A LONG HISTORY, BUT A RECENT CONCEPT
Another of the difficulties involved in exploring enforced disappearances concerns the fact that, despite the world experiencing this phenomenon for decades, it is still a recent issue in the legal sphere.
The three international instruments set up to combat the phenomenon are: the United Nations Declaration on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance (1992), the Inter-American Convention on Forced Disappearance of Persons (1994), and the aforementioned 2006 International Convention. None of them have been in existence for more than 40 years. In Colombia in the year 2000, the crime of enforced disappearance had barely existed either, stresses López.
His study, however, does not only deal with the case of Colombia, being a document of a global nature. “Enforced disappearance occurs in some 120 states in the world. It is one of the worst crimes in Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, the USA, Russia, Turkey, Nepal...So they (my thesis director and others) told me to write with a vision that could be applied to any geographical framework,” says López. And that is what he did.
Among other things, the thesis provides a deep and wide-ranging historical framework that digs into the origins of enforced disappearance. Although this professor underlines the difficulty of pinpointing the exact origin, the doctrine points to a beginning in WWII through a directive called Nacht und Nebel (German for Night and Fog) signed by Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel.
This decreed that saboteurs captured in occupied territories during the conflict should be tried only if a quick trial could be assured, their guilt declared, and their death sentence decreed; otherwise, they should be transported during the night fog to concentration camps. This directive and the ensuing disappearances were declared war crimes by the Nuremberg Trials in which the allies ruled on punishments for atrocities committed by Adolf Hitler’s regime.
In this historical framework, López eagerly situates the movements of families of disappeared people in Latin America, identifying them as a key element for recognising enforced disappearance as a crime. “During the era of Southern Cone dictatorships, families of disappeared persons put the issue on the hemisphere’s agenda. This meant a big change: they touched the heart of the United Nations and the Inter-American System, which finally paid them attention in relation to disappearances.”
The expert also underlined the importance of women participating in these processes; although the majority of disappeared people are men, it is usually women—mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters—who suffer most from psychological, social, economic, and legal damage after a disappearance. But women have also led the moves that put this crime under a worldwide floodlight. They are not the only ones, however, one of the most representative examples being the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina.