Death Camp Confessions and Resistance to Violence in Latin America - Jean Franco (2007)

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Death camp confessions and resistance to violence in

Latin AmericaJean 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 Am erica

Jean

Franco

I V l y argum ent in this paper concerns the fact that repressive moderni-

zation 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 South ern Cone have made

it evident that mode rnization is a euph em ism for escalated economic

exploitation based on severe repression.

As a preface to my argum ent, I want to take off from an observation

made by Jacobo T imm erman in his book,

Prisoner

without a N umber, Cell

without a Nam e (1981), in which he explained that his torturers tried to

create a different more sophisticated image of the places of tort ure . As

if by this means, they might give a more elevated status to their ac-

tivities, 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 in-

stitutionalization for their world . Tim me rm an accutely observes the

sordid and archaic basement on which the appearance of a mo dern

institution is built. Because the term mo dernization is a euph emis m,

it is important to explore the hidden assumptions behind this term

whic h obviously valorizes the mo dern 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 diverg-

ing 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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GreystokeandTh eEmerald Forestb ring back the noble savage mu ch as the

Jesuits conceived that figure in the seventeenth century colonization of

the Americas.Fitzcarraldoretells the epic of conquering th e A mazon 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 ofRambo, which vies with the popular imperialist

fiction of nineteenth-century England, to bad conscience movies like

ApocalypseNowa ndUnderFirewhich m ake the colonized world the scene

of metropolitan heart-searching, what is going on is the same old fron-

tier war. Fennimore Cooper 's characters and Bulldog Drummond are

etched dee p, not in a political unconscious as Jame son w ould have it,

but as part of a dynamic ethnocentric discourse which is continuously

reproduced not only in popular art but in academic and cultural insti tu-

t ions,

as was recently seen in the Primitive/Modern exhibition at the

Museum of Modern Ar t .

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 moderniza-

tion 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 issolid

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 w ith the shock of the new, with the

harnessing of the archaic with modern technology without the allevia-

tion of any kind of participation.

It is worth remembering that even during the colonial period, Vice-

regal society aimed not only at changing indigenous beliefs but also at

incorporating difference on condition that it was converted into style.

Th is my thologica l practice who se discovery is generally attribu ted 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 com-

plicity 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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7

stress is that economic modernization in Latin America initially relied

heavily on a traditional lando wning class able to mobilize private arm ies

of overseers w ho were thus able to exercise a degree of exploitation th at

was impossible in most metropolitan countries. The critique of moder-

nization, the realization that so far as Latin America was concerned

capitalism would not inevitabily bring about democracy as the

positivists though t, came from two quartersfrom left intellectuals and

politicians like Jos Carlos Maritegu i, wh o wanted an autonom ous

Latin American solution to social problems, and secondly through cul-

tural movementsthe search for Latin Americanism, the attempts to

break away from the cultural lag imposed by a linear vision of history

and cultu re. Literature played a very importan t role in this process. T he

shock effect of contempo raneously existing cultu res, 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 trans-

formed by modernization and its wars.

W hat 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 mas-

sacre of Indians in the nineteenth century to make way for immigrant

population s, but also the dead in titanic civil wars like the violencia in

Colu mb ia, the massacre of strikers in El Salvador and Peru in the 1930s.

The installation of new types of military dictatorships, technologi-

cally more efficient in the 1960s was a quantitative rather than a qual-

itative 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 c heap labor w ithout th e 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 Christ-

ian, 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 Eu ropean or the Ame rican. Th is was th e

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 presenta-

tion of Nicaragua as a moral society. Thus we can see why there might

be a twofold ethical imperative wh ich 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 G eneral, finished in 1950, is a shamanistic descent to the dead

builders of Mac chu P icchu and the ir 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

novels

For a tomb without a name

(On etti),

On

heroes

and tombs

(Sabato),

The Death of Artemio Cruz

(Fuentes),

The Funeral of Big Mam a G arcia

Marquez),

The War ofthe End ofthe World

(Vargas Llosa),

Th e

Eyes

of the

Buried

(Asturias),

Lying in State

(Roa Bastos)these very titles suggest

an overwhelming problem around the unhallowed dead. Both the guer-

rila movement of the sixties and seventies as well as writers represented

themselves as the avengers of the unburied dead. The anonymous un-

buried 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 l i terary or poli t icalwas un-

dermined by events in the late sixties and th e seventiesthe inability of

Cuba to remain outside East/West politics, the overthrow of Allende,

and the insti tution 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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Jean Franco 9

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

apply n eoliberal economics came in the aftermath of brutal repression of

political parties and trade unions which in tur n generated different

forms of resistance.

