Human Rights Issues around Latin America

Lillie points us to a series of excellent posts/issues. First, there's this great report involving the relatives of "false positives," or innocent civilians whom police or paramilitaries murder and then dress them up as "guerrillas" to build up their body count. Paramilitary violence continues to be one of the biggest threats to human rights and innocent civilians' lives in Colombia, and the story gives a harrowing level of personal detail of the liveso f those who have suffered.

She also does a great job chronicling the life of Domingo Antonio Bussi, one of the leading forces in installing repression and torture in Argentina immediately prior to and during its seven-year dictatorship. Bussi has never been repentant for his acts, and is currently on trial at last this past week, where he defended the use of repression and torture and denied that anybody had been "disappeared" in his region of Tucuman .

Finally, Lillie points us to these poignant images from Chile's recently-opened Museum of Memory, which chronicles the events and abuses of the Pinochet regime. Like Lillie and many others, the images and layout of the Museum strike me as very impressive and well-done, and must be overpowering in communicating their message in person.

A Rare Admirable Quality in Ronald Reagan?

I'm going to write words I never thought I'd write or say: it may not be such a terrible to look to Ronald Reagan on a key issue in the United States for the last several years:

Reagan was far to the left of the 2010 Republican Party on issues such as torture. The convention that he signed in 1988 holds that there is no circumstance of any kind that permits torture, which certainly would include the 9/11 aftermath and related anti-terror efforts today.

But it goes even deeper than that. As I noted in an early 2010 blog post: “Reagan would not have approved of drone-fired missile attacks aimed at killing terrorists; as president, he several times rejected anti-terrorism operations for the sole reason that civilians would have been killed by collateral damage. In 1985, he surprised aides such as Pat Buchanan by ruling out a military response to a Beirut hijacking for fear of civilian casualties; Lou Cannon reported then in the Washington Post that Reagan called retaliation in which innocent civilians are killed “itself a terrorist act.” And the idea of trying terrorists in military tribunals as opposed to a civilian court of law? The Reagan administration was completely against that. Paul Bremer (yes, that Paul Bremer) said in 1987, “a major element of our strategy has been to delegitimize terrorists, to get society to see them for what they are — criminals — and to use democracy’s most potent tool, the rule of law, against them.”

To be clear, I absolutely do not think Reagan was a saint, nor does Will Bunch, who also points out that the "'Reagan Doctrine' in Central America, leaving the fight to anti-Communist thugs and death squads that the then-president called “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers,” is arguably the gravest moral failing of his tenure." I couldn't agree more.

But that doesn't take away from the rather stark stance Reagan took against torture, nor does it detract from the obviously-opposite stance of current torture-apologists who claim to look to Reagan as their guiding light. Again, this is in no way an apology for Reagan, and I think his policies were overwhelmingly terrible and negative on both the U.S. and the world. That said, the fact that he was so strongly anti-torture does matter, and just serves as another reminder of how far the right has gone in the last 30 years, as well as how the vision of Reagan that today's right props up as its paragon does not always reflect the Reagan who was actually president.

Historical Image of the Day

Supposed terrorist in Abu Ghraib Prison, 2000s.

The Annual Protest at the School of the Americas/Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation

Erwin reminds us that today is the day of the annual protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC), formerly known as the School of the Americas. The name-change happened back in 2001, when the Bush administration realized the School's name had been associated with some of the worst crimes against humanity in the 20th century in the Americas. Rather than closing the school down or providing a real analysis of possible changes in U.S. policy in the hemisphere, the government opted to simply change the name to the WHISC.

Among the school's more infamous graduates, there is murderous Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt, former friend-to-America Manuel Noriega, and Lieutenant Byron Carvajal, a Colombian facing 60 years in prison for murdering ten counternarcotics police in Colombia, as well as many other distinguished men who were involved in torture and murder throughout Latin America. Obviously, if you've been running a center that trained soldiers who raped, tortured, and murdered civilians everywhere from Chile and Argentina up to El Salvador and Guatemala, you would hope a complete shut-down would happen, rather than a simple name-change, but that would be too humane. As a result, the protests continue on an annual basis.

Father Roy Bourgeois, the founder of the group School of Americas Watch (and major protagonist in Leslie Gill's excellent book that looks at the history, ideology, and results of the SOA) has an article up at HuffPo that outlines the recent activities of graduates from the SOA (including one of the leaders in the Honduran coup this year), as well as outlining a quick history of the SOA and the theme of the protests this year (which focus on the 20th anniversary of the murder by armed forces of 6 Jesuits, their cook, and his daughter in El Salvador).

Without a doubt, the School of the Americas is one of the darkest parts of American foreign policy in the 20th century, and the fact that it continues to exist under a lengthy euphemism does nothing to take away from the ugliness of the facts. It's worth learning a little more about the SOA if you haven't already, and contacting your congressperson to ask them why the U.S. continues to support an institution notorious for its training of torturers, rapists, and murderers.

