TheDeviated Mourningof the Disappeared: Reimagining Disappearance and Transcending its Tropes

Abstract

Forced disappearance has hindered the development of conventional forms of mourning, but protocols have gradually emerged, establishing canonical ways of facing that difficulty, while the concepts of 'disappearance' and 'disappeared' have been consolidated as effective transnational categories capable of explaining new forms of social violence. This article examines how in the new forms of disappearance the manifestations of mourning systematically deviate from the canon and acquire a complexity that exceeds the established tropes about it. It requires reimagining the dynamics of mourning in the new contexts of disappearance and, especially, in those of 'social disappearance'.

Grief among relatives of disappeared persons in the context of state violence: an impossible process?

“…As Rousseaux (2001) asserts, if the crime stays unpunished in legal terms, grieving could be perceived by relatives as forgetting the loved one. Enforced disappearance shakes the foundations of our representations of life and death, the body, and existence (Gatti & Peris Blanes, 2021). We agree with Haq (2020) that the political dimension of the grieving has to be considered: "The mourners reclaim their attachment with the missing as a form of political protest" (p. 110).…”

Remembering Ex-combatientes: A Visual Enquiry into the Social Memory of Colombia’s Former Combatants

“…This condition of permanent deferral is mirrored by the duration it takes for Muñoz's images to reappear, and the uncertainty as to whether they will resurface. This sense of hopelessness, metonymically delivered by Muñoz's process in Aliento, mediates what Gatti and Blanes (2021) describe as one of the leading tropes of forced disappearance:…”

“…The lack of the victim's body, and an official discourse that repudiates and invalidates their experience create a crisis of identity, reality and grieving. Gatti and Blanes (2021), in the article…”

“…In Latin America today, it would be difficult to find individuals who do not know about forced disappearances or what the figure of the disappeared represents (Gatti & Blanes, 2021). Beyond the legal and institutional recognition of the disappeared as a human rights violation, the disappeared have attained tropes, in the sense of a common, recurring theme or convention associating those forcibly disappeared to "an individual's removal from the rule of law by state or para-state forces and the plunging of that individual into a space of negation" (Gatti & Blanes,p.…”