The establishment of authoritarian regimes in the Southern Gone

can be seen bo th as a continu ity of very ancient proced ures and as a new

high-tech form of repression. On the one han d, 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 m ethods by w hich 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 anon ym ous in nat ure , charac-

terized by a certain regularity in the proceeding s wh ich lends cre-

dence to the fact that me thods were taught, routinized and exported wit h

data exchanged between different countries; 2) involved the use of dis-

appearanc e 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 characterist ic of Nazi Germ any

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

Argen tina, the top mem bers of the hierarchy w ithin the torture insti tu-

tions were referred to as managers and assistant managers, as if they

belonged to a corporation NuncaMs1984: 253-9). In ano ther testimon y

from Argentina, the victim described how those involved outlined the

rules of the gam e before begin ning tortu re, explaining the exact vol-

tage 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. Testimo nio del abog ado, Ma rtn 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, Confesionesde un

agente

de

seguridad, 1984). A subculture developed with its own terminol-

ogy 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 me ntion is made of priests wh o collaborated w ith

the military (although priests were also tortured and killed), and in one

case a prisoner was told by the priest, M en's lives depen d on God a nd

your information

Nunca Ms:

26 1).

I t is impo rtant to know how and w hy 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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JeanFranco

11

ture undoubtedly recruit such people. But madness is too easy an exp-

lanation. We have to ask ourselves what circumstances make it possible

for torture squads to operate in the way they do.

On e answer is provided b y the m anner in which torturers are incor-

porated into torture squads through rituals which have much in com-

mon 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 wh o mu st be eliminated a tribal enem y, a feroci-

ous animal, or simply an effeminate schoolfellow. The denigration of

this othe r usually involves his reduction to the status of the devalued

woman. These casual rituals of cruelty which have marked the adoles-

cence of many young men even in liberal societies are formalized, even

bureaucratized in the death camps. The confessions of a Chilean sec-

urity 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 ac-

counts of such exaltation, the sense of being god and having absolute

power over people.

T he association of sexuality w ith 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'sDiary of a ChileanConcentration Camp

(1975), written just after his release from Tejas Verdes, describes how

the brutalization of prisoners reduces their thinking to an exclusive

concern wi th bodily functions. M y body was aching terribly. I didn 't

dare look at my penis. I was scared to . A prisoner wh o 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 wh o was also in

the army but had not shown himself sufficiently macho and was thus

tortured to make him a man. H is brother comm ents, H e came out half

crazy, the fucker, but we all have to learn what it takes to be a man.

Oth erwis e there'd be no keeping the fuckers und er con trol.

On the other hand, their abjection forced male prisoners to live for

the first time as if they were wom en, to unde rstand w ha t it me ant 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 impossi-

bility 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. Dea th 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 hum an 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 hum an identity tha t affects the w hole

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 m ovements 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 w ithin 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 w ho 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 tortu re in bo th Argentina

and Chile. These texts include the confessions of torturers, trial pro-


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ceedings, the report

Nunca Ms

an d Todo

es Ausencia;

and journals the

periodical published by the m others of the Plaza de Mayo and the Diario

de l

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 supp ort of hum an rights or in the trials of the ju nta in A rgentin a, and

the text is therefore writte n from a legalistic viewpoint to e stablish guilt

(see bibliography). We can be sure that m any aspects of camp life w hich

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

th eConfession

o f

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 th at he would no t have found th e tortur e 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 wom en, b ut daily sexual

abuse.

