The number of disappearance: trajectories in the tally of victims of forced disappearance in Latin America

Abstract

ABSTRACT The “metric turn” is shaping human rights knowledge, governance and politics globally. This article seeks to contribute to the emergent analysis of numbers in human rights matters from a Latin American perspective. We explore a phenomenon that is hard to count; the number of victims of forced disappearance –persons who are kidnapped and murdered, and whose bodies are disposed of. And we study it in three contexts of political institutional violence on the continent – the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990), the armed conflict of Colombia (1958–), and México's dirty wars (1964–1998) and narco-conflicts (2002–). Focusing on numbers' liveliness, we draw from interviews, institutional documents and archive analysis to examine the trajectory of the number of forced disappeared persons and how it mobilizes and is shaped by human rights concerns. Transitivity is crucial in the trajectory and liveliness of numbers. Challenging the view that numbers only prove effective when decontextualized, we show that transitivity is a mathematical, cognitive, and political achievement, and identify the effects of transitive but also of referential and provisional numbers in the human rights field. Particularly, how they contribute to the acknowledgement and handling of human rights violations, pushing for the production of accountability regimes.