¿Donde están? Pretrial detention and the practice of forced disappearance in Guatemala

Abstract

Cold War counterinsurgency campaigns pioneered the practice of forced disappearance during Guatemala's genocidal civil war (1960–1996). It was a systematic practice of violent repression that did not necessarily end with the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords. Today, more than a quarter century later, criminal organizations, drug cartels, and transnational street gangs not only disappear people in the dead of night but also experiment with ever more sophisticated ways of doing so. One recent innovation has been to have people arrested on false charges and then disrupt their legal proceedings to such an extent that they disappear—from society, certainly, but also from the criminal justice system. This article, in response, follows the case of someone held in pretrial detention for 1805 days to assess how and to what effect criminal and state actors weaponize administrative incompetence to subtract people from society.

¿donde están?

Law enforcement officials arrested Jorge Fernandez, a middle-aged businessman of some financial success, outside his Guatemala City home on 27 October 2016. ¹ A municipal judge would eventually dismiss his five counts of fraud, citing a lack of evidence, but not until Jorge spent the next 1805 days in pretrial detention. Held inside a desperately underfunded prison facility, one operating at over 500% capacity (CIEN, 2015; see also Roche, 2021), Jorge endured 82 postponed hearings and thus waited nearly 5 years for his one day in court. “I’ve disappeared,” he told me on his 243rd day of detention. He said something similar on his 864th day, and then again on his 1268th. At some point Jorge decided to strike back, pursuing a self-directed study of pretrial detention. With nothing more than a pencil and a few scraps of paper, he spoke, by his own account, to some four hundred detainees about their experience of the system and in the end compiled a series of notes on pretrial detention in Guatemala. His experiences and observations, when paired with my own extended fieldwork across this country's pretrial detention centers, help to provide an unexpected answer to a painfully familiar question in Guatemala: ¿Donde están? Jorge answered the question on his 939th day of detention. “Where are the disappeared?” he asked out loud. “We are in jail.”

This article focuses on the abuse of pretrial detention in Guatemala, assessing not only the astounding bureaucratic failures that allow individuals such as Jorge to be locked up for years without a conviction but also those actors who weaponize this administrative incompetence to disappear people from society. Because Jorge was not alone. Over the course of my fieldwork in pretrial detention centers across Guatemala, detainees repeatedly described themselves as “lost,” “misplaced,” or “forgotten.” These were men whose families knew where they were, but whose files had dissolved into administrative limbo. Interviews with guards, lawyers, and administrators also allowed Jorge's account to be read not as singular testimony but as an analytic window into a wider carceral practice rooted in wartime tactics. The history of such tactics runs deep.

Cold War counterinsurgency campaigns during Guatemala's genocidal civil war (1960–1996) pioneered the practice of forced disappearance in Latin America (CEH, 1999; see also Dulitzky, 2019), with state security forces abducting, torturing, and killing some 45,000 students, teachers, politicians, farmers, children, and priests (REMHI, 1998; see also Franco, 1999; Ortiz, 2002). It was a systematic practice of violent repression that did not end with the signing of the Peace Accords (United Nations Peacemaker, 1996). Today, more than a quarter century later, criminal organizations (Escobar, 2019), drug cartels (UNODC, 2012), and transnational street gangs (Fontes, 2018) not only disappear people in the dead of night but also experiment with ever more sophisticated ways of doing so. One recent innovation has been to arrest people on false charges and then disrupt their legal proceedings to such an extent that they disappear—from society, certainly, but also from the criminal justice system. “The hardest part about getting out of jail,” Jorge explained to me after his release, “was proving to [government] administrators that I was actually inside the jail.”

The abuse of pretrial detention in Guatemala poses conceptual challenges to scholarship on the state, sovereignty, and the disappeared. Today, most scholars agree that the practice of forced disappearance produces uncertainty (Weld, 2013). Neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent, the disappeared exist in a state of suspended development. The Guatemalan sociologist Carlos Figueroa Ibarra (1999) probably said it best when he titled his book on the disappeared “those who will always be nowhere.” And yet Jorge's case upends this familiar narrative in some crucial ways. For one thing, Jorge was never nowhere. He was also not just anywhere. Criminal actors disappeared Jorge inside a very specific state institution. His family found him the next day, but they could not get him out—because Jorge (bureaucratically speaking) was not there (Denyer Willis, 2021: 300). Riddled with typos and misplaced for months, Jorge's case file could not connect him to the very archive that Michel Foucault (1977) critiques so well in his work on the modern prison. The carceral state, Foucault observes, is always watching, documenting, and filing, with administrative and regulatory practices producing intricate systems of control. Visibility is a trap, Foucault (1977: 200) warns. Yet disappearing can also be a problem for prisoners. My fieldwork encounters with Jorge and with dozens of his cellmates demonstrate how and to what effect criminal actors block pretrial detainees from accessing the governmental mechanisms that render them legible to the state. The net effect is not only a terrifying degree of uncertainty for these detainees but also a new era of forced disappearances—not by the state or despite the state but rather through the state.

Disappeared

Jorge's arrest had the feel of an abduction. A pair of uniformed police officers handcuffed him outside of his home in the middle-class suburbs of Guatemala City, citing a warrant for his arrest, and then a plainclothes officer emerged from the squad car. He had a gun in one hand and a cellular phone in the other. The police officer handed Jorge the device, and when he put the phone to his ear, the voice on the other end of the line demanded US$1 million or Jorge's full cooperation in a money laundering scheme. The plan went something like this: As the owner of several independent gas stations, Jorge would purchase gasoline from a criminal organization that smuggled fuel out of Mexico. “They were obviously fishing for someone, for anyone,” Jorge told me on his 243rd day of detention. Jorge had always purchased fuel from registered providers and had no interest in breaking the law. He also did not have US$1 million. “They didn’t know me,” he said. “They just knew that I owned some gas stations.” Jorge refused to participate in the plan, and so the uniformed officers arrested him on what a judge (nearly 5 years later) would understand to be false charges. “The problem is that once I entered the [pretrial detention] centre,” Jorge told me on his 933rd day of detention, “I disappeared.”

Jorge's disappearance was not without context. Over the last half century, a combination of processes, some of them specific to Central America, structured the conditions of his abduction. The first is Guatemala's civil war (1960–1996). In the early years of the conflict (Jonas, 1991), before the military perpetrated acts of genocide against the Maya (Nelson, 1999), the National Police played a key role in state repression (Weld, 2014), with officers working alongside an increasingly militarized government to suppress dissent (Schirmer, 1998). Tasked with internal security, the National Police engaged in surveillance, torture, and extrajudicial killings (Krujit, 1996). They disappeared some 45,000 Guatemalans, along the way normalizing the image of officers emerging from a squad car to detain law-abiding citizens on false charges (Levenson-Estrada, 1994). The 1996 Peace Accords disbanded the National Police (Warren, 1998), replacing it with what many hoped would be a more democratically minded National Civil Police (Byrne et al., 2000), but the war's legacy of impunity and corruption continued well into the postwar era (Impunity Watch, 2008). “I don’t think it is unusual (extraño) for a police officer to kidnap someone,” Jorge told me on his 243rd day of detention. “That's what [police officers] do in Guatemala. That's what they have always done.”

The second process underlying Jorge's abduction is postwar violence. Soon after the signing of the 1996 Peace Accords, the rise of transnational street gangs (Levenson, 2013) and organized crime (Arnson et al., 2011) combined with drug cartels (Fielding and Giacomello, 2013; UNODC, 2014) and rampant government corruption (UNODC, 2012; Taft Morales, 2018) to make Guatemala City one of the most dangerous places on earth (Wilson, 2009; Dudley, 2016). Across a decade of so-called peace, more civilians were shot, stabbed, and beaten in Guatemala City than were killed in the active war zone of Iraq (Restrepo and García, 2012). The average Guatemalan criminal trial also lasted more than 4 years, while only around 3% of homicides resulted in a conviction (Grann, 2011). “Guatemala is a good place to commit murder,” one international observer remarked, “because you will almost certainly get away with it” (Painter, 2007). One consequence of this postwar violence has been the imbrication of state and criminal actors. Today, criminal actors in Guatemala perform state functions, from the collection of taxes (Sridhar, 2007) to the administration of justice (Cruz, 2010), while state agents support illicit enterprises ranging from extortion rackets (Fontes, 2016) to postwar death squads (McKinley, 2007). The plainclothes officer who handed Jorge the cell phone back in 2016 could have been a state agent working for a criminal organization. He could have also been a criminal actor posing as a police officer. “I don’t think the distinction matters,” Jorge shrugged on his 864th day of detention. “Either way, I’ve been disappeared.”

Jorge's unlawful detention was also made possible by a third, and related, historical process: the government's strong-fisted (mano dura) response to postwar violence (Golob, 2023). Mirroring broader Central American trends, these tough-on-crime policies included militarized policing (WOLA, 2020), extrajudicial killings (Bargent, 2013), and the relatively new practice of mass incarceration. While there is a well-documented history of exporting U.S. models of incarceration around the world, especially to Latin America (Gilmore, 2007; Wacquant, 2009; Ross, 2013), postwar Guatemala has confronted a steep learning curve made only more precipitous by an antiquated prison system (Wilson, 2009). Since the end of the country's civil war, the state has committed less than 1% of its annual budget to managing and maintaining the country's twenty-two formal prison structures. The pretrial detention center that held Jorge, for example, consistently sits at 500% capacity (CIEN, 2015) and the effects are observable. On Jorge's 1715th day of detention, we spoke in a prison yard packed with detainees. These men were living cheek to jowl, and I remember mentioning to Jorge that it would be completely possible to lose track of someone in this crowd. “This is how people disappear inside the system,” Jorge replied. “They get lost. The guards even forget that they are here.”

In Guatemala, these three processes—genocidal civil war, postwar violence, and government policies that prioritize incarceration and limit due process—have culminated in the widespread and systematic abuse of pretrial detention (IACHR, 2017). This phenomenon is not specific to Guatemala. An ever-increasing number of Latin Americans live in carceral states where more than half of the prison population has not yet been sentenced: Paraguay (77.9%), Bolivia (69.9%), Uruguay (69.7%), Venezuela (63%), Honduras (53.1%), Panama (53%), and Guatemala (51.8%) (Castro, 2019: 121; see also Fondevila and Quintana-Navarrete, 2021). And while the Spanish word carcel has become a catch-all throughout Latin America, encompassing both pretrial detention and prison, these two institutions are not only constitutionally distinct entities but also ideologically and architecturally different constructions. Modern prisons promise at least the pretense of reform, with architectures that aspire (even if only on paper) toward the disciplining of prisoners into liberal, democratic citizens (Salvatore et al., 2001). Pretrial detention centers, however, have never been intended as anything more than short-term holding tanks. This is why the use of these centers as long-term detention facilities has since made absurd that familiar image of the kneeling prisoner from Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977: 169–70). This drawing of a man on his knees in front of a central inspection tower beautifully animates Foucault's thesis about prison subjectivity, but Jorge outright chortled at the picture when I showed it to him on his 939th day of detention. “No one is watching us here,” Jorge quipped. “This place doesn’t even have a guard tower.”

Deformed

I first met Jorge on his 243rd day of detention. He had an unruly beard and wore a pair of oversized pants that he belted with some shoelaces. His notebook and pencil were the only items that lent him any semblance of coherence. Proudly embodying what Antonio Gramsci describes in his own Prison Notebooks as the “organic intellectual” (Gramsci, 1992), Jorge had already been at work on his study of pretrial detention for several months, enumerating a long list of imperatives for those who might also have been disappeared. Some of his suggestions are practical: “Number 23—Read the entire arrest warrant and check your name for misspellings.” “Number 38—Never leave the police officer alone with your vehicle. The officer may plant false evidence.” “Number 82—Demand to see your case file. Read it and understand it.” A few of his imperatives are admittedly kind of funny: “Number 16—If you have more than one romantic partner, only have one of these partners visit you at a time.” Others are heartbreaking. “Number 75—Think of [your abduction] as an adventure on a boat or a submarine. Number 76—Do not cry in front of your visitors. They are also depressed.” “Number 81—You must accept the reality of where you are.” This last imperative caught my attention, especially because of its attention to place. “Where are you?” I asked Jorge. We again spoke in the prison yard, once more pressed shoulder to shoulder with other detainees. “Where am I?” he asked. “I am nowhere.”

