Juan Villoro
I met Uruguayan sociologist Gabriel Gatti in the fall of 2019 at Stanford University. It was my first contact with someone who, interestingly enough, is dedicated to studying the disappearance of people. We tuned in immediately because we were facing the same predicament. Our work did not include health insurance, and we were required to have one with “repatriation of remains in case of death”.
Gatti came to the subject because of a dramatic personal background. His family fled the Uruguayan dictatorship when he was a child and settled in Argentina, where his father disappeared shortly after the 1976 military coup. His sister Adriana met the same fate in 1977 and his cousin Simon was 28 days old when he disappeared in 1976 (he would reappear in 2002 under a different name). However, Gatti’s investigations are not animated by victimhood or bitterness. Unlike predators, he does not seek to deny or erase; his task is to give meaning to what apparently has none. The most recent result of this endeavor is “Disappeared. Cartographies of Abandonment“, a splendid book halfway between essay and chronicle.
Gatti begins by defining the political meaning of “disappeared”. The term emerged in Argentina during the military dictatorship to describe those who had suffered an enforced disappearance with state intervention in a context where there were previously civil guarantees, and no information could be obtained. A disappearance is a repressive act that violates the democratic order.
Over the years, the concept has broadened its range, as there are many ways of suppressing identity. There are, for example, the nameless dead of the Spanish Civil War, the victims of organized crime in Mexico, the many people without documents, and the outcasts of post-industrial capitalism who roam the cities like zombies spouting prophecies in a language no one understands.
In the Dominican Republic, Gatti interviews a new version of the midwives dedicated to having people without papers officially “born” on a birth certificate. A good part of this population lacks a civic identity. The same is true in Mexico. In Chiapas, one out of every three peasants does not have documents, and when they try to obtain them, they not only have to prove that they are Mexicans but also that they are not Guatemalans seeking to emigrate illegally to the United States. Strictly speaking, millions of our country’s inhabitants are stateless.
Gatti also studies the systematic theft of babies from poor people in Spain from 1940 to 1990. A network of nuns working in hospitals took advantage of helpless women who gave birth after rape or were unaccompanied by a partner, telling them that their children had died in childbirth. In complicity with the hospital and the Church, they kept the children to give them up for adoption to wealthy families. This began with Franco’s regime but lasted for several decades.
In Uruguay, Gatti studies the forgotten who defy the notion of poverty, the nomadic masses who no longer have recognizable customs. They are stains and shadows in the demography. In his bewilderment, a specialist refers to them as “bugs” without derogatory intent, seeking to define an indefinable species.
I started reading Gabriel Gatti’s book on May 16, 2022; that day, it was announced that, according to official data, Mexico had just surpassed one hundred thousand disappeared. When I finished it on June 13, there were 476 more that had disappeared. Like a clock or a klepsydra, the book measures, page by page, something that is coming to an end.
Gatti begins his chronicle by describing the isolation in the early days of the pandemic. In March 2020, we became less real; our presence went from being a requirement to being an option, and we became symbolically closer to those missing.
Gatti’s study allows us to make a disturbing conjecture: the prevalence of virtual reality is explained, in part, by the many variants of human disappearance.
As fate would have it, my first contact with Gatti had to do with finding a way to dispose of our bodies in the event of death. It was a random sign that I was before someone dedicated to giving another meaning to disappearance, to map abandonment to make it legible and close, like the lines of a hand.
This column was published in Spanish by Reforma on June 17, 2022