Mundane disappearance: The politics of letting disappear in Brazil

Abstract

Every year between 20 and 25,000 people ‘go missing’ in São Paulo state in Brazil. But in Brazilian law disappearance is just a fato atípico, an ‘atypical occurrence’. There is no causal relationship between act and violence to be legally found. Nor, it seems, is there a pursuit to know. In a region well recognised for political disappearance, I ask for a deeper and historicised consideration of how disappearance has worked politically, and why it might be acutely important at the current juncture where mass graves have a kind of axiomatic enigma. Doing so allows for a thorough disaggregation of how conditions of passive government and a lack of pursuit – letting disappear – shape the terrain of both extreme suffering and contemporary political ordering.

Keywords:

• disappearance
• the politics of knowledge
• containment
• organised crime
• Latin America
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

This monograph and related work has benefited immeasurably from discussions with generous colleagues and peers, including at Harvard University Department of Anthropology, the University of Chicago Department of Anthropology, Duke University Brazil Initiative, the Latin America Centre at Oxford University, Wolfson College at Cambridge University, the Graduate Institute in Geneva and the Latin American Studies Congress in Boston in 2019. Special thanks go to Max Curtis, Eliana Carneiro, David Doyle, Ieva Jusionyte, Márcia Hattori, Anna Villareal, William Mazzarella, Anthony Pickles, Darryl Li, John French, Gray Kidd, Flávia Medeiros, Rebecca Tapscott, Leigh Payne, Robert Samet, Laurie Denyer Willis, Yael Navaro and Sarah Wagner, for reading material, inspiration, hosting talks, and providing intangible, life-giving collegiality.

Above all, to Débora, Neide, Mariana, Sandro and Otávio, your patience, grace and kindness are a model for utopia.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Data from the Secretary of Public Security of São Paulo compiled by the Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública.

2 For outstanding recent considerations see: Edkins (2011), Karl (2014), Godoy (2015), Ferrandiz et al. (2015) and Wagner (2015).

3 Within one month of giving his deposition, Colonel Malhães was dead. Newspapers reported that he had been killed during a home invasion, though his wife was unharmed. The Chair of the Rio de Janeiro Commission spoke openly of his death as a queima de arquivo – ‘wiping the slate clean’, or, literally – ‘torching of the archives’.

4 A pseudonym

5 Eduardo Cunha, a representative from Rio de Janeiro state, was charged with diverting money to, among other places, an HSBC bank account in Switzerland.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graham Denyer Willis

Graham Denyer Willis is University Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and Latin American Studies in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge.