Disappeared Detainees ( Spanish : detenidos desaparecidos, DD. DD) is the term commonly used in Latin American countries to refer to the victims of kidnappings, usually taken to clandestine detention and torture centers, and crimes of forced disappearance, committed by various authoritarian military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s, and officially recognized, among others, by the governments of Argentina (1984) and Chile (1991). [1]
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The simultaneous and massive appearance of this practice in various countries is considered to be the result of the common training provided by the U.S. Defense department at its School of the Americas in Panama. [2] Antecedents of the forced eliminations and disappearances of political prisoners can be found in the Hitler dictatorship, which issued an ordinance (the Nacht und Nebel Decree, Night and Fog) applicable to captured English "Commandos" who were summarily executed without any record of their capture and execution.
The first step of this method consisted in the apprehension of the victims by law enforcement agencies, undercover secret police or paramilitary groups with official support. Sometimes the arrest was conducted with a certain formality; at other times it took on the appearance and brutality of a kidnapping.
Once arrested, the victim was usually subjected to physical and psychological torture sessions, while official channels of information denied relatives any knowledge of the person's whereabouts. The "detainees pointed the finger at complete strangers for protecting their companions. They hoped that the interrogators would quickly determine their innocence, although often the opposite was true: the detainees could not provide them with any information because they had no information to offer, which led to even greater torture". [3] Finally, the prisoner was killed and his body was buried clandestinely. In some cases, the hostages survived and are considered "ex-disappeared detainees". [1] [4]
The hiding of the corpse was often carried out with the support of aerial vehicles, such as airplanes and helicopters, from which the bodies were thrown into the sea or into inaccessible areas. [5]
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The massive disappearance of people implied long years of search and suffering for their relatives (causing severe anguish due to long unfinished mourning). This situation led relatives to organize themselves to demand information, justice and the search for the corpses by filing habeas corpus petitions in the courts. For example, in Chile, the Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared and the Agrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Políticos acted; and in Argentina, the organization of Mothers of Plaza de Mayo and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (founder organisation) .
This illegal practice forced, with the passage of time and the fall of the dictatorships that carried it out, the creation of official bodies to clarify these crimes (such as the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in Argentina or the Commission for Peace in Uruguay) and of a new criminal offense in many of the countries affected, where today the forced disappearance of persons is explicitly punished, in addition to international human rights treaties and conventions.
The Dirty War is the name used by the military junta or civic-military dictatorship of Argentina for its period of state terrorism in Argentina from 1974 to 1983 as a part of Operation Condor. During this campaign, military and security forces and death squads in the form of the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance hunted down any political dissidents and anyone believed to be associated with socialism, left-wing Peronism, or the Montoneros movement.
An enforced disappearance is the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person with the support or acquiescence of a state followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person's fate or whereabouts with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law. Often, forced disappearance implies murder whereby a victim is abducted, may be illegally detained, and is often tortured during interrogation, ultimately killed, and the body disposed of secretly. The party committing the murder has plausible deniability as there is no evidence of the victim's death.
The Valech Report, officially known as The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report, documents instances of abuses committed in Chile between 1973 and 1990 by agents of Augusto Pinochet's military regime. Published on November 29, 2004, the report presents the findings of a six-month investigation. A revised version was subsequently released on June 1, 2005. In February 2010, the commission was reopened for a period of eighteen months, during which additional cases were examined.
The Higher School of Mechanics of the Navy has gone through three major transformations throughout its history. Originally ESMA served as an educational facility of the Argentine Navy. The original ESMA was a complex located at 8151 Libertador Avenue, in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, in the barrio of Núñez. Additionally, It was the seat of U.T.3.3.2—Unidad de Tareas 2 of G.T.3.3 [es].
National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons was an Argentine organization created by President Raúl Alfonsín on 15 December 1983, shortly after his inauguration, to investigate the fate of the desaparecidos and other human rights violations performed during the military dictatorship known as the National Reorganization Process between 1976 and 1983.
The Night of the Pencils, was a series of kidnappings and forced disappearances, followed by the torture, rape, and murder of 10 high-school students that began on the evening of 16 September 1976 and continued into the next day, during Argentina's last civil-military dictatorship. The event is one of the most infamous acts of repression committed by the last Argentine military dictatorship, as most of the victims were under 18 years of age. Four of the victims survived; the remains of the others have never been found.
Human rights abuses in Chile under Augusto Pinochet were the crimes against humanity, persecution of opponents, political repression, and state terrorism committed by the Chilean Armed Forces, members of Carabineros de Chile and civil repressive agents members of a secret police, during the military dictatorship of Chile under General Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990.