Around Latin America - Human Rights

A few items of note this week:

-In Guyana, police are facing (rightfully) severe criticism and outrage over a brutal case of torture. While interrogating a 14-year-old boy about a murder, they apparently set his genitals on fire in an effort to torture answers out of him. Outrage among Guyanans of all sectors was immediate, in part exacerbated by pictures of the boy (caution: the previous link is very graphic and disturbing) on the front page of one of the daily newspapers. The chief of police is saying that the entire police force is being castigated for the actions of a few bad apples; however, citizens in Guyana are saying torture has long been a problem in the police force for a long time, and their skepticism; every government and regime that has used torture tends to deny the widespread practices and blames a few "rogue elements" (see: Rumsfeld, Donald).

-I'm late in getting to this, but in Argentina this week, General Reynaldo Benito Bignone, the final president of Argentina's dictatorship during the "Dirty War" (1976-1983), went on trial for his role in human rights abuses. Bignone was president of Argentina from the Argentine defeat in the Malvinas/Falklands War in June 1982 until the inauguration of Raul Alfonsin in December 1983. The specific charges against Bignone include the torture of 56 people, as well as the use of illegal searches. Bignone is one of the last "presidents" of the "Dirty War" to face charges, and is currently under house arrest. While I don't know what the outcome will be, or if he will see any prison-time, the fact that Argentina is going after him is just another good step in addressing the terrors of one of its darkest periods in history, when the military government killed upwards of 30,000 of its own citizens in just 7 years.

-I recently mentioned that Brazil's government appears on the verge of launching its own truth commission, 24 years after its military dictatorship (1964-1985) finally ended. While this would be the first governmentally-sponsored Truth commission, we already know much about the mechanisms and practices of torture in Brazil, as I mentioned, and a large part of that knowledge comes from the "Never Again" project that the Catholic Church and Protestant leaders cooperated on. In short, they managed to find a loophole in law under Brazil's dictatorship, in which lawyers could, for a 24-hour period, take out secret military files detailing arrests, tortures, and "trials" before tribunals. The original intention of the law was to allow some facade of "defense" in these trials. However, Archbishop Cardinal Arns and Reverend Jamie Wright realized what the loophole offered, and so they had a team of lawyers taking out these files for 24 hours, and (without the government's awareness) the Church would photocopy all of the files, returning them on time. As the dictatorship came to a close, the Church compiled the files into a 6-volume set, and published a condensed one-volume report in 1985 titled Brasil: Nunca Mais ("Brazil: Never Again"). Well, for those interested, you can download the entire report from University of Texas Press. You have to pay, but if you go to this link, you can also read the introduction to the project for free. And for those interested in the narrative of how the Church was able to photocopy the files and create a huge archive documenting the Brazilian dictatorship's regime of torture and abuses, check out this book.

-Speaking of the military, in Paraguay this week, Fernando Lugo fired his military chiefs just one day after denying that he was worried about the possibility of a coup. As has often been the case in Latin American history (Brazil 1964; Chile 1973; Guatemala 1954), Lugo's rhetoric and efforts to help the poor were at the base of the rumors:

Since winning the presidency last year and ending 61 years of domination by the conservative Colorado Party, Lugo has been trying to push reforms that would benefit Paraguay's numerous poor.

He has criticized an elite class that "sits comfortably in air-conditioned offices," while the poor "survive on just one meal a day if they are lucky ... without safe drinking water, surrounded by misery."

Lugo's rivals have been searching for ways to force him about of office before his term ends in August 2013.

Last week, a majority of lawmakers threatened to mount an impeachment trial over comments he allegedly made in a poor neighborhood that some interpreted as a call for class warfare. Lugo denied saying that.

Lugo also assured everybody that there was no broad threat from the military, even while saying that "There could be small military groups that are connected to or could be used by the political class, but institutionally, the military does not show any intent of reversing the process of democratic consolidation." While I suspect he's right about the overall military establishment in Paraguay, the fact that he fired some of those chiefs makes it clear he didn't find the rumors to be completely unsubstantiated, either.

-Finally, the Obama administration announced this week that it was in favor of offering political asylum to a Guatemalan woman fleeing her abusive husband:

With White House backing, Rody Alvarado Peña likely will be allowed to stay in the United States after fighting immigration court since 1995, The New York Times reported.

Alvarado currently lives in California where she is a housekeeper at a home for elderly nuns. She told the newspaper she was pleased but wondered why it took so long.

Immigration lawyers said the administration had taken a major step toward defining the legal grounds in a murky area of asylum law under which battered and sexually abused women in foreign countries could seek U.S. protection.

This is just great news. While some may (and certainly will) complain about the use of "political" asylum for victims of domestic abuse, or mount some weak, racist anti-immigration stance over this, it's a great humanitarian step on the part of the Obama administration. Many countries in Latin America still don't offer a good way out for women in abusive marriages. By offering political asylum for these victims, Obama has taken a good, significant step in doing what he can to help women who face domestic violence in other countries, and that's a good thing.

