When people start disappearing without due process you have to wonder what is going so terribly wrong. Perhaps it would be unfair to compare the seeds of what is being planted right here in the United States today to the runaway brush fire of Chile’s enforced disappearances in the 1970s, but the crop has been planted in American soil and we could well have to reap the bitter harvest. The difference right now may only be scope.

Augusto Pinochet in that tragic ironic day of September 11, 1973 succeeded in upending Salvador Allende’s democratically elected Presidency in a military coup and became the dictator resolved to weed out the leftist influences of that country. When his reign was ended, conservatively 3095 people had been ‘disappeared’ or executed. Enforced-disappearance was suddenly a familiar noun in the english language and defined in Wikipedia as: the secret abduction or imprisonment of a person with the support or acquiescence of a state followed by a refusal to acknowledge the person’s fate or whereabouts with the intent of placing the victim outside the protection of the law. 

To say no one lives outside the protection of the law in the United States would be staggeringly naive, but at least we once were able to say the letter of the law, and the aspiration of our democracy was to assure that every person is equally protected under the law and no one was above or below the law. This writer fears perhaps we can no longer even cosmetically claim that aspiration. With the deportations, masked arrests with no attention to sacred space and the possibly unauthorized flights of unidentified persons to countries outside of our jurisdiction, something seismic has occurred. 

Good is in this case the protection of the law with the spotlight on due process. Never mind civil disobedience when ‘the state’ is the violator. We could call this Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp Cancer. More than one administration has been foiled by that horrific Guantanamo nonlegal environment because if the law assures due process, it doesn’t provide for a face saving way back into compliance from the violation of its provisions. Good here goes back to the tolerance and intolerance paradox, except I think a majority of Americans still believe in law and order. Gross violations of law and human rights are intolerable in America, and how strange that a branch of political action that previously worried about civil disobedience and its costs, now find themselves the new champions of the law and order. Good is the restoration of due process and recompense for our violations. That at least would be a good start.