By Sergio Salazar Araya

The article reconstructs and critically analyses two main contemporary discursive formations associated with migrants disappearing in transit through Mexico: the official state discourse and the social discourse of organizations searching for missing persons along the migratory route. This article discusses how the two discourses contradict each other, disputing how to represent a phenomenon occurring at the intersection of diverse, complex forms of violence. This exposes collusion between states and criminal organizations, as well as the scattered duplications and continuities between legal and illegal dynamic forces producing regional social order. Disappearance is a technique specific to actors who are battling one another in a broader field of transnational mobility and circulation. In addition, both discourses hinge on social value forms that go beyond the strictly pecuniary and situate people’s systematic disappearance as a central feature of regional power networks. The empirical data was collected during fieldwork in Mexico and Central America and collated with data published in recent reports (state and non-governmental) on migrants’ disappearance in Mexico. 

  European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies Revista Europea de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe December, pp. 159-178  2020.