Pitches wanted (disappearance, Latin America/Caribbean) | $250 per article

COMPANY/PUBLICATION: NACLA REPORT

Deadline: 4 January 2024

Heather Gies, Managing Editor at NACKLA, is looking for pitches:

NACLA is currently accepting proposals for an issue on disappearance in Latin America and the Caribbean. Send us your pitches by January 4, 2024. December 15, 2023

Disappearance has a painful history in the Americas. While often associated with the elimination of alleged subversives during 20th-century armed conflicts and the U.S.-backed dictatorships that gripped the continent, disappearance continues to haunt the present day: in migration, mass incarceration, arbitrary detention, and climate disasters, it is a specter in the erosion of memory, culture, livelihood, and nature. Generations have been marked by the violence of absence, and many communities still mend and incompletely grieve the tragedy of loss. “Sí no hay cuerpo no hay delito,” the saying goes—if there is no body, there is no crime. For crimes of both the past and present, this common expression continues to define the parameters and possibility of justice across the hemisphere.

As a widespread regional phenomenon, disappearance allows us to scrutinize Latin America’s contemporary evolution, exposing the violent logics that underpin its political and social systems. Exploring what is lost and what remains enables us to understand the structuring role of U.S. imperialism, to register lasting community-level concerns, and to examine crises such as feminicide, transnational migration, and modern captivity. From the Cold War to today’s war on drugs, disappearance is a multidimensional source of lasting damage that also poses an ongoing challenge of representation and remembrance.

Disappearance, as well, is not solely a human concern. Cutting across environments and species, it underlines the urgency of biodiversity loss and ways of living under assault in Latin America. It speaks to the erasures of ongoing colonialism, connects to the politics of memory, and historicizes the emergence of investigative innovations in forensics and journalistic forms. It helps us to see, with a committed eye, the community-led cultures of recovery in the region that aim to blunt the effects of structural violence by taking concrete steps towards reparative, restored, and dignified worlds. Engaging disappearance beckons us to wrestle with the debris of living in Latin America and the Caribbean, forcing us to confront the cruelty that befell who or what is no longer there.

Exploring these themes, the Summer 2024 issue of NACLA Report, guest edited by Jorge Cuéllar, asks: ¿Donde están? For this issue, we are looking for pieces that address the issue of disappearance in new and thought-provoking ways. We are especially interested in contributions that give particular attention to responses to disappearance through activism, art, photography, and public education in ways that contribute to a region-wide analysis of this widespread phenomenon.

We’re interested in pieces addressing topics including but not limited to:

• Disappearance through the lens of femicide and gender-based violence in Peru
• Historical denialism, the politics of memory, and the return of the far-right, such as in Argentina
• Legacies of the 1973 coup in Chile from perspectives such as the Mapuche and/or other marginalized groups
• The politics of evidence and Latin American archives
• Disappearance and its relationship to post-conflict cultures of justice and peace, including truth commissions and movements for victims of enforced disappearances
• Climate change, environmental disasters, and hometown or neighborhood loss
• Forced displacement, transnational adoption, and family separation
• Arbitrary detentions, incarceration, and abductions
• Cultural loss and/or ancestral struggles for the defense of territorial lifeways, such as in Amazonia, the Andes, Honduras, Guatemala, etc.

We welcome submissions from scholars, journalists, activists, and other writers. For articles, we are interested in pieces that examine specific, narrowly defined topics and that are written in a lively, accessible manner. We give preference to articles that are based on original research and interviews. We also welcome artistic and creative proposals and are interested in working with artists to showcase their work in hybrid print and digital formats.

Pitches and accepted articles may be submitted in English, Spanish, or Portuguese. NACLA offers a small honorarium of $250 to contributors who depend on writing as their primary source of income.

Please send a brief pitch (250 words) outlining the thrust and tone of your proposed piece and why you are well positioned to write it by January 4, 2024 to managing editor Heather Gies at hgies@nacla.org. We will respond to pitches by January 12, 2024. Drafts of accepted articles (2,500-3,500 words) will be due February 20, 2024.

CONTACT INFORMATION (please do not share the email address publicly):

Questions/submissions: hgies@nacla.org

Website: https://nacla.org/

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