Lessons From Latin America As The US Reckons With Enforced Disappearances

Lessons from Latin America as the United States Reckons With Enforced Disappearance Post Event UPDATE collage Published: May 12, 2025 For more information, contact: 202-994-7000 or nsarchiv@gwu.edu Subjects Human Rights and Genocide Political Crimes and Abuse of Power Regions Mexico and Central America South America Enforced disappearance is not codified in U.S. law as a standalone crime. Nonetheless, we are starting to see across the United States actions targeting immigrants that could meet the definition. As of late April, the Trump administration has sent 288 people, most of them citizens of Venezuela, to a notorious prison in El Salvador. It has happened with a near-total lack of transparency. Neither the U.S. nor the Salvadoran government has shared the names of these 288 individuals: what we and their loved ones know comes from media leaks or from victims’ legal actions, as in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. All are now being held in a Salvadoran mega-prison in an extra-judicial manner, without charges or any hope of a day in court. This is enforced disappearance. Latin America has a long and brutal legacy of the use of enforced disappearance. But many countries also have proud histories of human rights defenders who have fought the practice effectively. Read more about Enforced Disappearance Watch the recording On April 30, the National Security Archive and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) co-hosted an online conversation with three Latin American experts to learn from their experiences with enforced disappearance. The motivation behind the meeting was a growing sense of alarm, disbelief, and helplessness among many Americans as we witness the Trump administration’s unprecedented actions targeting immigrants in the United States. At the president’s direction, U.S. government agents have seized men, women, and children for detention and deportation without due process. We have seen the images of masked security forces swarming a student outside her home, a mother driving with her kids, workers in a restaurant kitchen. To take them where? Whether the agents are from ICE, DEA, ATF, CPB, or the local police, they don’t always reveal the victim’s destination. They don’t always inform their families that they’ve taken them. They don’t always allow the victim to contact their lawyer. They don’t always bring them before a judge. And now they don’t even always imprison them in the United States. How do we make sense of this? For those of us working in Latin America, the actions of Trump’s security forces ring a deeply disturbing bell. We can’t help but connect what is happening in our country today, right now, to a long history in the Americas of governments’ use of enforced disappearance to punish people considered dissidents. In Latin America, that could mean armed guerrillas or suspected subversives; more often it meant students, teachers, journalists, investigators, indigenous activists, opposition politicians, lawyers, priests. But if the region has a dark history of disappearing its perceived enemies, it also has a proud and powerful tradition of fighting back. People mobilized. They organized. They created strategies to protest the disappearances, demand information, hold hearings, fight in the courts, create new laws, search for the missing, expose injustice, and tell the rest of the world what was happening. That’s why we invited these three experts – these colleagues and friends – to speak to us. Mimi Doretti, Juan Méndez, and Marcela Turati all have direct experience with enforced disappearance and its impact on a society. We need to hear from them. We need to learn from their histories. We need to pull lessons from what they have to tell us about how to fight back. Our conversation is archived for anyone who missed the live event. And go to WOLA’s posting about the webinar for a transcription of the some of the key remarks and a set of powerful conclusions drawn from our speakers’ presentations.