Cities of Air: Data Visualization and Architectural Memory in the Art and Literature of Forced Disappearance

Recently published figures of the total number of disappeared persons since Mexico's former president FELIPE CALDERÓN escalated the Mexican drug wars in 2006 (supported by a multibillion-dollar aid package from the United States) puts the number somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 people.¹ However, these numbers are likely much higher, since this only reflects formally reported cases of missing persons. Exact figures are difficult to come by because of the guilt-by-association attached to cartel-related disappearances and because of the complicit role that state agencies and law enforcement have played and continue to play in the ongoing violence and disappearances.² Family members, friends, and neighbors are reluctant to report missing persons, leaving national and international human rights organizations to estimate figures using a variety of data-extrapolation methods and new digital forensic tools. The trauma of unaccountable disappeared persons has left an indelible mark on generations of people throughout the Americas, having become especially acute in the wake of the anti-leftist coups of the 1970s. It pervades much of the recent literary and artistic output of those countries most affected by disappearances, not least because many of those who have been forcibly disappeared include a disproportionately large number of left-wing artists, writers, and activists themselves.

When the United Nations formed the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances in 1980, nine of the fourteen states detailed in the ensuing report were American nations.³ Precipitated by ongoing crises in the Americas, Southeast Asia, and Africa, the working group formed in order to take a global view of an issue that up to then had been treated as localized, independent acts of mass violence. But by categorizing forced disappearance as a developing international concern, the working group also recognized that state and paramilitary forces were leveraging the technique in response to an increasingly globalized mass media (which seemed to normalize and thereby legitimize mass disappearance as a global phenomenon) and in tandem with transnational Cold War coalitions (like the Southern Cone dictatorships who carried out the infamous anticommunist campaign known as Operation Condor). The ordinary mechanisms of international accountability—visibility, witnesses, and concrete evidence—are themselves the target of and motivation behind forced disappearance. Forced disappearance, as opposed to genocide, created for the state and for paramilitary groups a ready means of deniability.⁴ Without bodies, testimonies, or verifiable evidence, there is no easily prosecutable crime or sustainable justification for intervention, nor is there an obvious means for families to mourn those who are gone.

The responses of international human rights groups and those of artists and authors have increasingly diverged in their respective strategies and, more significantly, in their respective approaches to data collection and thereby to accountability. The UN's working group, for example, has of late become more focused on new surveillance technologies and methods of data collation in order to hold regimes and paramilitary groups legally accountable for the dead and missing. Data visualization in particular has come to occupy an especially important place in the strategies, rhetoric, and policy recommendations of human rights groups because data visualization can more "effectively communicate their messages and findings to targeted audiences" in a "more accessible and compelling" way than traditional methods, and it also can aggregate massive amounts of otherwise disparate data into a manageable and simplified interface that is navigable in real time.⁵

By contrast, novelists, poets, artists, journalists, and activists have been and remain skeptical of technological means of reckoning the disappeared. They regularly identify the ways that these new visualization techniques repeat, and perhaps even more deeply entrench, the very same structural inequalities and violent abuses of power that enable forced disappearance in the first place. In his poem "Green Areas", Chilean poet Raúl Zurita writes that "some cows were lost in the logic" and that those cows that do "finally come wandering" will "never be able to be seen … / because they live in the non-Euclidean geometries."⁶ Originally published in 1979 in the immediate wake of...