Dis-integrating Rural Development

In his column on October 29, 1977, in the paper La Prensa, Pablo Antonio Cuadra told the story of a campesino who came to visit him in his office. The campesino asked for justice for a family that the Guardia Nacional had “disappeared” in the mountains around Matagalpa in northern Nicaragua.¹ For Cuadra, the campesino’s use of the verb “disappeared” expressed the proliferation of “a new form of death: anonymous, negated, veiled,” that corresponded to a new iteration of government power in the countryside. Cuadra asserted that the expression “to be disappeared,” emblematic of human rights abuses throughout Latin America,