Measuring absence: Narrative obstacles to counting contemporary enforced disappearances in Latin America
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Statistics hold the potential to lend political urgency to otherwise seemingly isolated human rights abuses. Yet, despite the persistence of the problem, statistics on enforced disappearances in contemporary non-civil war Latin American democracies are rare. This article examines the available statistics found in the annual human rights reports of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the US State Department and assesses the narratives that accompany them. The article argues that the reports’ narrative frames present three key obstacles to the statistical visibility of enforced disappearances in contemporary Latin America that pertain to the definition of problem, whose information is included (voice), and the narrative’s clarity and consistency. These obstacles affect case counts and, consequently, the political urgency attributed to the need for accountability and policy change.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it