“I Know You Want to Find Me, But You’re Not Going To”
On forced disappearances in Guatemala and the United States
As I waited for Doña Rosalina Tuyuc to meet me in front of the cemetery in San Juan Comalapa in the Chimaltenango department of Guatemala, I studied the city-block-long line of murals telling the story of the local struggle against colonization, internal war, and slaughter: helicopters fluttering over burning villages, soldiers shooting barefoot Indigenous villagers point-blank in the head, locals running for safety into the mountains.
Like many memorials in and around Comalapa, parts of the mural touched on forced disappearances. One poem reads:
Ojalá supiera en donde / fuiste enterrado para poder / visitar tu tumba y / llevarte flores papá.
If only I knew where / you were buried so I could / visit your grave and / bring you flowers, papa.
The term disappearance is increasingly relevant in the United States, as ICE continues to snatch people off the streets and flush them into the maw of the detention camp system. (Here’s a Human Rights First summary on the current scope of the tactic in the US, as well as a report on migrant disappearances in the borderlands.) Family and friends of the abducted go days, sometimes longer, without knowing where their loved-one detained or in what conditions. I’ve been contacted multiple times in past months by desperate family members who know, or suspect, their brother, mother, or father has been arrested by ICE or Border Patrol and now they have no idea where they are, if they’re still in the country, if they’re coming back. They worry they may not even be alive.
As I continue research for a book project on the history of disappearances, I traveled to Guatemala to see how forced disappearances there continue to haunt (often from more than 40 years ago) and have also prompted fights over justice and the preservation of historical memory.
That’s what brought me last week a few hours away from the capital to the bursting green hills of San Juan Comalapa.
It was a warm late morning, and Doña Rosalina kept looking up and saying it was going to rain. At one point, in her slow Spanish (she’s a native Kaqchikel speaker, and also speaks Quiché) she said, “Look, a rainbow.” (Instead of a period or exclamation point at the end of the sentence, proper punctuation to capture her tone would express wonder.) “It has so many colors,” she said.
In the early 1980s, Doña Rosalina’s father, brother, and nephew were all disappeared by the Guatemalan Army. So were many of her friends and a few of her teachers. Later, in the early 2010s, two of her brothers were murdered. When I asked her who was responsible for the latter deaths, she said, “We don’t know, but probably it was the army.”
Doña Rosalina traced the troubles to the massive 1976 earthquake that shook Guatemala. She said the city and much of the region came together in a new way after the earthquake, but so did the army. Standoffs were inevitable. People started protesting the high costs of living, the difficulty of rebuilding after the quake, and the army read it all as a threat. So they started kidnapping people. The term she used was secuestrar, which has a not irrelevant English cognate.
“The army started using a list, they called it the black list, and they had a lot of our names on it, people with the cooperatives, university students. If you were on the list, it meant they were looking for you.”
The use of lists was common during the war, as Roman Gressier writes in NACLA of the Diario Militar, or Death Squad Dossier.
After graduating from nursing school, Doña Rosalina heard that her name was on the list, and decided to flee to Guatemala City. Communicating from city to city was dangerous at the time, even by letter, and so it was more than a year before she learned her father had been disappeared. By the time she came back to the Comalapa area, she said there were soldiers on every corner.
As the army continued to crack down, they tried to dispose of any evidence that would reveal they were snatching people away. Disappearance thus becomes an “attempted destruction of the factuality of the event,” as Michele Castañeda writes in Disappearing Rooms. That housecleaning (one operation in Guatemala was literally called Operación Barrida, or Operation Sweep) is partly why the army opted to disappear instead of kill. There are other reasons, too, why states lean on disappearance as a tactic. (More on that below.)
“They wanted to erase the evidence,” Doña Rosalina said, “but mother earth was able to hug its children, so she could give them back to us later.”
After her father, the army disappeared her brother. And then her nephew. And then many more of her friends, neighbors, and teachers. She survived the war, but the 1996 peace accords didn’t bring her peace. She told me that after many years of searching she had a dream: “My dad talked to me. He told me, ‘I know you want to find me, but you’re not going to.’” The message from her father brought her some comfort, but it hasn’t stopped her search. It’s one of the reasons she and others began planning the memorial for the disappeared.
The person who sold the land, previously used as a military outpost, where the memorial was built told Doña Rosalina that the dead were bothering him there — they wouldn’t let him work. Organizations supporting the search for the disappeared have found and exhumed 176 sets of human remains on the property.
Perched on a damp, pine-shaded hill in the midst of steeply rolling plots of towering corn, the memorial yard has a small, roofed shrine, dozens of white stone graves, and a white stone wall on which are listed 6,000 names of people who have been disappeared. The total number of disappeared during the war in Guatemala is at least 45,000 — likely the most disappearances of any Latin American country in the 20th Century, more than Argentina or Chile. The memorial space in Comalapa also has open graves, like wide pits — about the size of a small room or shed — dark with moss and where some small plants are taking root. Out of these graves searchers retrieved human remains, some of which have been identified, others not.
Doña Rosalina told me they keep the graves open so the dead can speak to them.
