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"¿Dónde están los desaparecidos? / Where are the disappeared?", by Irma Müller. (Photo: Martin Melaugh)

In this traditional arpillera, made in the late 1980s, a group of women in colourful dresses are protesting in front of the Courts of Justice. They hold a banner reading: "Where are the detained disappeared?" On the right-hand are silhouettes of two armed police, identified by their green clothes and their car. They are faceless to show that the protest is against the dictatorship and not the individual officers. Typically, the sun is in the sky, but the two large clouds are unusual.

According to the International project of human rights, there were 1,192 cases of forced disappearance, 2,995 people were executed and 38,254 people were recognised as victims of political imprisonment and torture. These figures, updated in March 2018, draw on their own research and official documents from Chile’s four Truth Commission Reports. Memoria Viva - Proyecto Internacional de Derechos Humanos. A new state search initiative, announced in 2023, considers 1,469 of those killed or disappeared by the dictatorship to be still missing. Observatorio de Justicia Transicional, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile (2023)

Letter from Irma Müller to Gayla Jamison, 25 September 1989 relating to this arpillera and Cinco sitios de desaparición colectiva / Five sites of collective disappearance

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