Under martial law in the Philippines of President Ferdinand Marcos from 1972 to 1981, there were 3,257 extrajudicial killings, 35,000 people were tortured and 70,000 incarcerated. Records of human rights group Karapatan show that 759 people 'disappeared'. Relatives were told they had joined the communist insurgency. But when the guerillas surrendered, the 759 were not among them. No bodies have been found.

In Argentina, the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons has documented the cases of 9,000 people during the so-called dirty war of 1976 to 1983. The generally accepted count is 30,000 los desaparecidos, or missing ones, many pushed from planes over the ocean-like Rio de la Plata (the River Plate), and some stolen as babies.

Nathan Englander, who came to prominence with his prize-winning collection of short stories For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, published in 2000, has chosen los desaparecidos as the subject for his debut novel, The Ministry of Special Cases.

It's an important, elegant, witty but deeply depressing account of Buenos Aires during the dirty war and the collapse of a marginalised Jewish family: Kaddish Poznan, his wife, Lillian, and their teenage son, Pato.

'After 52 years in that city, Kaddish's blindness was as sharp as his sight. He'd learned not to see any trouble that didn't see him first,' writes Englander as he introduces this hijo de puta (son of a whore) chipping names off gravestones in a walled-off Jewish cemetery that theoretically doesn't exist. It's where members of the Benevolent Society buried Jewish whores, gangsters and those who might shame the wider, more prosperous Jewish community. Fearful for their own success or safety, their children would rather the past be forgotten.

'I provide respect for the dead and confidentiality for the living,' Kaddish says to cosmetic surgeon Julio Mazursky, who wants to erase his father, 'Toothless' Mazursky, so named for how he left those who crossed him.

Englander's story is about a lot of things: the nature of truth, the manipulation of fear, the price of acknowledging death.

Kaddish is about as downtrodden an underdog as one can find, but he's not stupid. Whereas 'truth can be denied but it cannot be undone', he's forced to ask: 'How true is anything that only one man believes?'

In Englander's Argentina, Kaddish knows there is no protection from 'a government so paranoid that it would one day hunt us down for fearing such a situation would come to be. We're conspiracy theorists who have been stripped of our conspiracy. Fearing this would happen is our biggest crime.'

The role of the Ministry of Special Cases is as 'the ministry of last resort. It's a bureaucratic dumping ground, a loony bin for those with no redress'. Hundreds wait daily, clutching a random number for the chance to plead their case if only the right forms can be filled out. Those with money skip the queues and buy their missing back before making themselves disappear.

To be summoned to the ministry is another matter - whole families are rumoured to have vanished. When Poznan's neighbour, Cacho, is summoned, he wails: 'I know they want us to be afraid. But why me? I was afraid already.' He returns, but it's unclear what fear made him say.

Fear is everywhere. The sound of a police siren or a soldier's stare prompts a reflex reach for ID. But so long as the fears are never realised, life goes on. 'The troubles always start when they start for you,' Kaddish is told.

Englander, an American Jew, has already made enemies in the Orthodox sects, and will certainly make more with The Ministry of Special Cases, which attacks 'the grand tradition of Jewish diplomacy: Never acknowledge a catastrophe until it's done.'

A leader of the Jewish community attacked by Lillian for doing nothing but compile a list of people the government is prepared to admit might have disappeared, retorts: 'I'll tell you, without metaphor or rumour or lie, there are terrible things happening. There are crimes the western hemisphere has not known. You must open your eyes and look up, Mrs Poznan. Then you won't expect so much of anyone. It isn't angels you'll see. Those are bodies raining down from the sky.'

Like Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, most of the real criminals have grown old and died. Regimes know to avoid accountability by implicating as many as possible, from young conscripts to frightened civilians. Myanmar does it today. China did it during the Cultural Revolution.

As Kaddish is told by a man who dumped naked and unconscious bodies from his aircraft over the river until one fought back: 'It's hard to pass judgment when one must pass it on oneself.'