How Autocrats Disappear People and Information, and How We Can Fight Back

A New Lucid Series

I am excited to announce a new Lucid series that will run occasionally over the next months and into the fall. It explores the ways that past and present authoritarian states and parties around the world create silences around objects, histories, events, nature, and people that they have locked up, destroyed, banned, and muted.

It examines the narrowing of knowledge and memory when books vanish from educational institutions and bookstores, art is no longer shown in galleries and museums, documents are removed from archives, and websites and social media accounts go dark, removing statistics on climate change, corruption, public health, state violence, and the economy from public scrutiny.

The series also helps us understand how to fight back against this destruction and silencing. It highlights the work of human rights and climate activists, judges, historians, artists, forensic archeologists, and many others who bring to light what has been cancelled and buried. This is difficult and often dangerous work and it deserves our support, because many organizations that support this work are themselves under autocratic attack.

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On May 20, 2024, the campaign of former president Donald Trump posted a video on Trump's Truth Social account. "What's next for America?" it asked, stating its subject as "what happens after Donald Trump wins." This black-and-white film fantasized that Trump's second presidency enshrined in history for its "creation of a unified Reich."

The 1930s-style images of the leader and the cheering crowd, and the newspaper references to World War One as a recent event, associate Trump with the fascist strongmen who claimed they brought their countries stability. The film "looks back" at Trump's feat of removing state enemies on the scale of old-school dictators ("15 million illegal aliens deported").

As a "Law & Order Restored" message flashes on screen, we see police and ICE arresting a young man who wears a hoodie, building on images that Fox News and other MAGA-allied media outlets associate with immigrant and Black crime. By the time the "Reich" message returns and we see MAGA!! chiseled in stone, we have been prompted repeatedly to immortalize Trump, associate him with past dictators, and forget the faceless millions who must be kept out of bounds, out of circulation, and out of history.

Public outrage at the Nazi reference led the Trump campaign to remove the video, but the events it forecast are now unfolding in America. A year later, it is ICE agents who sometimes wear hoodies, and are also routinely masked to keep them unaccountable and anonymous as they perform the cherished autocratic rituals: tracking state targets, surprising them at home, at work, or on the street, and then disappearing them into prisons, concentration camps, warehouses, basements of government buildings, or into gulags run by foreign partners.

While authoritarians have always vanished people, the term “disappeared” or “missing” comes to us from Cold War Argentina. Between 1976 and 1983, the U.S.-backed right-wing military junta abducted and killed as many as 30,000 people who were accused of being terrorists (the evergreen label for people autocrats want to silence or execute). To avoid accountability and leave no documentation of their crimes, state security forces disposed of the bodies in remote areas or in unmarked mass graves, or threw them from airplanes into the sea.

It fell to the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” –mothers of the disappeared—to expose these atrocities by gathering weekly in the center of Buenos Aires starting in 1977 and marching while holding photographs of their loved ones so that if they were alive they could be found. Their presence as testimonies of disappearance, and the documentary evidence provided by their photographs of their family members, spoke for those made voiceless by state terror.

The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, and the allied group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, created a culture of commemoration and practice of resistance that proved influential throughout Latin America and beyond. These groups could be models for public protest by allies as disappearances in the United States escalate.

Members of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo confront the authorities, Buenos Aires, May 25, 1978. SCANPIX SWEDEN/AFP, via Getty Images.

The Argentinian junta also kidnapped up to 500 children who were given to families of childless regime loyalists. This other category of disappearances involves an established autocratic practice with a lineage that goes from the Nazis (who kidnapped Polish Christian children to give to German families) to Cold War juntas to the current Russian kidnapping of Ukrainian children. Just this week, a 48 year-old Argentinian man born to a left-wing activist mother in a junta detention center was identified via DNA testing as one of those taken decades ago.

It is important to understand the range and methods of disappearances and mutings because they are expanding today as authoritarian leaders and their enablers have more to conceal. Newer autocrats are committing repressions as they consolidate their power: this is the case with Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Trump in America.

Established regimes, such as Russia and China, are proving the maxim that the longer such governments are in power, the more violence, censorship and information manipulation they require to keep secrets buried, discourage protest, and keep up a facade of competency.

Autocrats know that when disappeared people reappear, truths are spoken, and forbidden histories are written, this punctures veils of silence and engineered forgetting, reminds people of the moral collapse that comes from complicity with dictatorship, and complicates the revisionist histories authoritarian states produce and circulate.

The ultimate goal of autocrats is to gain enough power to have a monopoly on who can tell the stories about the past and the present. And yet truth comes out in the end, despite their efforts, because such holes in the heart and the historical record have always been calls to action. Each time we expose a concealment of the truth, or commemorate those who have been silenced by disappearances or imprisonments, we perform an act of justice.

It takes fortitude to try and save what autocrats want destroyed, or uncover what the powerful want to remain buried. It can be hazardous to contest those official narratives, even years after the dictatorship has ended, or to show a photograph of someone who is supposed to be forgotten because their image is a reminder of state repression.

Those who do this courageous work are democratic heroes. This Lucid series honors them.