The mechanics of Jorge's disappearance are not difficult to discern. They begin with what might be called the deformation—or deliberate manipulation—of his intake forms. These forms are not simply bureaucratic documents; they function as a detainee's lifeline. They are the first and most definitive proof that a person has entered state custody, and they provide crucial information such as cellblock location and assigned sector. In a system where families, legal advocates, and even officials rely on paperwork to trace a detainee's whereabouts, the intake form becomes a key mechanism of accountability. That is why it was so chilling—and so effective—when an officer, acting at the request of a criminal actor, scrambled Jorge's intake information. This minor but intentional falsification rendered him invisible within the institution, and this deformation was not simply clerical error; it was an act of bureaucratic violence that disappeared Jorge from the system. “For long stretches of time,” Jorge told me on his 1222nd day of detention, “I did not exist. My file could not be found. And so I could not be found.”

Jorge's case was extreme, but the mechanism was familiar. Other detainees described intake files riddled with errors. These included incorrect birthdates, swapped surnames, missing signatures, and this stalled hearings for months or years. In conversations in the yard, men traded advice not about innocence or guilt but about how to repair a file before it erased them entirely. Jorge's own intake form, it turns out, was eventually found to contain several falsifications. Officers altered his national identification number and misspelled his family name. These were seemingly minor distortions that had devastating consequences. The changes effectively severed Jorge from institutional traceability, creating barriers even for diligent administrators who tried to locate him. Worse still, Jorge was assigned to one of the most impoverished and neglected sectors of the facility, where detainees sleep on the floor, rarely bathe, and subsist on little more than beans and tortillas. Jorge remained there for months until his wife smuggled in enough money to pay a drug trafficker for a cot in a slightly less ramshackle sector. “I told the prison guards that I had moved,” Jorge told me on his 742nd day of detention, but no one in central administration updated his records. It is unclear whether this additional clerical error was intentional or just an accident. Either way, Jorge slid even further from sight.

At one point, on his 742nd day of detention, I asked Jorge—carefully, almost apologetically—why these criminal actors had not just killed him. Wouldn’t that have been easier? We sat on the edge of his cot, whispering so as not to disturb a few detainees who napped next to us. Jorge paused for a long time, then shrugged with a mixture of irony and resignation. “Why kill me,” he said, “when they can pay a guard some money to change a few numbers? A few letters?” His tone was dispassionate, not because he did not care, but because the logic was, to him, so obvious. Altering a digit in a national identification number or a vowel in a last name cost less, and it certainly risked less. The infrastructure of violence, he seemed to suggest, had evolved—not toward precision, as much recent work on technologies of surveillance would suggest (Zuboff, 2019), but toward plausible deniability. To disappear a person today, it is enough to bend the archive until the person dissolves inside it.

Unbeknownst to Jorge, forced disappearance has always been an archival project in Guatemala. To terrorize so-called enemies of the state, counterinsurgency campaigns during the Cold War relied not only on machine guns and windowless vans but also on index cards, manila folders, and three-ring binders (Weld, 2014: 15). In July 2005, human rights officials in Guatemala City stumbled upon a cache of some 80 million pages of information that detail the history of the now defunct National Police and its role in the country's civil war (Lovell, 2013). These inspectors found “metal filing cabinets … with improvised labels scrawled in black marker” that distinguished “assassinations” from “homicides” from “kidnappings” (Doyle, 2007: 56). Other cabinets held “internal police-employee files,” “identification cards,” and “enormous leather-bound ledgers” that contained the names of “captured communists” (Doyle, 2007: 58). This archive was (and continues to be) the largest collection of state secrets ever found in Latin America, with the materials providing unprecedented insight into the wartime kidnapping, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of Guatemalans (Weld, 2014). These documents, at a more conceptual level, also animate how the archive has always been a means of surveillance and social control, imprisoning members of society within what Foucault would have recognized as the archival equivalent of the panopticon.