This brings me to a second important point. It is a matter of some

significance th at one of the ins titutions that t he m ilitary governm ents of

Chile, Argentina and Uruguay were mos t 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 re-

sponsible 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

imp ortan t to sever family from its necessary link wit h bourg eois . O n

the left, liberation from the family could leave young people danger-

ously 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 wome n against Allende in the first consum er revolts. In attack-

ing 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 recog-

nize from mass graves. What seems a traditional, even a mythical, as-

sociation 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 contem-

poraneity. 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 bet-

ween public and private on which most political movements had been

articulated. The symbolic force of the protest was reinforced in Argen-

tina by weekly dem onstrations in a central pub lic space, associated with

independence, the Plaza de Mayo (Navarro: 1985). In Chile women

chained themse lves to the railings of the closed Congress bu ilding . 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 E l Salvador. It is evident in the language of conversion whic h

the mothers use to describe their adhesion to the m others' movement. At

the same time, it would be a mistake to see these movements simply as

worse case movementsones which accidentally come into being be-

cause 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 consti tuted, 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 ex-

press 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 publicself 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 photo-

graphs 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 demonstra-

tions for life . T he contrast with the US A 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 indigen-

ous 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 a ppare ntly 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 w ith the private

sphere. They have opened the way towards an emergent ethics which

cannot be associated simply with preordained gender, race or class.

Wh at the m others' movements shows is that what has been relegated to

the fem inine is in fact continuity and survival. M ichel de Certeau (1985)

has talked mu ch of those tactics which com e out of everyday life, whic h

are not great gestures made to posterity but more modest challenges

the appropriation of language, of public space, the acceptance of politi-

cal 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 wha t Ernesto L aclau and C han tai Mouffe are saying in

t h e i r b o o k ,

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a radical democratic

politics

(1985), wh en th ey speak against a unified disc ourse 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 move-

ments 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? T hir d, how many of those people at present comm itted to

grassroots movements will be drawn back into the glamour of national

politics and into a universal discourse, the privileged po int of access to

trut h whic h can be reached only by a l imited num ber of subjects?

Laclau a nd M ouffe say, the classic discou rse 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 consi-

dered that it was possible and legitimate to operate. But this diversifica-

tion 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 Argen-

tina not come about through theoretical breakthroughs but rather as the

aftermath of some of the harsh est and most wides pread repression in the

continent. We are left with the question of how many dead there will

have to be before these archa ic formulae of Oth ernes s are no longer

needed to manufacture the cement of society.

Acknowledgement: I am grateful to T ununa Mercado and N oe Jitrik for allow-

ing 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 ca mp.

Books and Articles M entioned

Araujo, Ana Mara,

Tupamaros. Des

femmes

del Uruguay

(Paris: Des Femmes

1980)

Agrupacin de familiares de detenidos desparecidos,

Nuncams

(Buenos Aires:

Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1984)

Berman, Marshal l ,

A ll that is solid melts into air-the experience ofmodernity

(New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1985)


14/14

JeanFranco

17

Bonasso, Miguel,

Recuerdos

de la Muerte (Buenos Aires: Brughera, 1985)

Comisin Nacional sobre la desaricon de personas,

Confesionesde un agente de

seguridad (Santiago de Chile, 1984)

de Certeau, Michel, Practices of Space and Th e Jabbe ring of Social Life, in

On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: John s H opkin s University

Press,

1985), pp. 122-45 and 146-54

Fanon, Frantz,

Le sdamnsde la terre

(Paris: Franois M aspe ro, 1961)

Nava rro, Marysa , Th e Personal is Political. Las Ma dres de Plaza de Mayo,

(unpublished manuscript)

Orphe, Elvira,La ltima

conquista

de El Angel (Caracas: Monte Avila, 1977)

Puig , Manuel ,

The Kiss of the S pider Woman

(Ne w York: 1979, Knopf)

Taussig, Michael, Histor y as Sorcery,

Representations

7, University of Califor-

ni a

Timmerman , Jacobo ,

Preso sin nombre, celda sin nmero

(Barcelona, C aracas,

Buenos Aires: El Cid Editor, 1981). English translation

Prisoner

without a

Number, Cell without a Name

Valds , Hernn,

Diary of a ChileanConcentration Camp

(London: Victor Gol-

lancz, 1975)

Vidal , Hernn,

La vida por la vida. LaagrupacinChilenadefamiliares dedetenidos

desaparecidos

(Minneapolis: Institute of Ideologies and Literatures, 1982)

Will iams, Raym ond,

The Country and the City

(New York-London: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1973)

Death Camp Confessions and Resistance to Violence in Latin America - Jean Franco (2007)

Documents