Deaths and Disappearances in Migration to Europe: Exploring the Uses of a Transnationalized Category

Abstract

The high number of persons lost, missing, or dead without confirmation of decease in the Euro-Mediterranean in the context of migration and seek of asylum pose a challenge to the technical and conceptual tools available in order to account for their lives. This article explores the reach and possible uses of the category of enforced disappearance. The genealogy of enforced disappearance in Latin America in the 1970s is presented and discussed in terms of its legacies and teachings, like the importance of distinguishing disappearances from deaths. The recent incorporation of “disappearances in context of migration” as a matter of concern in explorative studies of the UN Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances is subsequently exposed and analyzed. Indirect, outsourced, or externalized state agency, creation of spaces of abandonment from the states, and emergence of spaces of indeterminacy between life and death are some of the aspects related to migratory routes to Europe tackled by the recommendations of the Working Group. Finally, the text explores the affinity between migrants’ disappearances and other contemporary forms of exclusion or expulsion which may be subsumed under the category of “social disappearances.”

Nombrando lo que no tiene nombre: pensando la “desaparición” de migrantes en la frontera mexicano-estadounidense (Arizona)

“…Esa falta de certeza, esa incertidumbre en torno al paradero de los migrantes no se traduce en un uso generalizado, por los agentes entrevistados en Tucson, de las categorías desaparecido o desaparición como pensábamos que sucedería. Sosteníamos esta idea en varios motivos: primero, porque la empiria nos confirma que esa categoría está siendo usada en situaciones muy numerosas, incluyendo algunas similares a las de Tucson, esto es, en contextos de tránsito migratorio (Kovic, 2018;Schindel, 2019b); segundo, porque en ese lugar, como en otros que se han analizado con la categoría desaparición, el estatuto de vivo o muerto era una incertidumbre; finalmente, y, sobre todo, porque en Tucson se replican muchos de los elementos propios a las desapariciones (separación de cuerpo y nombre, centralidad de la disciplina forense, prácticas de búsqueda y de conteo, quiebre del sentido, etc.). Ahora bien, en Tucson, los agentes con los que trabajamos en nuestra investigación hacen en general uso de otras fórmulas que consideran más ajustadas a la situación.…”

“…En esa circulación, la categoría se adaptaba a las situaciones locales y concretas -es el caso de Colombia, también el de México (Gatti e Irazuzta, 2019)-a pesar de no coincidir exactamente con la definición jurídica ni con lo que le dio origen. Aunque se pueda cuestionar si desaparición es el concepto apropiado (Anstett, 2017), o al menos apropiado para algunos casos (Ferrándiz, 2010;Gatti, 2011;Mandolessi, 2014), es innegable que este es usado hoy para situaciones muy lejanas a esas "originarias" (Gatti, 2020), entre otras, las migraciones en el Mediterráneo 3 (Schindel, 2019b), pero también para el tránsito entre México y EE.UU. (Kovic, 2018 4 ; Reineke, 2016a).…”

Death at the Border: Revisiting the Debate in Light of the Euro-Mediterranean Migration Crisis

“…It followed that opponents’ uncertain fate became a hotly contested and political issue, with families and activists calling for states to admit their deaths (rather than to save their lives). As Estela Schindel (2019) documents, today’s border deaths display a few similarities. There are major uncertainties regarding what happens to migrants along their dangerous journey to Europe, which leads to situations in which neither life nor death can be ascertained.…”

“…Tazzioli (2015) suggests that, while they remain alive and escape death, they are not really “saved,” in the sense that they are likely to experience difficult living conditions: Some will end up in the camps designed to host unwanted migrants, others will be sent back to their country (where their life will sometimes again be put at risk), while still others will live in the shadow, in illegal or semilegal conditions that deprive them from many fundamental rights. Estela Schindel (2019) similarly notes that dead/disappeared migrants can be envisaged as part of a larger group of people who suffer from a kind of existential vulnerability, as they are victims of brutal forms of “expulsions” characteristic of advanced capitalist societies (Sassen, 2014).…”

Border Deaths

“…The terror inflicted by the military juntas in Argentina, Chile and Guatemala relied on a shared strategy: forcing the family, comrades and beloved of the 'disappeared' into a state of collective fear and a permanent social and existential limbo with no hope of seeking justice before the courts. Counting on impunity, it inflicted a sense of never-ending (or unachievable) mourning to the families of the disappeared (Gatti 2014;Riquelme 1994;Schindel forthcoming). Such a scheme of terror was brought to an end by the political activism of the Argentinian Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo, who developed their political campaign around the refusal to accept the death of their beloved before the state.…”