Today, the postwar phenomenon of forced disappearance remains an archival practice, but rather than the illusion of an omniscient force that always watches, always documents, and always files, criminal actors today leverage administrative ineptitude to systematically dissociate subjects from the very discursive mechanisms that would otherwise render them legible to the state. Jorge was alive, but his case file would go missing for months. It was also full of typos, and thus he couldn’t go anywhere, do anything, or, most profoundly, be anyone. He disappeared. The only available analogue to this tactic and its effects comes from those wartime materials discovered back in 2005. Archivists have since established that, throughout the 1980s, the National Police studiously avoided identifying corpses, even though they often had enough information to do so (Lovell, 2013). Instead, they disappeared thousands of people by burying these bodies in mass graves marked “XX” (Doyle, 2007: 56). The systematic dissociation of these remains from governmental accounting forestalled any sense of justice and closure. However, whereas the practice of forced disappearances in the twentieth century relied on the presumed finality of death, today's version perversely hinges on ensuring the unresolved limbo of the living body.

Delayed

Jorge endured 82 postponed hearings across 1805 days of pretrial detention before a judge finally dismissed his case for lack of evidence. Along the way, he lost weight, developed rashes, sores, and ulcers, and wrestled with a “slow violence” (Berlant, 2011) that made him illegible to the system and thus invisible to society. Through the years, he cycled between disbelief and resignation, rage and melancholia. “Everyone knows I’m innocent,” he told me on his 939th day of detention, not in protest but as a kind of exhausted refrain. Still, late at night, Jorge would find himself gripped by sudden waves of optimism, surges of hope that the arc of personal and national history might still bend toward justice. But then he would crash into despair. He wept quietly into a pillow his wife had smuggled into the center. “My time inside this place has not been easy,” he said. “It's not like every day is the same. I’m in the same sector. I see the same people. I eat the same food. But I don’t have the same feelings every day.” Jorge's account captures the affective volatility of carceral time—not its stasis, but its uneven textures. As we walked the prison yard, he explained how he spent his days preparing for a hearing that had yet to occur. “They cancel them,” he said. “Sometimes right before I’m about to speak to the judge.” These delays, as he understood them, were not bureaucratic accidents but deliberate tactics. They were acts of procedural cruelty that reinforced his exposure to a system whose power lay not in sentencing him but disappearing him.

For many detainees, postponed hearings were not discrete disappointments but the rhythm of carceral time itself. Men measured their detention not in months or years but in canceled dates. In this sense, Jorge's case is far from exceptional. Guatemala's judicial system operates at the threshold of collapse: it is an assemblage of overworked judges, overburdened public defenders, and underpaid clerks attempting to triage an avalanche of unresolved cases. This exhaustion does more than delay justice; it produces what some anthropologists have called a “gray zone” of legal ambiguity (Feldman, 2019), in which the system effectively disappears thousands of detainees without the need for physical violence. One statistic that prison administrators often mention captures the perversity of it all: an estimated 5% of those convicted in Guatemala have already completed their sentences but remain imprisoned simply because there are not enough staff to process their release. This is not a breakdown of law but a function of it. It is a system in which bureaucratic scarcity becomes a tool of forced disappearance. It was this very indeterminacy that allowed Jorge's tormentors to prolong his detention. They bribed clerks to postpone hearings. They also misplaced court files and paid administrators to scramble the schedules of defense lawyers. They even disrupted Jorge's transfers from the detention center to the courthouse, creating the illusion of noncompliance. At one point, these criminal actors sued Jorge for failing to attend the very hearings that he had been prevented from reaching. “That was humiliating,” Jorge conceded on his 1268th day of detention.

