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Socialism and Democracy

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Death camp confessions and resistance to violence in

Latin America
Jean Franco
Published online: 13 Dec 2007.

To cite this article: Jean Franco (1986) Death camp confessions and resistance to violence in Latin America, Socialism and
Democracy, 2:1, 5-17, DOI: 10.1080/08854308808427947
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Death Camp Confessions and Resistance

to Violence in Latin America

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Jean Franco

I V l y argument in this paper concerns the fact that repressive modernization in Latin America has brought about a re-examination of certain
terms which had yoked class or economic systems with cultural and
political systems as if they were inseparable. I refer to the yoking of
democracy as the political system that inevitably accompanies
capitalism, to the yoking of the family to patriarchy and the yoking of
masculinity to the public sphere. The terrible and traumatic events of
the past few years in Central America and the Southern Cone have made
it evident that "modernization" is a euphemism for escalated economic
exploitation based on severe repression.
As a preface to my argument, I want to take off from an observation
made by Jacobo Timmerman in his book, Prisoner without a Number, Cell
without a Name (1981), in which he explained that his torturers tried to
"create a different more sophisticated image of the places of torture. As
if by this means, they might give a more elevated status to their activities, raise it to sort of high-level professional category . . . Their
military superiors encourage that fantasy in them and in others and that
idea of important places, exclusive methods, original techniques, new
apparatuses, allows them to claim a touch of distinction or institutionalization for their world." Timmerman accutely observes the
sordid and archaic basement on which the appearance of a "modern"
institution is built. Because the term "modernization" is a euphemism,
it is important to explore the hidden assumptions behind this term
which obviously valorizes the modern over the so-called primitive. It is
ethnocentric to the core and handily replaces questioned terms such as
civilization as against barbarism, Christianity as against paganism. The
procedures and myths, however, go back to the conquest and have
changed little since the sixteenth century, as can be readily observed not
only in the death camps but also in modern mass culture which has
continued to rewrite the myths of conquest and empire, scarcely diverging from the classical forms in which they were first generated in earlier
phases of imperialism from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.

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Greystoke and The Emerald Forest bring back the noble savage much as the
Jesuits conceived that figure in the seventeenth century colonization of
the Americas. Fitzcarraldo retells the epic of conquering the Amazon on
behalf of a superior high culture. The Indians who were killed during
the making of the film are not mentioned in the credits. From the
colonizing savagery of Rambo, which vies with the popular imperialist
fiction of nineteenth-century England, to bad conscience movies like
Apocalypse Now and Under Fire which make the colonized world the scene
of metropolitan heart-searching, what is going on is the same old frontier war. Fennimore Cooper's characters and Bulldog Drummond are
etched deep, not in a political unconscious as Jameson would have it,
but as part of a dynamic ethnocentric discourse which is continuously
reproduced not only in popular art but in academic and cultural institutions, as was recently seen in the Primitive/Modern exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art.
Let no one think that I am here setting up an authentic third world
in opposition to the metropolis. The third world is not a place but a
shifting frontier along which a war explodes wherever the modernization bulldozer appears. In his book The Country and the City (1973),
Raymond Williams traces a European landscape that still bears the
marks of this struggle, as does Marshall Berman, in his All that is solid
melts into air. What is being crushed is not rural purity or authenticity,
however, but heterogeneity, certain kinds of subjects and practices
which are obstacles to modernity. Violence in Latin America is thus not
an aberrant form of nationalism, not Argentine violence as Timmerman
would have it, or Salvadoran violence as Joan Didion would have it.
Violence is the explosion that comes with the shock of the new, with the
harnessing of the archaic with modern technology without the alleviation of any kind of participation.
It is worth remembering that even during the colonial period, Viceregal society aimed not only at changing indigenous beliefs but also at
incorporating difference on condition that it was converted into style.
This "mythological" practice whose discovery is generally attributed to
Roland Barthes was in fact the inspired invention of Franciscans and
Jesuits. Thus emblems of Aztec emperors along with classical heroes
decorated the arches which welcomed the new viceroys by providing a
conflict-free, pluralistic collage. Latin American independence initiated
a different kind of universality under the banner of progress; the complicity of this civilization with empire has been charted by Norbert
Elias (1978) and does not need to be repeated. What is important to

