Abstract
The article proposes a socio-anthropological analysis about the phenomena of missing people. The reflection is built from the dialogue with the work of other researchers and based on the material prepared in my own fieldwork, which includes the follow up of a collective of families of violence victims, interviews, journalistic documentation, criminal statistics, legislation about the subject and police reports. Amid the tangle of actors and utterances set out to build the disappearance as police, family and healthcare problem, the question that emerges is about the possible relationships between disappearance and murders. The argument of this work resides in the fact that the act of making bodies disappear as practice-event provides a common denominator for the police, the militia, and the traffickers, actors who now work together and sometimes compete. Missing bodies and people are part of the confrontational language, and may also be a transaction object. The enforced disappearance corresponds to a power device located between state violence and criminal violence.
Keywords
crime; enforced disappearance; families of victims; police violence