The wrinkle is that no one witnessed Jorge's disappearance. There were no unmarked cars, no masked men, no midnight knocks. Unlike the theatrical disappearances carried out across Latin America in the 1980s—abductions that, as Diana Taylor (1997) has shown, operated through spectacle and public fear—Jorge disappeared in relative silence, through paperwork and jumbled calendars. He vanished into a system whose dysfunction is so ordinary, so familiar, that it no longer registers as violence. His name just slipped off schedules. Clerks also lost his file, then found it, and then inexplicably rerouted it. Court dates came and went, but these were not mistakes. They were calculated manipulations of a broken system so mired in incompetence that violence no longer needed to hide, and this meant that in Jorge's case, forced disappearance did not need to take spectacular form. Administrative indifference did the trick, with the latest approach to forced disappearance in Guatemala relying on exhaustion, confusion, and procedural plausibility. Jorge's initial arrest—by police officers, in front of his house, in the light of day—is an all too familiar scene in Guatemala, given its wartime history, but Jorge was also (and more profoundly) misfiled: his presence scattered across forgotten folders and misplaced entries, exiled not from space but from legibility.

Eighty-two delayed hearings structured Jorge's own experience of pretrial detention, coloring his conversations with fellow detainees and bending his long list of imperatives toward the brutal experience of having one's right to due process repeatedly deferred. Many of the imperatives that appear in his notes fixate on an encounter that never seemed to happen: “Number 83—If you can, use a bandage or a sling when you speak to the judge. He will think that you are sick and will not treat you like an animal. Number 84—Do not dress elegantly when you speak to the judge. Number 85—Look the authorities in the eyes. Do not be afraid. Show them that you tell the truth and that you are not afraid of a fight.” These were not idle reflections but a form of speculative praxis. They amount to a repertoire of imagined performances crafted in the absence of a stage. Jorge's notes, passed hand to hand among fellow detainees, became a collective ethnography of survival, shaped by rumors, half-remembered hearings, and whispered advice. In the absence of reliable legal representation and predictable timelines, detainees rehearsed for their hearings as one might wait for a miracle: anxiously, exhaustively, and with the full knowledge that it might never arrive.

“Think of it from the judge's perspective,” Jorge reasoned with me on his 565th day of detention. We again sat on his cot. The rest of the men in his sector had gone to the yard, leaving us behind to compare notes as our conversation drifted toward culpability. “The judge doesn’t know any better,” Jorge shrugged. “He's just handling as many cases as he can every day.” Jorge even granted a pass to the lawyers: “When my hearing gets canceled? All they see is that they have one less meeting. Who's going to complain?” Jorge also reflected on the clerks who misplaced files, misspelled names, and delayed paperwork. “They’re kids,” he conceded. “And they’re looking for a little more money. They also don’t know me. And they don’t know that I’m suffering.” For Jorge, the violence of his prolonged detention did not stem from a single malevolent actor or even a recognizable ideology, but from a dispersed, faceless system in which no one believed anyone responsible but in which everyone was implicated.

Denied

Denied any clear target for appeal, Jorge found himself trapped in a landscape where state and criminal actors had become indistinguishable. There was no one to whom he could turn for protection. The police officers who arrested him had acted on orders from a criminal network, but their uniforms and paperwork belonged to the state. Even after his family located him in the detention center, Jorge could not rely on the legal system for recourse. The courts failed to recognize the falsified charges. The prison administration lost his file. Public defenders cycled through his case with neither continuity nor commitment. At the same time, Jorge could not reach back toward the actors who orchestrated his detention; to do so would be to submit to the very threats that led to his imprisonment. He was suspended between two forces that mirrored each other so perfectly that the difference no longer seemed to matter. This collapsing of categories—between law and crime, legality and corruption—meant that Jorge had not simply been denied justice. He had been denied the very relational terms by which justice might be sought.

The impossibility of naming a perpetrator meant Jorge could not construct a coherent narrative of grievance, let alone mount a protest. Those who suffer injustice often do so in ways that presume legibility—a letter to a judge, a press conference, a note from a prison cell. But Jorge's situation precluded such gestures. The violence he experienced was dispersed across too many hands, too many files, too many missing names. There was no agent to confront, no institution that would recognize the complaint. Even among fellow detainees, the particulars of Jorge's case evaded easy articulation. “I was disappeared,” he would say, but the word had become too large, too abstract, to translate into specific demands. Unlike the victims of overt political repression, Jorge was not persecuted for what he believed or said. And what made his suffering unbearable was not just its intensity but its incoherence. He could not explain who had done what, or why, or even what could be done in response. The harm he endured was systematic and impersonal, its very anonymity compounding the sense of abandonment. Jorge had lost not only his freedom but also a language to reclaim it.

