Pío Baroja once said (trying to emphasize the idea that death is only understood from the world of the living) that there are no more dead than those carried by the living. It is therefore pertinent to emphasize that in all cultures, despite the significant diversity of rituals, this process of accompanying the deceased includes the material remains of the deceased as an inexcusable ingredient.
An empty coffin is the painful and frustrated culmination of a life cycle. The absence of a body hides from the mourners the certainty of the fatal event, fertile ground for uncertainty about the fate of the absent.
The practice of forced disappearance has its origins recognized in Adolf Hitler in his Decree of Night and Fog, of December 7, 1941. In said decree it was provided that people detained in occupied territories were transferred to Germany, where they disappeared without a trace. In the midst of the Cold War, between the years of 1966 and 1989, it is known that in Latin America there were close to ninety thousand people disappeared, as a consequence of the military dictatorships of the time. As Dr. Eligio Cruz Leandro, guest editor of this issue in Mexico, comments, this scourge “gained strength as a mechanism of political repression starting in 1960. One of the characteristics of the so-called “dirty war” was persecution, torture, and disappearance of a large number of people, as a systematic practice against people opposed to the regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that remained in power for more than 70 years”.
During the PAN governments between 2000 and 2012, this practice took off again, notably led by organized crime groups and state military forces. The situation has remained similar and despite the fact that the current government boasts of having made progress on the issue, the real situation is that (as the guest editor comments) “at almost five years of this government, given the dimension of this collective national tragedy and the pain of many families, these actions [carried out by the government] can be considered irrelevant, considering that thousands of people continue to disappear, without identifying them, and that others continue to disappear for the same reasons.” As Bob Dylan told us in his song Blowing in the wind: “How many more deaths will it take to realize that there have been too many.”
For all of the above, this issue of the journal INTER DISCIPLINE entitled Missing persons has vital relevance in the times we live in. In its dossier there are works related to the Mexican reality, but it also includes a proposal on the disappeared in Argentina. It also contains an interview with Dr. Rosalía Castro, cofounder of a group of seeking mothers.
The section Independent Communications consists of eight papers on different interdisciplinary topics. The issue also covers two book reviews.