Modernization as violence in Latin America
Franco, Jean. “Death camp confessions and resistance to violence in Latin America.” Socialism and Democracy, Volume 2, Issue 1 January 1988 , pages 5 – 17.
Franco's argument is that there is a continuity in the use of violence in Latin America to bring on economic exploitative systems and label them as "modern", but there is a qualitative change in the effectiveness of the methods that the military regimes used in the 70's. As proof of the first, the building of commercial centers (malls) after the coup to proclaim a modern country in Chile and erase the past. As a proof of the latter, the new methods involved more systematic, calculated and regular practices of terror that combined bureaucracy and high-tech techniques with savagery. However, the excess of these practices cannot be explained by the economic factors alone, but we need to look at regimes of racism and misogyny and religious metaphors that enabled the specific practice of torture. For instance, torturers were indoctrinated in the idea of the evil "other" as an effeminate enemy, in rituals that have a continuity with other practices of male bonding and construction of heterosexual masculinity. Likewise, Franco notes that the use of gendered and sexualized practices and language in torture sessions is alarming.
The erasing of identity of the victims becomes an important feature so that torture and death do not acquire any heroic dimensions. In contrast, the practices of the Madres in Argentina and Agrupación in Chile are geared to bring back the dead not as a frozen memory: "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." (p.14)
Franco's argument is that there is a continuity in the use of violence in Latin America to bring on economic exploitative systems and label them as "modern", but there is a qualitative change in the effectiveness of the methods that the military regimes used in the 70's. As proof of the first, the building of commercial centers (malls) after the coup to proclaim a modern country in Chile and erase the past. As a proof of the latter, the new methods involved more systematic, calculated and regular practices of terror that combined bureaucracy and high-tech techniques with savagery. However, the excess of these practices cannot be explained by the economic factors alone, but we need to look at regimes of racism and misogyny and religious metaphors that enabled the specific practice of torture. For instance, torturers were indoctrinated in the idea of the evil "other" as an effeminate enemy, in rituals that have a continuity with other practices of male bonding and construction of heterosexual masculinity. Likewise, Franco notes that the use of gendered and sexualized practices and language in torture sessions is alarming.
The erasing of identity of the victims becomes an important feature so that torture and death do not acquire any heroic dimensions. In contrast, the practices of the Madres in Argentina and Agrupación in Chile are geared to bring back the dead not as a frozen memory: "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." (p.14)
In what way (and why) do you think that the violence under Pinochet was both "calculated" and excessive? Surely, in so far as it was excessive it also went beyond calculation?
ReplyDeleteIt is important to say that the idea of the "excesses" has been mobilized by the defenders of the military regime. They claim that, whenever they were human rights violations, it was due isolated random cases of excesses by some individuals. Moreover, they claim Pinochet was not even aware of it. It has been important, then, to show that these "excesses" were systematic and part of a calculated strategy.
ReplyDeleteIt was calculated because it was part of a larger strategy led by the School of the Americas and its doctrine of the internal enemy —in the context of the cold war— that used a calculated amount of violence throughout LA to impose neoliberal economies and ideology. It was at the same time excessive because that amount of violence was calculated to efficiently destroy the subjectivity and humanity in the victims, and to re-establish certain class, race, and gender hierarchies that were perceived to be at threat during the Unidad Popular.