Jorge began his hunger strike on his 1112th day of detention. It emerged not as an act of resistance but as an ambiguous performance of refusal (Simpson, 2014), ultimately addressed to no one. Unlike other political prisoners who have weaponized their bodies as a last form of protest—Bobby Sands in Ireland (O’Malley, 1990), detainees at Guantánamo (Shah, 2022)—Jorge had no audience. The media were not watching. The courts were not listening. Even his family, though devoted, had no institutional pathway through which to convert his suffering into recognition. Jorge stopped eating simply because he could not endure his condition any longer. Hunger became a kind of muteness, an inward collapse. “I knew no one would care,” he told me a week into the strike, on his 1119th day of detention. “But I had to do something.” His body began to fail. His skin stretched thin, his eyes dulled, and he moved with less purpose through the prison yard. He never declared a strike. He did not scrawl slogans on the wall or issue statements to the press. He just stopped eating. “No one even noticed for a while,” he later recalled. Jorge's hunger strike did not resist the system so much as expose the futility of resistance when suffering is met with indifference, when silence is the only tool left to the disappeared.

Rather than empowering him, Jorge's hunger strike deepened his sense of abandonment. Deprived of food, his body began to atrophy, turning into a fragile record of a protest no one else could attend. Day after day, he would lie on his cot, sometimes drifting into sleep, sometimes staring at the cracked ceiling. The strike altered nothing about his case. It did not bring him closer to a hearing. It also did not attract the attention of human rights observers. It simply hurt him. His stomach cramped. His head throbbed. He could no longer join the other detainees in the yard. Some men whispered that Jorge had gone mad; others simply avoided him. In a system where survival often depends on others, his self-erasure at times marked him as expendable. Jorge became a kind of ghost, neither fully dead nor meaningfully alive. Where once he had been misplaced in the archive, now he was lost in his own flesh. The hunger strike became not a tactic but a trajectory: toward dissolution, not justice.

Denied protest and recognition, Jorge was left with his pain. The hunger strike, rather than revealing the violence of his detention, intensified the opacity of his suffering. Even the most attentive observers could not interpret what it meant. When I asked him—long after he had resumed eating—why he had done it, he only shrugged. There was no manifesto, no list of demands. It was a silence that marked the final stage of Jorge's disappearance. In a system where recognition is a precondition for redress, Jorge's hunger signaled a kind of vanishing. His pain could not be translated into policy or argument. It simply existed, and then passed. The strike left no mark on the record, no scar in the file.

There is, however, one enduring trace. A single photograph, taken by another detainee, captures Jorge during the final week of his hunger strike. He lies in bed, a thin blanket draped over his torso, an IV piercing his arm. He looks gaunt and tired. The bones in his face are sharp. His body, diminished, barely seems to inhabit the frame. But his eyes—wide, alert, and unmistakably lucid—stare straight into the camera. The effect is haunting. Unlike the bureaucratic archive that dissolved him, this image renders Jorge unavoidably visible. It is as if, in that moment, he turned his gaze toward an imagined audience beyond the walls and asked for someone to see him. Not to rescue him, or vindicate him, or even to remember him, but simply to acknowledge him.

Discharged

Jorge's disappearance was not the tragic consequence of one corrupt police officer or a single misplaced file. It was the foreseeable outcome of a carceral system that now disappears people by design. The bureaucratic void that swallowed Jorge is also not unique to Guatemala, nor is it new. It is part of a broader regional pathology in which pretrial detention—once imagined as a temporary, exceptional measure—has metastasized into a permanent, extralegal mode of punishment. Across Latin America, the number of people held without a conviction has reached staggering proportions, and yet the numbers alone cannot capture the horror. To be held for years without charge, without visibility, and often without hope is not just to be imprisoned. It is to be erased. Jorge understood this. That is why he spent his 1805 days in pretrial detention documenting the system that disappeared him. “We are in jail,” he often told me, answering the question that haunted Guatemala's civil war: ¿Donde están? But jail in Guatemala is no longer merely a place. It is a method of making people vanish in broad daylight. The significance of this shift extends far beyond Guatemala. Across contemporary carceral regimes, pretrial detention, administrative delay, and procedural ambiguity have become tools for managing surplus populations without the spectacle of overt repression. In this sense, Jorge's disappearance is not an exception born of dysfunction but a diagnosis of how modern states increasingly govern through suspension rather than resolution.