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stress is that economic modernization in Latin America initially relied

heavily on a traditional landowning class able to mobilize private armies
of overseers who were thus able to exercise a degree of exploitation that
was impossible in most metropolitan countries. The critique of modernization, the realization that so far as Latin America was concerned
capitalism would not inevitabily bring about democracy as the
positivists thought, came from two quartersfrom left intellectuals and
politicians like Jos Carlos Maritegui, who wanted an autonomous
Latin American solution to social problems, and secondly through cultural movementsthe search for Latin Americanism, the attempts to
break away from the cultural lag imposed by a linear vision of history
and culture. Literature played a very important role in this process. The
shock effect of contemporaneously existing cultures, the anachronism of
what in a European time frame might be sequential, gives the literature
of the sixties in Latin America its mask of vitality, a mask which on
close inspection turns to be a death maskthe frozen and permanent
face of what had been dynamic local cultures, now destroyed or transformed by modernization and its wars.
What comes into view in the sixties is a very curious carnival indeed.
Not a vitalizing libido released after repression but a kind of ghost
dance, a ghost dance around the dead of a war that began with the
conquest and goes on today; a war punctuated by vast genocides and
massacres. The deaths of the indigenous populations in the sixteenth
century, the dead of indigenous uprisings and slave barracks, the massacre of Indians in the nineteenth century to make way for immigrant
populations, but also the dead in titanic civil wars like the "violencia" in
Columbia, the massacre of strikers in El Salvador and Peru in the 1930s.
The installation of new types of military dictatorships, technologically more efficient in the 1960s was a quantitative rather than a qualitative change. Rubber workers were enslaved and slaughtered in the
Putamayo when rubber was exploited, and in the 1970s when it was a
question of acquiring cheap labor without the inconvenience of political
opposition and labor unions, the military slaughtered the opposition in
the Southern Cone.
The victims in these wars are not part of a past which has been
superseded. As Fanon (1961) shows, the thrusting of peoples into an
Otherness, the living death that is bestowed upon them by colonialism
and its ethnocentrism, leads to stagnation from which one form of
escape is violent self-assertiona reversal of values, Muslim not Christian, primitive not modern, black not white. Clearly behind this there is

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a sense of community, which might be embodied in the nation or the

race seen as the reversal of the European or the American. This was the
founding impulse of Cuba in the sixties when Che Guevara tried to
produce a society which had non-material incentives. It is the founding
impulse of present-day Nicaragua with its opposition to commodity
culture, the fomenting of creativity in poetry workshops, the presentation of Nicaragua as a moral society. Thus we can see why there might
be a twofold "ethical imperative" which impressed itself upon Latin
American militants and writersthe demand for autonomy and for
recognition of the unburied dead of the wars of modernization. What
might be considered the Latin American equivalent of modernism is
marked not only by art's negation of official culture but even more by
this responsibility to the dead. The second section of Neruda's poem
Canto General, finished in 1950, is a shamanistic descent to the dead
builders of Macchu Picchu and their resurrection in his voice and blood.
The modern Latin American novel, indeed, comes into being around an
obsession with the fate of Polinices, condemned to lie unburied, a prey
to vultures outside the walls of the polis. The titles of many modern
novelsFor a tomb without a name (Onetti), On heroes and tombs (Sabato),
The Death of Artemio Cruz (Fuentes), The Funeral of Big Mama (Garcia
Marquez), The War of the End of the World (Vargas Llosa), The Eyes of the
Buried (Asturias), Lying in State (Roa Bastos)these very titles suggest
an overwhelming problem around the unhallowed dead. Both the guerrila movement of the sixties and seventies as well as writers represented
themselves as the avengers of the unburied dead. The anonymous unburied would be salvaged by new breeds of heroismthat of the creator
of autonomous fictional worlds which were models for the autonomy
which Latin America had never enjoyed and creators of autonomous
states freed from the grip of imperialism. Both of these were seen as
essentially masculine vanguard projectsdespite the incorporation of
women into guerrilla movements, despite the increasing number of
women writers.

