The True 'Desaparecidos'

The article discusses how the relatives of the disappeared are handling us a model for how other humans can use the forces of globalization to make this world a less threatening home for us all. When grieving relatives in places like Chile, Guatemala showed bystanders images of their missing kin in celluloid, they were making present, material, and lifelike what had been phantasmagorically removed from their hands. Making the violence instituted by arbitrary rulers globally visible was a particularly apt response to disappearance because that extreme form of repression originated, in fact, in a strategy of the dictatorship that had a global component from the start.

Duke Scholars

Author Ariel Dorfman Literature