Jorge's plight marks a chilling evolution in Guatemala's long history of forced disappearance. During the civil war, it was state agents who vanished people—hooded men in unmarked trucks, bodies in clandestine graves, names redacted from official registries. Today, the techniques have changed, but the logic remains intact. The disappeared are no longer dragged from their homes in the dead of night; they are booked, processed, and jailed. Officers enter their details into databases but then delete them through clerical error, deliberate delay, and at times outright sabotage. Guatemala has entered a new era of disappearance—again, not by the state or despite the state but rather through it. This is the central horror of Jorge's detention: it reveals how illicit actors have weaponized the very institutions meant to guarantee legal order. Erased in slow motion, Jorge was neither tortured in a clandestine site nor killed in secret. Instead, he was held both by the law and just beyond its reach, at a detention center whose crumbling infrastructure camouflaged the violence enacted within. That Jorge was never truly “nowhere” makes his disappearance all the more grotesque.

There is one crucial difference between this new era of disappearance and the one that preceded it: today's disappeared sometimes come back to life. Unlike those disappeared during the Cold War—whose bodies never reappeared, whose families weathered the silence—those vanished through pretrial detention sometimes reemerge, changed but still breathing. Jorge returned. So too have thousands of others: men and women who, after years in legal limbo, step out of the shadows of carceral neglect and into society. But their return is rarely read as a victory. These are not survivors in the triumphant sense. They are revenants: figures who carry the mark of bureaucratic oblivion, who have been rendered socially unintelligible and institutionally illegible. In Cold War Guatemala, the goal was annihilation: to eliminate bodies and erase dissent. Today, the violence lies in suspension, in the indefinite deferral of identity, trial, and closure. To disappear someone through pretrial detention is not to destroy them but to unsettle them at an existential level: to break them across time and memory. And when they return, they do not come back whole.

Jorge is not whole. He left the pretrial detention center after 1805 days and re-entered a world that had long since moved on. His daughter, a child when police arrested him, is now a teenager with a cautious smile and headphones in her ears. His son, once a boy who clung to his hand, has become a young man with the gait and silence of someone used to waiting without expectation. Jorge's wife managed to keep the family afloat, but the effort had cost her. His gas stations, once the pride of Jorge's modest success, were no longer his. Old friends, once allies in business and weekend barbecues, were also distant. They sent texts, promising to get together soon, but they rarely followed through. They never doubted Jorge's innocence. Everyone knew that the charges were bogus, but something had clung to him—something that made people uncomfortable. After 5 years in a prison few could imagine, among men most would never meet, Jorge had become unrelatable. His family and friends did not know how to look at him, and Jorge, for his part, no longer knew how to be seen.

Today, Jorge walks the streets of Guatemala City a free man. He moves with deliberate calm, dressed neatly, his hair trimmed short, his shoes always polished. But he never leaves home without his briefcase. It is always in his hand, never out of reach. “In case I am ever approached by the police again,” he says. Inside the briefcase is an archive—his archive. It contains perfectly printed duplicates of every document that might prove his existence: his birth certificate, his national identification card, the record of his arrest, the court order that vacated the charges, his lawyer's business card, even photographs of himself with family members in front of recognizable landmarks. It is a curated defense against erasure, a portable bureaucracy designed to forestall another disappearance. Jorge knows now what many in Guatemala are only beginning to understand: that legibility is a lifeline. The state that once made him vanish has the power to do so again, and so he must always carry proof of his own existence. The briefcase is heavy—not just with paper, but with the knowledge that being found once does not guarantee he will not go missing again. “But I won’t let that happen,” Jorge told me several months after his release: “Never again.”