New Wine, Old Bottles? A Review of Gabriel Gatti’s Desaparecidos (2022)

Abstract

New Wine, Old Bottles? A Review of Gabriel Gatti’s Desaparecidos (2022) Joseph Wager (bio) Gabriel Gatti, Desaparecidos: Cartografías del abandono (Turner 2022), ISBN 9788418895371, 320 pages. Latin America’s experience of terror under dictators in the second half of the twentieth century and its robust civil-society response brought enforced disappearance to international attention. This attention has been integral to advances in international human rights law, most notably in the form of the International Convention [End Page 354] for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (ICPPED). Entered into force in 2010, the legally binding ICPPED has triple-digit signatories and represents the first instrument of international human rights law to prohibit disappearance. The ICPPED follows the contours of the Southern Cone legacy and defines enforced disappearance as the: deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.1 How to approach disappearance today, with international law as an implicit interlocutor, is the topic of Gabriel Gatti’s newest book, Desaparecidos: Cartografías del abandono (The Disappeared: Cartographies of Abandonment). Of Uruguayan extraction, Gatti is now a sociology professor at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. He is a leading figure on the systematic extermination of many thousands in the Southern Cone. Disappearance has been inscribed in Gatti’s biography: his father, sister, brother-in-law, and cousin were disappeared. For decades, he has embarked upon a sociology of the “gut” and “shoes,” bringing an embodied awareness to the academic study of this family legacy in powerful works such as Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay.2 His latest study exchanges the tangible gut and shoes for the intangible rumor: “I follow the rumor, that of the desaparecido,” which implies a concomitant adjustment in method and definition of the object of study.3 In this new work, Gatti assays an accounting of the overflow of desaparecidos beyond the enforced-disappearance genealogy of those deemed political dissidents in the Southern Cone to the proliferation of the term in contemporary human-rights discourse. From missing migrants in the Sonoran desert to stateless people in the canefields of the Dominican Republic, from the growing population of unhoused people in San Francisco to babies robbed in Spanish hospitals, Gatti tracks the category desaparecidos as one articulating abandonment across far-flung locales and juridically unconnected situations. Such an embrace entails personal and intellectual conflict for Gatti, as he is quick to point out. Not only do the new ways of discussing and identifying disappearance above not conform to his biography but they also fall outside the strictures of international human rights law. In jeopardy, then, is the normative advancement enshrined in the ICPPED. Yet this advancement itself warrants interrogation. The ICPPED has not provided meaningful relief in the vast majority of cases. To give one example, between 1980 and September 2020, the UN Working Group, which helped shape the ICPPED, “has sent a total of 58,606 case files to 109 States requesting search and investigation of the enforced disappearances. The number of disappearance cases under active consideration by the Working Group stood at 46,271 in 92 States as of May 2021.”4 And this only [End Page 355] captures cases that have been accepted in international fora, which already comprise a highly filtered number of cases. To offer another example, Mexico recently crossed the threshold of 100,000 officially registered disappeared, though international mechanisms would not recognize most of these cases as enforced.5 Gatti tackles these issues, the lack of relief and the tension in classifying persons as disappeared, head on, attending to the use of desaparecidos from the ground up, as it were. At stake in the pressing debate on disappearance is the privileging and socio-juridical legitimation of enforced disappearance at the expense of other forms of disappearance; thus, Gatti takes seriously the rumor to counter the category as understood in its Southern Cone...