This model of autonomywhether literary or politicalwas undermined by events in the late sixties and the seventiesthe inability of
Cuba to remain outside East/West politics, the overthrow of Allende,
and the institution of death camp regimes in the Southern Cone and
Central America whose aim was the pacification of a population that
had not docilely accepted the inevitability of consumer society. The

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attempts of Pinochet in Chile, of Martnez de la Hoz in Argentina to

apply neoliberal economics came in the aftermath of brutal repression of
political parties and trade unions which in turn generated different
forms of resistance.
The establishment of authoritarian regimes in the Southern Gone
can be seen both as a continuity of very ancient procedures and as a new
high-tech form of repression. On the one hand, the towering "caracoles"
or spiral-shaped vertical shopping malls in Chile erected after the
Pinochet coup arelike the churches built on Aztec temples or the
opera house built in the Amazonvisible symbols of modernization
which are intended to erase the past and proclaim the modern. On the
other hand, the methods by which these modern regimes were installed
had new features. Repression affected not only traditional political
enemies like the workers and trade unionists, but also the intellectual
leadership and elements of the populationmiddle-class women,
priests and members of religious ordersmany of whom had never
experienced terror and had thought themselves immune. Further, the
new terror 1) was more systematic and anonymous in nature, characterized by a certain "regularity" in the proceedings which lends credence to the fact that methods were taught, routinized and exported with
data exchanged between different countries; 2) involved the use of disappearance as a novel method of social control and in contrary fashion,
the random appearance of dead bodies was meant to act as a warning to
the general population; 3) involved the mutilation, burning or drowning
of bodies in order to prevent identification, and thus the elimination of
identity and also the impossibility of martyrdom (contrast this, for
example, with the funerals in South Africa); 4) involved the staging of
events in order to produce calculated effects on the general population.
For instance, the attempt to demonstrate that some of the dead were
killed in terrorist attacks or that the disappeared had simply left the
country. On inspection, however, these techniques are not so much new
as more efficient ways of spreading fear.
What is more interesting than the originality or banality of the
repression, however, is the excess involved. In his discussion of the
Putumayo massacres of the early years of the century, anthropologist
Michael Taussig (1984) points out that the excess cannot be explained
by economic motives since the indigenous work force of the rubber
plantations was crippled and mutilated and thus made not functional.
Something similar can be said of the repression in the Southern Cone
which went much further than was necessary to usher in a consumer

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society. This excess can only be attributed to the power of archaic

forcesracism, mysogyny and machismo which allowed the torture
system to function.
In order to illustrate this point, I want to refer briefly to confessions
of torturers and descriptions of torture that have recently come out of
Argentina and Chile. In these accounts the strange harnessing of
bureaucracy and savagery which was a characteristic of Nazi Germany
testify to lessons well-learned. Obviously, bureaucratisation makes it
easier for torturers to deal with a situation and continue their normal
relations with the outside world. A language of euphemism has to be
developed in order to enable them to speak of what they are doing. In
Argentina, the top members of the hierarchy within the torture institutions were referred to as managers and assistant managers, as if they
belonged to a corporation (Nunca Ms 1984: 253-9). In another testimony
from Argentina, the victim described how those involved outlined the
"rules of the game" before beginning torture, explaining the exact voltage that would be given, saying that nobody could resist that amount
without talking and that the after-effects would probably be permanent
(C.A.D.H. Testimonio del abogado, Martn Toms Grau, 1983). In
Chile and Argentina torture was referred to as a task (tarea) and there
was one case where an informer asked to be transferred from the Air
Force security to the DINA in the hope of better pay and a new car
(Comisin Nacional sobre la desparicin de personas, Confesiones de un
agente de seguridad, 1984). A subculture developed with its own terminology of packages, "transferred" (i.e. dead people). Finally the presence of
doctors, psychiatrists and occasionally nurses in torture sessions helped
to establish a sense of a routinized situation. At the same time, this
bureaucratic and routinized state of affairs was itself not a sufficient
legitimation, since the torturers also resorted to religious language, the
appeal to a Holy War in order to justify their activities. Indeed, in the
depositions of victims mention is made of priests who collaborated with
the military (although priests were also tortured and killed), and in one
case a prisoner was told by the priest, "Men's lives depend on God and
your information" (Nunca Ms: 261).

