The Last Outfit of The Missing
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.
I began this project in 2013 in my home country of El Salvador in an effort to understand the violence that consumed my homeland. I worked with authorities to photograph the bloodied clothes of victims discovered in shallow graves around El Salvador. I laid the clothes on top of a white backdrop, seeking to erase any distraction from their visual power and the stories they told. The project won first prize in the 2014 World Press Photo’s Daily Life category.
In 2021, as Mexico neared the grim milestone of 100,000 missing people, I picked up the project again. Part of my goal was to highlight another element of the crisis: A majority of victims recovered by authorities have never been identified. Their bones—and clothes—have been sitting in plastic boxes in government offices for years, even as their loved ones continue to search for them. The pictures from this second phase of the project were featured in September 2021 on the front page of The New York Times.
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 about who the victims were, what happened to them, and why we live in a society that has permitted the forced disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people.