The Pozo de Banfield is a former Buenos Aires Provincial Police station that was used as an Argentine clandestine detention center from November 1974 to October 1978, during the military dictatorship that ruled the country from 1976 to 1983. This detention center was an integral part of what came to be known as the Circuito Camps, and was one of the first to operate as such during the constitutional government of Isabel Perón, nearly 18 months before the 1976 coup d'état. With the nationwide extension of the 1975 annihilation decrees, provincial police forces were placed under command of the Army, and subsequently the Banfield Investigations Brigade became subordinated to the 3rd Mechanized Infantry Regiment of the Argentine Army.
Pilar Calveiro is an Argentine political scientist, a doctor of political science residing in Mexico. She was exiled to that country after having been kidnapped at the Navy Petty-Officers School of Mechanics (ESMA) during the military dictatorship of the 1970s. In her writing she has made important contributions to the analysis of biopower and political violence, as well as recent history and the memory of Argentine repression. Her work has been published in Mexico, Argentina, and France, and she is currently a research professor at the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla. Her publications include Poder y desaparición, los campos de concentración en Argentina and Desapariciones, memoria y desmemoria de los campos de desaparición argentinos.
Londres 38 is a building that was used by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) as a detention and torture center for opponents of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. The facility is located in downtown Santiago, Chile, and was known in DINA's jargon by the code name Yucatán.
Jorge Hernán Müller Silva, a Chilean cinematographer, and his girlfriend, Carmen Cecilia Bueno Cifuentes, a Chilean actress and filmmaker, were left activists from the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) who were detained on 29 November 1974 by security police during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. While held in Villa Grimaldi, it is believed that they both were subjected to torture. Their fate remains unknown.
Violeta Zúñiga Peralta was a Chilean human rights activist who was part of the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos during the Military Dictatorship of Chile (1973-1990) until her death. She was also a member of the folk dance group, "Cueca sola", in which she participated more than a hundred times as a dancer, commemorating those who disappeared in Chile.
Facundo Astudillo Castro was an Argentine citizen who went missing on 30 April 2020 after being stopped by the police during the COVID-19 pandemic strict lockdowns in Argentina. He was hitchhiking from Pedro Luro to Bahía Blanca, when in the town entrance of Mayor Buratovich was stopped in a police checkpoint of circulation permits. His last known image, taken the day of disappearance, depicts him being held by the police for violating the lockdown, with his hands against the police vehicle number RO 23360. It was cataloged by the victim family as a Forced disappearance in hands of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. This theory was also followed by human rights activist Estela de Carlotto. Nora Cortiñas, another known activist in Argentina, demanded the resignation of Sergio Berni, the Buenos Aires Province Minister of Security. The minister considered this an irresponsible request.
Sergio Eduardo Diez Urzúa was a Chilean architect and politician.
Memory, Truth and Justice processes is the name with which the processes that culminate in trials for crimes against humanity carried out against those responsible for human rights violations committed in the context of state terrorism during the last civil-ecclesiastical-military dictatorship in Argentina between 1976 and 1983 are referred to. These include the actions of Human Rights organizations, such as Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo or HIJOS, as well as different public policies such as the creation of CONADEP, the creation of reparation laws, the restitution of appropriated children, the Trials for the Truth, the marking of Sites of Memory in Argentina in the areas where clandestine detention centers operated and the creation of Spaces of Memory.
Cuartel Simón Bolívar was a facility used by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), Chile's secret police during Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. It functioned as a detention and torture center aimed at eliminating opponents through disappearance and extermination tactics. Located in the La Reina commune of Santiago, this facility was operated by a subgroup within DINA known as Brigade Lautaro.
Disappeared detainees in Chile (Desaparecidos), refers to the victims of enforced disappearances perpetrated by the Chilean military during the political repression following the 1973 coup d'état led by Augusto Pinochet. The term "disappeared detainees" is also used in other Latin American countries. These enforced disappearances were used both to eliminate oppositional individuals and to "spread terror within society". According to the intergovernmental organization International Criminal Court (ICC), “enforced disappearance of persons constitutes a crime against humanity".
The José Domingo Cañas Memory House was a detention and torture center operated by the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), located at 1367 José Domingo Cañas Street, in the Ñuñoa district of Santiago, Chile.
The denial of state terrorism in Argentina consists of the act of denying state terrorism during the civic-military dictatorship from 1976 to 1983 called the National Reorganization Process, which was part of the Dirty War. The denialism of state terrorism in Argentina has taken different forms over time, from denying the existence of missing persons, the justification of the acts committed, or declaring that the conflict was "between two equivalent sectors that produced symmetrical damage".
The clandestine detention, torture and extermination centers, also called, were secret facilities used by the Armed, Security and Police Forces of Argentina to torture, interrogate, rape, illegally detain and murder people. The first ones were installed in 1975, during the constitutional government of María Estela Martínez de Perón. Their number and use became generalized after the coup d'état of March 24, 1976, when the National Reorganization Process took power, to execute the systematic plan of enforced disappearance of people within the framework of State terrorism. With the fall of the dictatorship and the assumption of the democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín on December 10, 1983, the CCDs ceased to function, although there is evidence that some of them continued to operate during the first months of 1984.