; in Paraguay there are 500 cases of disappeared; in Chile of the 3,000 murdered, 1,198 were forcibly disappeared; and Argentina’s list of disappeared is by far the greatest with the numbers ranging from 8,960 to 30,000 persons.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/23/a-brief-genealogy-of-disappearance-and-murder/
