As the frantic search for remains after 9/11 drove home, most people find it difficult to live with uncertainty regarding the death of a loved one. This uncertainty is the subject of a powerful new exhibit, The Disappeared, at New York's Museo del Barrio (originally conceived by a curator at the North Dakota Museum of Art), which wrestles with the history of state-sponsored terror in South America in the 1970s and '80s, mainly in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. During this period, a number of military governments, some of them supported by the United States, came to power and set out to repress Marxist and other left-leaning dissidents; their primary tool for doing so involved secret kidnappings and detention that usually resulted in the death of the victims, known as los desaparecidos. In Argentina, these events took place over the course of nearly a decade, during the so-called Dirty War from 1976 to 1983; in Uruguay, they continued until 1985, when the dictatorship fell. As Lawrence Weschler writes in the show's catalog, it was a "diabolically effective" tactic: It silenced both the dissidents themselves and diverted their survivors into searching, futilely, for them. This print by the Uruguayan exile Antonio Frasconi is heavy with the sense of despair and powerlessness that was felt by the survivors of the disappeared.