Disappearing People
One of the ways that brutal right-wing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet would terrorize the Chilean people into patriotic submission to his authority was by disappearing people. This was different from simply torturing and executing them. He and his goons certainly did that too. But disappearing people was different. With executions and bodies, families at least had certainty with respect to what had happened to their loved one. With disappearances, they never could be certain that their loved one really was dead. There was always a small part of people that retained some amount of hope that maybe — just maybe — their loved one would show up after being released from years or decades in some prison. It was a brutal way to psychologically torture the family members of the person who had been disappeared and everyone else in society.
In a sense, disappearing people is what the U.S. government has been doing with immigrants that it is sending to El Salvador. Once U.S. officials deliver people into the clutches of El Salvador’s brutal dictatorial regime, the U.S. government ostensibly loses control over them. At that point, people are taken to the country’s infamous terrorism confinement center where they are subjected to torture and indefinite detention and even the possibility of extra-judicial execution.
Equally important, the inmate is denied any contact with the outside world. His family does not know his condition. For all they know, he could be dead. He has been disappeared into the bowels of the terrorist confin
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
