DESAPARECIDO

noun (Politics) (People and Society) Any of the many people who disappeared in Argentina during the period of military rule there between 1976 and 1983; by extension, anyone who has disappeared in South or Central America under a totalitarian regime. Etymology: A direct borrowing from Spanish desaparecido 'disappeared', the past participle of the verb desaparecer 'to disappear'. History and Usage: The plight of the desaparecidos, also called in English the disappeared or disappeared ones, was much discussed in the newspapers in the US and the UK from about the late seventies. Many were never seen again after being arrested by the army or police, and can only be presumed killed in detention; many others were children who were taken away from their arrested parents and placed with other families without any consent. Since the end of the military regime, the desaparecidos have remained in the news from time to time, and some of those formerly in detention have reappeared. The effort continues to trace as many of the displaced children as possible and return them to their real families. Recently the word has been extended in use to anyone who has suffered a similar fate in Spanish America. People whose children or husbands or wives were desaparecidos--'disappeared ones'--would go to Cardinal Arns, and the Cardinal would stop whatever he was doing and drive to the prisons, the police, the Second Army headquarters. New Yorker 2 Mar. 1987, p. 62 The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo are assembling a genetic databank on grandparents whose grandchildren are still missing, and on children who suspect that they are desaparecidos but whose grandparents have yet to be identified. Nature 18 June 1987, p. 553