While the rate of disappearances in Guatemala has plummeted since the 1980s, governments in the region are leaning back into the tactic. According to Yaneth Martínez, of the Salvadoran human rights organization Cristosal, since the state of exception was put in place in El Salvador in 2022, the organization has received hundreds of reports of people being arrested and disappearing into the country’s brutal prison network.
Central America scholar Jorge Cuéllar writes that in recent years, “disappearance has reemerged — or persisted — as a dependable technique of terror, social control, and revisionism.” Just as Guatemala learned from the Americans, Israelis, and the French about how to conduct “anti-insurgent” warfare against their own people in the 1960s, elite Guatemalan army squadrons have since trained other entities, including Mexican cartels, in the tactics of warfare and terror. Over the last twenty years in Mexico, more than an estimated 130,000 people have been disappeared.
The epidemic is spreading to — as well as through — the US, as the Trump administration renders migrants to Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guantánamo Bay, Eswatini, South Sudan, and Djibouti.
Given the trends, Doña Rosalina told me about the importance of staying vigilant and keeping records. “Forgetting is political,” she said. And forgetting starts as soon as the act, any act — disappearance, insurrection or any aggression — is finished. Forgetting is also imposed by the state, as politicians whitewash or deny crimes, as well as obfuscate, logjam, or delay truth or justice. “We don’t want to forget,” Doña Rosalina continued. “We don’t want to forgive and forget, not without them accepting responsibility.”
Another advocate of the disappeared in Guatemala told me what it’s like to dedicate his life to not forgetting. Paulo Estrada’s dad was abducted and disappeared in Guatemala City when he was just a year old. His dad, Otto Estrada, as well as his uncle, Julio Alberto Estrada, were both named in the notorious Death Squad Dossier. Paulo told me he’s been looking for his dad his whole life. That’s what he went to school and trained in archaeology to do. He now researches and conducts interviews with communities looking for the disappeared. When he identifies a possible grave site, he and colleagues go through the laborious and sometimes years-long permission process to conduct a search and exhumation, and then, eventually, he gets in the dirt and starts digging. “I’m a searcher,” he said.
I asked him why governments kidnap and disappear instead of kill.
“You disappear people to use torture techniques to extract information,” he said. “You’re not leaving chopped up corpses all over. You’re disappearing them. Disappearance imposes a social impact. It’s a pluri-offensive crime, a perpetual torture. Every day, a perpetual torture, dripping all the time, it doesn’t stop.”
Many of the people I spoke with described that same characteristic of disappearances: their unsettling lack of horizon. “The bodies want to rest,” Raúl Najera, of the Human Rights Office of the Archbishop of Guatemala, told me. “The family wants to rest. Disappearance robs them of that rest.”
I attended a hearing in the long-slogging trial of the Death Squad Dossier a couple days after I talked to Estrada, who was sitting in the front row of the audience. Lawyers for the families of the disappeared began the hearing by, one-by-one, expressing their “complete lack of confidence” in the government prosecutor Noé Rivera, who they claim is biased towards the accused génocidaires. I spoke with multiple people at various agencies and organizations who said that since Guatemala’s attorney general, Consuelo Porras, took office in 2017, state prosecutors, including Rivera, have repeatedly and consistently thrown sand in the gears of criminal cases involving genocide and disappearance.
Officials with the Forensic Anthropology Foundation of Guatemala, or FAFG, told me that the attorney general’s office is not only slow-walking legal cases, but is, by erecting a bureaucratic wall of paperwork and burdensome permitting requirements, preventing archaeologists from searching for the disappeared. Claudia Rivera, director of FAFG, said the attorney general’s office, since 2022, began to “bombard us with requests.” She called it a “politics of saturation” and a clear attempt to slow down their work.
After a four-hour session, with lawyers on both sides back-and-forthing accusations about the fitness and impartiality of the state prosecutor, the judge pushed back the hearing on merits to Jan. 19, 2026. The families then returned to the long wait, the seemingly endless search.
Back at the memorial in Comalapa, Doña Rosalina told me that despite the difficulties and setbacks, she isn’t resting. She said she and many others were committed to the truth and bringing peace back to these lands. Referring to the plot where her father was likely tortured and killed, she said, “Before it was a place of screams and pain. But now this is their place” — the place of the dead. “We come to speak with them.”
She said that while the dead — the “guardians of the place” — can’t taste, they can smell. That’s one of the reasons she and others come to offer them sweets and flowers. I watched as she laid out a line of jocotes, small and delicious fruits popular in Central America, balancing them on rocks. She picked up one fist-sized stone, turned it over and kissed it, then set it back on the ground.
“The hope is gone now,” Doña Rosalina said. And then, a moment later, she took it back.
“There’s always hope. The universe has a great responsibility. You always hope to get an answer before you die.”
The responsibility, she said, is all of ours.
John, glad to see you made it to the Land of Eternal Disappearances--I trust you are privy to the Future Security Initiative presentation on "Mujeres Achis" by photo journalist Victor Blue. His focus is the massacres outside of Rabinal. I have written about these situations in my book, The Guatemala Reader and have a few other sources of information I'll share via email. Cheers, Mark