Disappeared Detainees (Spanish:detenidos desaparecidos,DD. DD) is the term commonly used inLatin American countries to refer to the victims of kidnappings, usually taken toclandestine detention and torture centers, and crimes offorced disappearance, committed by variousauthoritarian military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s, and officially recognized, among others, by the governments ofArgentina (1984) and Chile (1991).
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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 itsSchool of the Americas in Panama.[1] 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".[2] Finally, the prisoner was killed and his body was buried clandestinely. Some 12,000[3]of the hostages survived and are considered "ex-disappeared detainees".[4][5]
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.[6]
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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 filinghabeas corpus petitions in the courts. For example, inChile, theAssociation of Families of the Detained-Disappeared and theAgrupación de Familiares de Ejecutados Políticos [es] acted; and inArgentina, the organization ofMothers of Plaza de Mayo and theMothers of Plaza de Mayo (founder organisation) [es].
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 theNational Commission on the Disappearance of Persons inArgentina or theCommission for Peace [es] inUruguay) and of a new criminal offense in many of the countries affected, where today theforced disappearance of persons is explicitly punished, in addition to international human rights treaties and conventions.