Team WOLA
Highlights and Conclusions from the April 30, 2025 WOLA–National Security Archive Webinar
Over the past two months, U.S. immigration and law‑enforcement agencies have been detaining migrants and asylum seekers, [TK “and some U.S. citizens”] without promptly disclosing their whereabouts, permitting contact with counsel, or even keeping them on U.S. soil where they are clearly within the reach of the rule of U.S. law. Veteran rights advocates warn that these detentions mirror a practice that Latin American societies know all too well: enforced disappearance.
That was the subject of a nearly two-hour discussion, hosted by the Washington Office on Latin America and the National Security Archive, featuring three renowned Latin American rights advocates who have devoted much of their careers fighting to end enforced disappearances and hold perpetrators accountable. The panel distilled four decades of hard‑won lessons—from Argentina’s military rule, Central America’s conflicts, and Mexico’s present‐day crisis—into guidance for a United States that has begun sliding onto the same dangerous slope.
Lessons from Latin America as the United States Reckons with Enforced Disappearance
“Enforced disappearance is painful. It is a tragedy for families, but also for societies. And it’s not just a human rights violation… When a government takes citizens or others in their territory outside the protection of the law, this is a warning for democracy.”
In introductory remarks, Jiménez framed enforced disappearance as both a human‑rights atrocity and a democratic red flag. She invoked three mothers—Chilean, Mexican, Venezuelan—who are still looking for disappeared loved ones decades, years, or mere weeks later, to show that the pain transcends time and geography.
“We can’t help but connect what is happening in our country right now, today, to a long history in the Americas of the use by states of enforced disappearance to punish people considered dissidents.”
As moderator, Doyle noted chilling similarities between the Trump administration’s recent actions and the darker parts of Latin America’s recent history. She recalled, however, that Latin America “also has a proud and powerful tradition of fighting back” and inventing “strategies to protest the disappearances, demand information, hold hearings, fight in courts, create new laws, search for the missing, expose injustice, and tell the rest of the world what was happening.”
The three invited panelists, Doyle recalled, are emblematic of that experience. “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 here.”
“When the state no longer respects the rule of law, we are all in danger. We can all be accused at any time of being a criminal, a terrorist, or any other name, since nothing needs to be verified. Back then and now, we all know that no one actually disappears. It’s just not an existential status. We are either dead or alive.”
Drawing on 40 years of exhuming clandestine graves and investigating atrocities region-wide, Doretti described how Argentina’s junta used disappearance to eliminate due process and sow terror. She traced EAAF’s birth: prosecutors needed science, families needed someone they could trust more than state institutions, and young anthropologists provided both.
“Disappearances are torture as well. Because the person who is deprived of contact with a family, the person who doesn’t know what’s going to happen to him or her, the person who doesn’t know when this detention will end, the person who is in incommunicado detention, perhaps even in solitary confinement somewhere where nobody knows where they are, that person is being inflicted pain and suffering of a mental nature, even if no physical torture may be happening.”
Méndez blended personal testimony—he was disappeared for days and imprisoned for 18 months—with legal analysis. He helped win the Velásquez Rodríguez v. Honduras judgment, the Inter‑American Court’s landmark ruling that enforced disappearance is a crime against humanity.
“The people [must] understand that victims have rights… even if they were criminals, they have rights [including] not to be disappeared.”
Reporting on 127,000 disappearances in Mexico—mostly committed at a time of formal democracy, mostly by non-state actors with the government’s collusion, acquiescence, or deliberate inaction—Turati emphasized the battle for truth in real time.
Drawing directly from the speakers’ proposals and proven tactics, steps like these can guide U.S. advocates, policymakers, and communities:
The event’s nearly 500 participants asked dozens of incisive questions: more than time would allow. Many of them could be the subject of future events, and our organizations plan to hold more soon.
Argentina’s dictatorship, Central America’s civil wars, or Mexico’s organized crime violence all once seemed distant tragedies to many in the United States. Yet, as the webinar’s speakers made clear, the mechanisms of disappearance are portable, and their first victims are often the marginalized—migrants, students, activists—long before the practice threatens society at large.
The good news is that Latin America also exports resilience: mothers who march, scientists who unearth truth, lawyers who codify new crimes, journalists who refuse to let the missing be forgotten. Those lessons’ arrival in the United States is timely and urgently needed. By acting now—documenting every vanished person, closing every legal loophole, and mobilizing the broadest possible coalition—we can ensure that enforced disappearance never becomes normalized on U.S. soil.
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Lessons from Latin America as the United States Confronts Enforced Disappearance – Washington Office on Latin America | WOLA
