"This 176-page report documents nearly 250 "disappearances" during the administration of former President Felipe Calderón, from December 2006 to December 2012. In 149 of those cases, Human Rights Watch found compelling evidence of enforced disappearances, involving the participation of state agents."--Publisher's website.

This volume presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the practice of disappearances in Mexico, from the period of the so-called 'dirty war' to the current crisis of disappearances associated with the country's 'war on drugs', during which more than 80,000 people have disappeared. The volume brings together contributions by distinguished scholars from Mexico, Argentina and Europe, who focus their chapters on four broad axes of enquiry. In Part I, chapters examine the phenomenon of disappearances in its historical and present-day forms, and the struggles for memory around the disappeared in Mexico with reference to Argentina. Part II addresses the political dimensions of disappearances, focusing on the specificities that this practice acquires in the context of the counterinsurgency struggle of the 1970s and the so-called 'war on drugs'. The third section situates the issue within the framework of human rights law by examining the conceptual and legal aspects of disappearances. The final chapters explore the social movement of the relatives of the disappeared, showing how their search for disappeared loved ones involves bodily and affective experiences as well as knowledge production. The volume thus aims to further our understanding of the crisis of disappearances in Mexico without, however, losing sight of the historic origins of the phenomenon.

Enforced disappearance is one of the most serious human rights violations. It constitutes an autonomous offence and a crime under international law on account of its multiple and continuing character. It is not a phenomenon of the past, nor is it geographically limited to Latin America: such scourge is widespread today and on the increase in other continents. For more than twenty-five years, relatives of disappeared people worldwide have insisted on the pressing need for an international legally binding instrument against enforced disappearances. 2006 is the year of the adoption of the International Convention on the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances, which represents the result of several legislative and jurisprudential developments that are duly analyzed in this book. The Convention has been opened for signature in February 2007.

State Crime in the Global Age brings together original writings from leading scholars in the field to explore the many ways that the use and abuse of state power results in grave social harms that outweigh, by far, the consequences of ordinary street crime. The topics covered include the crimes of empire, illegal war, the bombing of civilians, state sanctioned torture, state sacrifice of human lives, and judicial wrongdoing. The book breaks new ground through its examination of the ways globalization has intensified potentials for state crime, as well as bringing novel theoretical understandings of the state to the study of state crime, and exploring strategies for confronting state crime. This book, while containing much that is of interest to scholars of state crime, is designed to be accessible to students and others who are concerned with the ways individuals, social groups, and whole nations are victimized by the misuse of state power.

The book identifies a new human rights phenomenon. While disappearances have tended to be associated with authoritarian state and armed conflict periods, this study looks at these acts carried out in procedural democracies where democratic institutions prevail.

In Paper Cadavers, an inside account of the astonishing discovery and rescue of Guatemala's secret police archives, Kirsten Weld probes the politics of memory, the wages of the Cold War, and the stakes of historical knowledge production. After Guatemala's bloody thirty-six years of civil war (1960–1996), silence and impunity reigned. That is, until 2005, when human rights investigators stumbled on the archives of the country's National Police, which, at 75 million pages, proved to be the largest trove of secret state records ever found in Latin America. The unearthing of the archives renewed fierce debates about history, memory, and justice. In Paper Cadavers, Weld explores Guatemala's struggles to manage this avalanche of evidence of past war crimes, providing a firsthand look at how postwar justice activists worked to reconfigure terror archives into implements of social change. Tracing the history of the police files as they were transformed from weapons of counterinsurgency into tools for post-conflict reckoning, Weld sheds light on the country's fraught transition from war to an uneasy peace, reflecting on how societies forget and remember political violence.