Presentation. Search and count the disappearance: techniques and methods

Abstract

The "old" disappearance practices linked to the dictatorial regimes of the 70s in Latin America - which link with persistent forms of genocide and extermination of native populations - still have the news of everything that remains to be counted, discovered and judged. Together with these, we find today new forms of disappearance in which the perpetrator or cause is not always the State and when it is, its responsibility has to do many times more by omission than by action: feminicides and trafficking in women; migrants who disappear across borders from south to north (Mexico, the Mediterranean); multiple situations of violence and vulnerability (Guatemala, Colombia); there are even "without an apparent cause," ordinary disappearances. The examples abound and are the sign that the disappearance acquires a validity and persistence that we know undeniable. Moreover, the concept seems to have expanded and thus cover new situations, occur in other contexts, become more flexible, even universalized (Gatti, 2011, 2017). The disappearance is the concept that is used precisely to explain many of these situations for which the available vocabulary falls short