Surface All the Disappeared! Fight Fascist State Terror!

Statement of the ILPS on the Occasion of Day of the Disappeared 2025

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On the occasion of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances (August 30, 2025), the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) remembers and honors the victims of this brutal and systematic practice. Enforced disappearance is not an isolated crime but a deliberate policy of state terror aimed at demobilizing, silencing, and eliminating popular organizations and the people in general.

This reality reflects the cruelty of state terrorism as a tool for the ruling class to maintain control in a capitalist system that thrives on exploitation and oppression. Forced disappearance is an extreme expression of class struggle, where state forces acting in defense of bourgeois interests, resort to repression and enforced silence to crush the organization of working people and democratic resistance.

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Historically, enforced disappearances became widespread in Latin America during the 1970s and 1980s, under military dictatorships that emerged in several countries in the region. These regimes were part of what became known as Operation Condor, a coordinated repressive effort among several governments, led by the United States, to eliminate political opponents and leftist movements.

This policy of disappearances drew heavily from the French military doctrine developed during the 1950s and 1960s, particularly during the Algerian War. French officers trained military personnel across Latin America, exporting counterinsurgency strategies. These tactics were later adopted and expanded by the United States, forming doctrines centered on systematic repression, including enforced disappearances, torture, and extrajudicial killings. The notion of “counterrevolutionary war” or “anti-communist war” became central in military manuals across the continent, explicitly outlining methods such as detain, torture, assassinate, and disappear opponents even after death.

Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s is one of the most infamous examples, where thousands were disappeared by the military junta. In Chile, Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship also employed enforced disappearances as a core repressive tool. In El Salvador during the 1980s civil war, government forces and death squads disappeared thousands of guerrillas and civilians suspected of supporting the resistance. In Peru, more than 40,000 people were disappeared and  exterminated in the 1980s–a practice that continues today, targeting organizations such as the Communist Party of Peru and the Tupac Amaru  Revolutionary Movement. Even now, families are denied the remains of their loved ones, with disappearance enshrined in Peruvian law.

In Guatemala, enforced disappearances reached unimaginable extremes during the armed conflict, particularly in the 1980s. The infamous Military Diary or Death Dossier unearthed in 1999 documented 183 cases of disappearances between 1983 and 1985, including photographs and accounts of torture. Guatemala has the highest record of enforced disappearances in Latin America, with more than 45,000 victims.

The School of the Americas (SOA), now WHINSEC–played a central role in exporting this doctrine. Established in 1946, it trained thousands of Latin American military and police officers in counterinsurgency, intelligence, and torture techniques. Many of them were later implicated in gross human rights violations, including enforced disappearances. Today, the French and US doctrines remain embedded in the military strategies of repressive states, reinforced by US Southern Command operations and security programs across the region.

The scale of these crimes is staggering. The President of Colombia recently acknowledged that as a result of such policies, more than one million people have been murdered in Latin America over the past 30 years. These strategies have also been deployed in coups such as in Honduras, in operations against Nicaragua and Cuba, and in repeated  interventions in Venezuela–consolidated under the so-called Lima Plan, which forms part of US preparations for a potential world war.

In the Philippines, thousands of people have disappeared since the implementation of martial law in the 1970s. In Indonesia, during the massacres of 1965-66, forced disappearances were used to eliminate members of the Communist Party and other people considered “dangerous.” During the “Years of Lead,” the Moroccan government also carried out enforced disappearances of political dissidents. And today they practice persecution, imprisonment and disappearance, in collusion with the Macron government of France, against the members and leaders of the Saharawi Republic.

​​Under the aegis of US imperialism, fascist regimes in Pakistan have prospered over many decades. In order to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s, the US and Saudi Arabia worked with the military dictator General Zia-ul Haq to establish an extremist jihadi culture in the country. Thousands of madrissas were established and weaponized, with violent sectarianism flourishing, resulting in blood baths over and over again. At the same time, the context of militarism was to contain the influence of the Iranian Shite Islamic revolution in the country. In the decades since, all forms of dissent whether from the peasantry, working class or those fighting for self-determination, national liberation and/or people’s rights are forcefully suppressed. To-date thousands of people have been disappeared especially those demanding rights in Balochistan.

In Turkey, in the context of the conflict with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), Turkish security forces have been accused of enforced disappearances of Kurds.

Elsewhere, enforced disappearances continue as a weapon of fascist and imperialist repression. In Palestine, Zionist forces systematically abduct and disappear Palestinians, leaving families without any information on the fate of their loved ones. In Kenya, activists opposing the US-backed Ruto regime face abduction and disappearance by security forces. In India, under Modi’s fascist regime, disappearances and extrajudicial killings are central to its counterinsurgency war against indigenous peoples and revolutionary movements, often burning bodies to erase evidence.

These are not isolated acts. They are part of a systematic policy to eliminate all resistance to imperialist hegemony. Enforced disappearances exemplify fascism–a violent mechanism imperialist powers and their client states use to maintain control. The struggle against enforced disappearances is inseparable from the struggle against imperialism, fascism, and all forms of class exploitation. We urgently call on all peoples to unite against these crimes, demand justice, and hold perpetrators accountable. Only through collective resistance, truth-seeking, and solidarity can we end enforced disappearances and build a world founded on dignity, justice, and genuine freedom.

We must act decisively against the current extension of US imperialism’s preparations for a third world war.

For the memory of the disappeared and for the struggle of the oppressed against the oppressive capitalist regime!

Long live the struggle of the peoples!

For our disappeared–neither forget nor forgive!

YANKEES GO HOME!

Signed,

International League of Peoples’ Struggle