Detenidos Desaparecidos

DD) is the term commonly used in Latin American countries to refer to the victims of kidnappings, usually taken to clandestine detention and torture centers, and crimes of forced disappearance, committed by various authoritarian military dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s, and officially recognized, among others, by the governments of Argentina (1984) and Chile (1991).

[1] The simultaneous and massive appearance of this practice in various countries is considered to be the result of the common training provided by the U.S. Defense department at its School of the Americas in Panama.

The first step of this method consisted in the apprehension of the victims by law enforcement agencies, undercover secret police or paramilitary groups with official support.

Once arrested, the victim was usually subjected to physical and psychological torture sessions, while official channels of information denied relatives any knowledge of the person's whereabouts.

This illegal practice forced, with the passage of time and the fall of the dictatorships that carried it out, the creation of official bodies to clarify these crimes (such as the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons in Argentina or the Commission for Peace [es] in Uruguay) and of a new criminal offense in many of the countries affected, where today the forced disappearance of persons is explicitly punished, in addition to international human rights treaties and conventions.