Adam Isacson

Here are notes and embedded video from our very well-attended 4/30 virtual panel, Lessons from Latin America as the United States Confronts Enforced Disappearance, hosted with the National Security Archive, with 3 longtime leaders in the fight against enforced disappearance in Latin America.

The below text is cross-posted from WOLA’s website.

Highlights and Conclusions from the April 30, 2025 WOLA–National Security Archive Webinar

This is enforced disappearance

Over the past two months, U.S. immigration and law‑enforcement agencies have been detaining migrants and asylum seekers 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.

Presentations

1. Carolina Jiménez Sandoval – President, WOLA

“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.

• Definition matters. International law codifies disappearance as state custody, or deliberate state inaction, plus denial of the crime. There is no ambiguity.
• Human impact is paramount. Technical debates must not obscure families’ anguish and the societal damage each disappearance inflicts.
• U.S. exceptionalism is over. A webinar once unthinkable is now necessary because U.S. agencies are adopting tactics once associated with Latin American dictatorships.

2. Kate Doyle – Senior Analyst, National Security Archive

“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.”

3. Mercedes “Mimi” Doretti – Executive Director, Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF)

“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.

• State denial breeds confusion and a maddening sense of unreality. Early in the dictatorship, relatives were told the kidnappings they witnessed had never occurred or that the victims were somehow deserving. The goal was paralysis through lies and denials.
• Families are partners, not witnesses. EAAF put relatives at the center of every investigation—sharing findings, co‑designing searches, putting evidence at the center and building trustful relationships.
• An “ecosystem” approach works. Forensic experts, lawyers, journalists, archivists, and families formed “a human‑rights ecosystem” that can out‑investigate a hostile, dishonest state.

4. Juan E. Méndez – Former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture; survivor, lawyer, scholar

“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.

• Temporary disappearances count. Moving detainees between secret sites, denying them lawyers, or hiding them from families—even for days—meets international definitions of disappearance. In Argentina, these practices began even before the 1976 military dictatorship began, during a state of siege.
• Four minimum state duties: Governments must register every detention immediately; forbid secret sites; notify courts about each detention; and guarantee the detained person contact with counsel and relatives.
• Law needs mobilization. International norms matter only when civil society “makes the state pay a price” for violations. A very good legal framework like the one that exists today is not enough on its own: “We need every man and woman who cares for the fate and whereabouts of every other human being to have their voices heard, have their voices resonate.”

5. Marcela Turati – Mexican investigative journalist, co-founder of Quinto Elemento Lab and Periodistas de a Pie

“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.

• Name the crime. The press once spoke euphemistically of people falling victim to levantones (“pick‑ups”); insisting on using the word “disappearance” forces the state to own its obligations. “You can talk about enforced disappearances when the public servants don’t prevent these disappearances, don’t investigate when the people present a denunciation… So it’s not only when the army abducts or makes detentions.”
• From confusion to complexity. Networks of journalists, data scientists, and victim groups map patterns—routes, mass graves, bureaucratic gaps—to demystify the phenomenon and put the puzzle pieces together, especially when the state can’t be counted on to do that.
• Tech with a human face. Turati’s team’s WhatsApp chatbot, SocorroBot, walks families through the first 24 hours after someone vanishes and connects them to local support.

Key conclusions

1. Disappearance is a deliberate state strategy, not a bureaucratic accident. Whether permanent or “only” temporary, or whether committed by government or non-state actors, secrecy plus denial equals disappearance.
2. Information—and its absence—is a battlefield. Dictatorships lied outright; today’s U.S. agencies exploit data opacity, shifting detainees among ICE and local jurisdictions’ detention facilities or foreign prisons. Documenting transfers, in this example, helps move from confusion to accountability. Sharing credible information means better communication and storytelling, beginning with spreading knowledge “about people’s rights as human beings.” Turati added: “Always look for the audiovisual support. I think that we have to find a way to go public, just to be massive with the public. And I can see the effects of the videos, photos, camera images, satellite images, I don’t know, trying to bring what we know the ‘influencers’ use.” This also requires clarity about who the intended audiences are.
3. Families are catalysts. Argentine mothers in the Plaza de Mayo, Mexican search collectives with shovels and drones, Central American parents seeking to trace children who disappeared along the migration route—relatives sustain the search when institutions fail. “The most important thing in Mexico is, for me as a journalist, to stay close to the victims,” Turati said.
4. Independent expertise matters. The Argentine forensic model showed why civil‑society science must fill gaps left by compromised state forensics. “Both Mimi and Juan have pointed to this sort of creating expertise in a field where there was none,” Doyle observed. “And that’s something that I think we need to think about here in the United States as well.”
5. International law is usable. The United States is a party to the Convention Against Torture. While it shuns the International Convention to Protect All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, existing instruments still prohibit the Trump administration’s practices, offering advocacy hooks. “The public understands instinctively what we mean when we say there’s no due process,” Méndez noted.

Recommendations

Drawing directly from the speakers’ proposals and proven tactics, steps like these can guide U.S. advocates, policymakers, and communities:

• Rapid, independent documentation: We need to closely document what is happening, both through direct information gathering and building public databases.
• Put families at the center: Relatives need immediate notification and frequent accompaniment from experts, mirroring EAAF’s family-first methodology.
• Legal safeguards and reform: Even as a U.S. ratification of the International Convention to Protect All Persons from Enforced Disappearance appears far off, it is urgent to prohibit incommunicado custody, denial of access to counsel, invocation of the Alien Enemies Act during peacetime, and failure to provide at least 30 days to bring habeas corpus challenges before being rendered to another country. Extrajudicial imprisonment, whether at home or in other nations, must never happen.
• Civil society mobilization: U.S. civil society and philanthropy must strengthen coalitions of journalists, tech volunteers, faith groups, and academics to keep cases in the public eye, echoing the Latin American “human-rights ecosystem.” Put a strong emphasis on storytelling, using innumerable tools including podcasts, exhibitions, teach-ins, or webinars like this one, especially to spotlight disappeared migrants and citizens.
• International pressure and solidarity: Work with international bodies like the Inter-American Commission and U.N. Working Group on Enforced Disappearance for emblematic U.S. cases. Tighten bonds with Latin American experts and search collectives for skill-sharing on investigation, trauma care, and public protest tactics.
• Accountability pathways: Document chain-of-command responsibility within DHS and private contractors to preserve evidence for future accountability measures. Never yield on the supremacy of judicial decisions: “I would say that the most alarming aspect of the situation,” Méndez warned, “is the fact that high ranking officers, officials are hinting that they don’t need to pay attention to court orders.”

Conclusion

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.