In South America characteristic of the military coups and dictatorships that followed was the disappearance of people in opposition to the Government. Anyone considered or suspected of being left wing was rounded up tortured, raped, or generally violently treated and shipped to camps, taken to the countryside and shot, dropped from helicopters into the sea, generally removed from society. One general in Argentina called the process "disinfection", it was not random but encouraged and taught in the military "School of the Americas" run by the US government.

The mothers and grand mothers of the disappeared started to campaign to find where their relatives had gone, normally to find where their bodies had gone, or to discover where the kidnapped young children of the disappeared had been placed. Thus was started the slogan "all memory is subversive".