Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic research on transnational adoption circuits, this paper offers a reflection on forms of political subjectivity and collective modes of political action in contemporary Guatemala, a context marked by aggressive neoliberalization and simultaneous re-militarization.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on research on transnational adoption circuits, the paper offers an ethnographically informed reflection on the experiences of families whose children vanished during the Guatemalan conflict (1960-1996), and who are currently pursuing collective political strategies to mount Habeas Corpus appeals (recursos de Habeas Corpus) to hold the State to account for the disappearance of their relatives. It focuses on an analysis of political subjectivities and collective modes of political action in contemporary Guatemala, a context marked by aggressive neoliberalization and simultaneous and rapidly intensifying re-militarization.

Unable to locate the missing and failing to find any information on their abduction in the archives, for these families, the condition of being disappeared is marked by a sense of absence as duration and lack of resolution. Against this background, I suggest that the presence of the disappeared in social memory, social practice and in the body politics can be conceptualized with reference to the Derridean notion of 'the trace', a construct which I put into conversation with the ethnographically resonant notion of 'huellas'. If the presence of the disappeared is their absence, this marks modes of subjectivity and social relations 'under erasure' which are currently the ground of articulation of political subjectivities and forms of political action in Guatemala. The paper considers how these dynamics may be reconfiguring the body politics, in a context where the re-militarization of communities in ways that mimic the political repression of counter-insurgency is increasingly part of daily life.