Government forces (not revolutionaries) which use either their official militaries/police (often) or their secret police (less often) to detain individuals without recourse to the law, then take them to illegal detention centers where they are tortured and eventually killed (in Argentina, some detainees were simply drugged and dropped alive to the Río de la Plata river, where they drowned -- our so called "flights of death" -- and others sometimes simply shot). The key thing that sets "disappeared" people aside from other ways of execution is that there is no official acknowledgement of their fate, and their friends and family are never truly sure of how they died unless their mortal remains are ever found by chance.
If this sounds horrifying, always remember our militaries in Latin America were trained in these tactics by the US government, in things like the School of the Americas [1], under the guise of "learning how to fight insurgency".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_f...
It's hard to choose a good path if a major world power is making sure all the good ones get shut down.
But this isn't what I said. I definitely didn't say "the USA did it". What I said was:
> always remember our militaries in Latin America were trained in these tactics by the US government
Which is both fair and accurate. The US was definitely involved one way or the other in most Latin American dictatorships of that era, enabling atrocities under the guise of fighting communism and insurgencies in their "back yard".
> agree fully
.. The US was definitely involved one way ..
how are we not in agreement now?
Of course it requires two things: murderers and those willing to train and support them.
PS: "nice try" my ass. This piece of history I'm telling you is widely acknowledged, this is not some kind of conspiracy theory.
To be clear: I do consider our dictators and murderers as worse people than those who trained them in the School of the Americas. Because, like you rightly put it, "who chooses this path?".
They were called los desaparecidos (“the disappeared”) and for years once a week their mothers would silently carry photos of them and walk in circles at the Plaza De Mayo in Buenos Aires.