It is important to know how and why torturers torture and to begin

by recognizing the fact that torturers are men. It is a mistake to regard
these men as necessarily pathological cases, although situations of tor-

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11

ture undoubtedly recruit such people. But madness is too easy an explanation. We have to ask ourselves what circumstances make it possible
for torture squads to operate in the way they do.
One answer is provided by the manner in which torturers are incorporated into torture squads through rituals which have much in common with schoolboy rituals. There are hundreds of literary accounts
from all over the world of such rituals which are commonly associated
with an evil "other" who must be eliminateda tribal enemy, a ferocious animal, or simply an effeminate schoolfellow. The denigration of
this "other" usually involves his reduction to the status of the devalued
woman. These casual rituals of cruelty which have marked the adolescence of many young men even in liberal societies are formalized, even
bureaucratized in the death camps. The confessions of a Chilean security agent and of Argentinian torturers make clear that the pact of
blood is what makes torture possible, i.e. the witnessing of torture and
killing, or the performance (this is particularly true in El Salvador and
Guatemala) of acts of disembowelling or mutilating in order to secure
group bonding. During torture sessions in Argentina, there were often
jokes, laughter, music and sadistic excitement. There are many accounts of such "exaltation," the sense of being god and having absolute
power over people.
The association of sexuality with torture is striking. Electroshock was
commonly applied to the testicles, to the breasts and the vagina in the
case of women. The prisoner's body became the focus of his or her
entire attention. Hernn Valds's Diary of a Chilean Concentration Camp
(1975), written just after his release from Tejas Verdes, describes how
the brutalization of prisoners reduces their thinking to an exclusive
concern with bodily functions. "My body was aching terribly. I didn't
dare look at my penis. I was scared to." A prisoner who was no longer
regarded as dangerous because he had been reduced to a vegetable was
still submitted to ritual humiliation which included electroshock in the
anus. An ex-soldier describes the torture of his brother who was also in
the army but had not shown himself sufficiently macho and was thus
tortured to make him a man. His brother comments, "He came out half
crazy, the fucker, but we all have to learn what it takes to be a man."
Otherwise "there'd be no keeping the fuckers under control."

On the other hand, their abjection forced male prisoners to live for
the first time "as if they were women," to understand what it meant not

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to be able to forget their bodies, to be ridiculed and battered, and to

find comfort in everyday life activities like washing clothes or uttering a
banal phrase.
The second important feature of the death camps was the impossibility of heroism. It was important for the military governments that
there be no martyrs in the struggle, that there should be no historical
memory, no family shrines. The reasons for this go far deeper than
political expediency for it aimed at destroying any meaning that death
might have in society at large. Death was not to be a form of continuity
but an extirpation. In Chile, prisoners were thrown into an unused
furnace at Longquen and buried alive. Once a human person is reduced
to a number, once nameless prisoners are thrown from airplanes, cast
into anonymous graves, and mutilated beyond recognition, there is a
devaluation of death and hence of human identity that affects the whole
of society.
Both the anonymity of death in the death camps and the parody of
death in mass execution desacralize death but they also undermine the
kind of male heroism which had powered the guerilla movements of the
sixties, and which had been displaced onto the artist as hero in the
sixties' novel. The polarization of masculine/feminine, active/passive,
was an intrinsic element within the armed groups that were fighting the
military governments. Once they were captured, however, it left them
with no room to negotiate between informing and death. Yet dying like
a man had little meaning when the heroism was not recorded, when the
body was mutilated beyond recognition and when no one was there to
witness the last heroic gesture or to continue the struggle. Many of the
women who belonged to militant movements were inspired by ideals of
militancy that were part of this macho ideal. Yet interviews with women
of the Tupamaru movement in Uruguay show that women were never
completely accepted as militants largely because their vulnerability to
pregnancy was thought to undermine their ability to behave with the
strength demanded of a militant (Araujo: 1980). The militant was
defined as masculine in the socially-constructed sense of this word, and
women "militants" were supposed to become pseudo-malesonly to be
ridiculed as Lesbians.
Except in literaturefor instance novels by Puig (1976), by Elvira
Orphe (1977), and Miguel Bonasso (1984)it is rare for militancy and
state torture to be discussed in relation to gender difference, despite the
already massive literature on death camps and torture in both Argentina
and Chile. These texts include the confessions of torturers, trial pro-

