They put on their clothes and headed to school, or work, or to meet up with friends. But they never came home. Hundreds of thousands of people have disappeared in Latin America in recent decades. For many of the missing, their last outfits—stained with dirt and blood, perfumed with death—are the only evidence of the lives they lived. 

This project seeks to show the magnitude of the crisis of the disappeared in Latin America by documenting the clothes found on the bodies of unidentified victims, the loved ones left behind, and the violent context that has fueled this tragedy—dictatorships, migration, drug trafficking and internal conflict. More people have disappeared in Latin America than any other region in the world.

The genesis of this project began in El Salvador in 2011 with the murder of my father, Domingo Ramos, by a 13-year-old carrying out a gang initiation killing. As part of my grieving process, I began documenting my father’s absence by taking photos of his clothes. I wasn’t a journalist at the time, but I felt compelled to understand what drove the violence in my country. 

A year and a half after my father´s murder, I began photographing the outfits of unidentified victims discovered in shallow graves around San Salvador. I laid the bloodied clothes on top of a white backdrop, seeking to erase any distraction from the visual power of the clothes and the stories they told. The project won first prize in the 2014 World Press Photo’s Daily Life category. 

Since then, I have dedicated much of my career to photographing the crisis of the disappeared across Latin America. In 2021, as Mexico neared the grim milestone of 100,000 missing people, I documented the forensic emergency that has resulted in the majority of recovered bodies never being identified. 

This project seeks to humanize the lives of the missing, to give them a voice from the grave. It is not a project that provides answers, but one that challenges viewers to ask painful questions.