Weaponizing Uncertainty: The Politics of Disappearance in Latin America

Existing research explains enforced disappearance as a tactic used to evade blame for violence against civilians, but blame often comes even to those whose victims vanish. In my dissertation book project, I address why rulers use the tactic when it is not effective for avoiding blame. I show that, through disappearances, rulers express information about their political projects to internal and external audiences. Internally, hiding some aspects of violence while revealing others helps rulers maintain control by weaponizing uncertainty: creating terrifyingly destabilizing uncertain environments. Externally, it facilitates friendly observers' ability to turn a blind eye to rulers' human rights abuses, providing benefactors with plausible deniability more so than the rulers themselves.

Rulers emphasize different kinds of disappearances – and different manners of weaponizing uncertainty – within their repertoires of violence to balance their competing demands for domestic social control and external approval. When rulers' monopoly on violence is consolidated, they perceive a civilian uprising as their primary domestic threat and use disappearances to force quiescence. When their monopoly is contested by another armed organization, rulers are more concerned with civilian support for the enemy, shaping their disappearance patterns. Finally, the more sensitive they are to external approval, the more rulers will perpetrate abductions as arrests, displacing guilt onto victims.

I illustrate what ruling state and nonstate actors in Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico meant to express via disappearances, working from a corpus of primary source material collected over ten months of fieldwork. I delve into primary sources as well as the broader historiography of my cases to demonstrate how internal and external conditions changed throughout my periods of interest, in turn changing the dynamics of campaigns of disappearance, causing some types to be emphasized and others to cease to be.