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ceedings, the report Nunca Ms and Todo es Ausencia; and journalsthe

periodical published by the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Diario
del proceso (Newspaper of the Trial of the military junta in Argentina).
With the exception of the literary works, most of this has been gathered
in support of human rights or in the trials of the junta in Argentina, and
the text is therefore written from a legalistic viewpoint to establish guilt
(see bibliography). We can be sure that many aspects of camp life which
are not pertinent to trials or to human rights investigations still remain
to be explored. One example is the relationship of class to torture. In
the Confession of a security agent, the agent being apprenticed as torturer is
forced to witness the torture of a MIR woman in which he is most
struck by the fact that she is an upper-class girl. It could be inferred
both that he would not have found the torture of a working class woman
to be so abnormal and secondly, that a hint of class revenge might have
entered into torture. At the same time, both Argentine and Chilean
material constantly refer not only to the rape of women, but daily sexual
abuse.
This brings me to a second important point. It is a matter of some
significance that one of the institutions that the military governments of
Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were most concerned to destroy was the
family as a region of refuge. They did this by making grandmothers
responsible for the subversion of their grandchildren and children responsible for the subversion of their parents.
This attack on the family, however, also showed the limitations of
certain left assumptions about the bourgeois family. In the light of
experiences such as those of the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, it is
important to sever family from its necessary link with "bourgeois". On
the left, liberation from the family could leave young people dangerously exposed. On the other hand, the logic of the military in attacking
the family, whether those families included revolutionary children or
not, was self-defeating. After all, it was the right that was able to
mobilize women against Allende in the first consumer revolts. In attacking the family, by torturing parents in front of children, by carrying off
grandmothers or parents of militants, the military released powerful
oppositional forces out of which emerged movements like those of the
Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Families and Relatives of the
Disappeared in Chile. The strength of these movements lay not so
much in the surprise element of women taking the initiative at a time of
intense repression but more in their creative use of symbolism. The
mothers of the Plaza de Mayo wore white handkerchiefs and carried

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photographs of their disappeared children; in Chile, the discovery of

bodies in the furnaces of Longquen was followed by a pilgrimage and
mass in which women carried flowers (Vidal: 1982). In Salvador, it is
women who find and photograph the bodies of victims and even carry
out searches for a limb or any part of a dead child that they can recognize from mass graves. What seems a traditional, even a mythical, association between mothers and death which puts the mothers beyond
the fear that affects other citizens, has become at the same time a
dynamic rintgration of the dead and disappeared into contemporaneity. Whereas modernization buried its dead to forget them, here
death is a political space not only of commemoration but of an ethics
based on collective memory and continuity.
The loss of children ejected these women from the protected circle
of the home and threw them into confrontation with the state and a
society which had hitherto represented itself as the protector of women
and children; in so doing they breached the gendered separation between public and private on which most political movements had been
articulated. The symbolic force of the protest was reinforced in Argentina by weekly demonstrations in a central public space, associated with
independence, the Plaza de Mayo (Navarro: 1985). In Chile women
chained themselves to the railings of the closed Congress building. In El
Salvador the mothers staged sit-ins in the half-built Cathedral in which
there is a monument to Archbishop Romero.
The religious element in all this is obvious even in Argentina where
the Church did not play any role in helping the mothers as it did in
Chile and El Salvador. It is evident in the language of conversion which
the mothers use to describe their adhesion to the mothers' movement. At
the same time, it would be a mistake to see these movements simply as
worse case movementsones which accidentally come into being because other forms of political life had ceased to exist. Whereas the male
bonding of the death camp torturers is based on well-established rites
through which masculinity has been constituted, women's solidarity
outside the kinship system goes against the grain. One student of the
mothers' movement, indeed, suggests that it was precisely the fact that
they were not perceived as political subjects that enabled them to express dissent (Navarro:26). Yet the mothers had to consolidate their
movements by taking on a public selfnot a prestigious public self but
a scorned and outcast public self. In Argentina, when the women began
to protest, they were known as madwomen.
The panoptic function of the modern city is here foregrounded but

