Every year between 20 and 25,000 people ‘go missing’ in São Paulo state in Brazil. But in Brazilian law disappearance is just a fato atípico; an ‘atypical occurrence’. There is no causal relationship between act and violence to be legally found. Nor, it seems, is there a pursuit to know. In a region well recognised for political disappearance, I ask for a deeper and historicised consideration of how disappearance has worked politically, and why it might be acutely important at the current juncture where mass graves have a kind of axiomatic enigma. Doing so allows for a thorough disaggregation of how conditions of passive government and a lack of pursuit – letting disappear – shape the terrain of both extreme suffering and contemporary political ordering.