“Where are our children?”: Human Rights and Forced Disappearance in Latin America

Abstract

The essay analyzes the Acari Massacre, which occurred on July 26, 1990, to discuss the limits and tensions of state endorsements of human rights violations against black-peripheral populations in Brazil. It aims to debate how forced disappearance constitutes a serious violation of human rights and how, in societies marked by colonial legacies like Brazil, the strategies of torture and murder by state agents are normalized (and updated) into systematic and daily practices of "disappearing" black people. Racism thus enables the justification of summary death and the perpetuation of the vilification that victimizes those who are rendered public enemies of the state. Finally, the essay points out how, in Améfrica Ladina, borrowing the concept from philosopher Lélia Gonzalez, criticism of violence is inseparable from criticism of the universalist and abstract conception of human rights, towards a right radically committed to life, embodied in the struggles of mothers and families of the victims.