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defied (de Certeau: 1985). These movements produced a public theater

in which an entire population, whether present or not, became the
audience. The women did not shout slogansthey held up photographs of people whose absence was an eloquent silence. Behind this
was an ethics of survival and life to counter the political use of death.
Thus in November 1985, three women's marches against Pinochet in
Chile converged on Pinochet's residence and were billed as demonstrations "for life". The contrast with the USA is striking since here pro-life
has been taken over by the state and conservatives.
In Latin America, the mothers' movements are not vanguard or
postmodern movements; nor are the indigenous uprisings like those in
Guatemala described by Rigoberta Menchu (Menchu: 1984). Firstly,
they were provoked by attacks on positions of moral righton the
family or the land. In both casesthat of the mothers, that of indigenous groupspeople discovered in the process of struggle that a mother
could be a mother without a child, that the Indian could be an Indian
without land. The mothers' movements in the Southern Cone and in El
Salvador, although apparently articulated on a very traditional different
tial axis, have revealed the fictionality of the conventional association of
the masculine with the public sphere, and the feminine with the private
sphere. They have opened the way towards an emergent ethics which
cannot be associated simply with preordained gender, race or class.
What the mothers' movements shows is that what has been relegated to
the feminine is in fact continuity and survival. Michel de Certeau (1985)
has talked much of those tactics which come out of everyday life, which
are not great gestures made to posterity but more modest challenges
the appropriation of language, of public space, the acceptance of political anonymity. In Chile, where grass roots movements have mobilized
the energies dispersed in 1973, in Argentina, in Uruguay and Brazil,
there is a quite new sense of the value of democracy, which for the first
time has become detached from capitalism or electoral politics, and of
the value of the family in which christenings and baptisms become
political gatherings.
Although written in unnecessarily jargon-ridden language, I think
this is essentially what Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe are saying in
their book, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a radical democratic

politics (1985), when they speak against a unified discourse of the left,
and for diversity and discursive discontinuity.
Movements such as those of the mothers cannot be reproduced or
essentialized. If we can learn anything from them, it is that they raise

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questions which may not have a single correct answer. Perhaps the first
and most pressing is that the appropriation of democracy and family by
opposition to military regimes only came about in an extreme situation.
Secondly, we cannot yet tell even in Argentina whether these movements will continue with the same vigor when political parties and trade
unions once again are allowed to function. Will the women's which
contributed so much to this realization drop from view with the return
to normality? Third, how many of those people at present committed to
grassroots movements will be drawn back into the glamour of national
politics and into a universal discourse, the "privileged point of access to
truth" which can be reached only by a limited number of subjects?
Laclau and Mouffe say, "the classic discourse of socialism . . . was a
discourse of the universal, which transformed certain social categories
into depositories of political and epistemological privileges. . . . and as
such it reduced the field of the discursive surfaces on which it considered that it was possible and legitimate to operate." But this diversification is fragile. And what Laclau and Mouffe do not deal with in their
book is that, disarticulating family from bourgeois, political from
macho vanguard, democracy from capitalism has, in the case of Argentina not come about through theoretical breakthroughs but rather as the
aftermath of some of the harshest and most widespread repression in the
continent. We are left with the question of how many dead there will
have to be before these "archaic" formulae of Otherness are no longer
needed to manufacture the cement of society.

Acknowledgement: I am grateful to Tununa Mercado and Noe Jitrik for allowing me to use their collection of documents, particularly those of Comisin
Argentina de Derechos Humanos. I also thank Giorgio Solimano for allowing
me to consult reports circulated in Chile on the Pisagua concentration camp.

Books and Articles Mentioned

Araujo, Ana Mara, Tupamaros. Des femmes de l'Uruguay (Paris: Des Femmes,
1980)
Agrupacin de familiares de detenidos desparecidos, Nunca ms (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1984)
Berman, Marshall, All that is solid melts into air-the experience of modernity (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1985)

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Bonasso, Miguel, Recuerdos de la Muerte (Buenos Aires: Brughera, 1985)

Comisin Nacional sobre la desaricon de personas, Confesiones de un agente de
seguridad (Santiago de Chile, 1984)
de Certeau, Michel, "Practices of Space" and "The Jabbering of Social Life," in
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