“Subversives” and “Delinquents”: Disappearance as a Form of Social Cleansing

• In Event: Violent Social Control of Civilians by Armed Groups

Abstract

In court documents highlighted in Gutiérrez Sanín’s 2022 article on paramilitary control and disappearances in Colombia, the leader of the Self-Defense Forces of Magdalena Medio (ACMM), one of Colombia’s most infamous paramilitaries, discussed his organization’s violence targeting practices. Ramón Isaza spoke about disappearing not only guerrillas and their suspected supporters, but also “the people who poisoned our youth” – alleged criminals such as “drug sellers” and “rapists” (44). Gutiérrez Sanín notes, regarding this practice, that “in some cases, disappearances and other forms of violence were used [by the paramilitaries] as a legitimizing tool vis-à-vis ‘the community’” (46). However, this potential use of the tactic does not jibe with conventional wisdom on why armed organizations undertake campaigns of disappearance.

Disappearances are often thought of as a political violence tactic that is employed to shield their perpetrators from international and domestic condemnation via a mechanism of plausible deniability. However, disappearances often involve some show of hand indicating that blame evasion is not the only – and may not be the principal – motivation for perpetrating this kind of violence. I posit that disappearances can also be used to communicate messages from the perpetrator to various intended audiences, including particular subsections of the perpetrator’s domestic population as well as external audiences. These messages, in addition to expressing information about armed organizations’ political projects and competence in the face of threats, also express information about who perpetrators believe belongs within a community and who can be targeted for violence, often in a way that seeks approval from observing populations.

This paper addresses the ways that perpetrators of disappearance employ different varieties of the tactic to both address the communities they rule’s existing perceptions of who belongs versus who does not as well as shape these perceptions to the organization’s purposes. First, I argue that armed organizations will perpetrate what I call “Attributable Abduction” disappearances – disappearances where the abduction component is conducted by easily and intentionally identifiable members of the organization – when they are acting against a population that is already considered an appropriate target for violence within the community. This population may include alleged petty criminals, drug sellers and users, sexual assailants, and sex workers – a general category justifiable through labeling the victims as “delinquents.” Meanwhile, they will perpetrate what I call “Textbook” disappearances – disappearances in which the abductors make efforts to conceal their affiliation, albeit intentionally incompletely for maximum terror – when disappearing alleged members of their political opposition: so-called “subversives” within the community. “Subversive” is an even more subjective and debatable category than “delinquent,” as the definition depends on one’s political orientation as opposed to the ruler’s as well as on thoughts, ideology, and identity rather than alleged misdeeds. This necessitates greater efforts to demobilize the targeted population as one attempts to gain approval from one’s constituent groups within a community.

I explore these issues of social cleansing and control through a case study on the time period Colombia’s National Center for Historic Memory identifies as the country’s peak period of disappearances (1996-2005), in which disappearances were perpetrated by paramilitaries, guerrillas, and the state alike, though paramilitaries dominated the practice’s use.

Author

• Madeleine I Stevens, University of Chicago