Uruguay's Amnesty for Dictatorship Struck Down

Most of the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay) countries, and even Brazil, have dealt with amnesties that forgave the culprits guilty of state-sponsored murder in one way or another. Chile managed to assure that Pinochet would never see an end to legal processes before he died; Argentina has begun prosecuting torturers and murderers from its "Dirty War," and has arrested leaders like Jorge Videla; Paraguay has literally begun digging up its past, and has some of the most extensive open archives on collaboration between right-wing dictatorships in South America; even Brazil has opened some secret archives, and while failing to ever go after torturers or the presidents, has stripped doctors who oversaw torture of their medical licenses.

The one conspicuous absence here is Uruguay, which still had in place a special amnesty for anybody who'd committed crimes during the dictatorship. Until today, when a court threw out the amnesty:

The Supreme Court ruling only applies to the investigation into the 1974 death in a military barrack of a young Communist teacher Nibia Sabasagaray, allegedly as a consequence of tortures and other abuses suffered while under arrest.

While that doesn't sound very hopeful save for the one case it deals with, the legal ruling for this case is based on the fact that the amnesty was not approved with a special majority vote, a requirement for this type of law in Uruguay, as well as the fact it violates the autonomy of the branches of government. As a result, while the court's ruling deals only with one case, its legal basis renders the entire amnesty illegal, opening the removal of amnesty to additional cases. On top of this, in the presidential elections this Sunday, Uruguayans also have a chance to vote on a referendum that would annul the amnesty law that Congress approved in 1986 (and that a referendum in 1989 confirmed).

In short, the one remaining amnesty law in the Southern Cone that had been relatively untouched and unchallenged is suddenly facing assaults from all sides, and this is nothing but good news for those interested in seeking justice for the crimes of Uruguay's military governments between 1974 and 1985.

Paraguay Finally Stops Paying Three Convicted Torturers

Somebody in Paraguay goofed up:

Three police chiefs imprisoned for torture have finally have been fired after collecting their salaries from behind bars since 1995, Paraguay's interior minister said Tuesday.

The former officials are serving 25-year terms in maximum security prison for human rights offenses under the dictatorship of Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, including the torture of opposition politicians.

I don't know why it would take so long to "fire" somebody who'd been in jail for 14 years; though it could have been accidental, I doubt it was. It's good that these three men aren't being paid for their crimes anymore, but it's still pretty appalling it took this long to get them off of the payrolls.

Animal Torture v. Human Torture

I personally don't care whether Michael Vick is reinstated to the NFL or not. For one, he's not very good. And second, well, who cares.

But the arguments for keeping Vick out are really interesting. Peter King at Sports Illustrated prints some of the e-mail responses after he said Vick should come back. One of them gets at the heart of a lot of the outrage toward Vick:

"He's a dog torturer. He has no room in our society let alone our favorite sport. He should be banned for life.'

That's interesting because whereas Vick was roundly condemned for torturing dogs, we have an entire political party saying it's OK to torture human beings in secret prisons with no accountability.

Now I think torturing dogs is terrible. Animal rights are important. I had an uncle (now-deceased) who abused animals and I would have had no problem with him serving some time for it. But what does it say about our society when torturing animals is a far bigger deal with far more moral condemnation than torturing people?

Photos Don't Lead to Anti-American Sentiment; Torture Leads to Anti-American Sentiment

Some new photos from Abu Ghraib have come out, and, well....no need to mince words: they're fucked up. We all know we torture(d) under the Bush regime, and it's not like we didn't know about Abu Ghraib. Still, seeing men covered in shit, cuffed into contorted positions, and left to die is no less outrageous. And Obama wants to hold off publishing more images because they "could stoke anti-American sentiment and endanger U.S. troops"?

You know what else endangers U.S. troops and stokes anti-American sentiment? Going to wars we have no business being in, and treating prisoners the way we treated Iraqis in Abu Ghraib and detainees in Guantanamo (and who knows where else). So fuck Bush for getting us into this mess, and if American military leaders aren't ready for the international backlash, well....you should have not followed orders from Rumsfeld and put an end to this crap before it got this far, and not only when documentary evidence and photos became public. No amount of justice or indignity can address what these people have done, but still, it must be said.

Shame on all of them, from Bush down to the lowliest soldier involved in this ordeal.

It Was Torture When Practiced on Americans 60 Years Ago; It's Not Torture Now

I recently read Shawn C. Smallman's excellent Fear & Memory in the Brazilian Army & Society, 1889-1954. Smallman does a great job of tracing shifts in military politics and memory, and the implications for the 1964-1985 dictatorship (though it is outside of his focus). One of the recurring themes is military leadership's use of torture against opposing factions or uprisings. One of these uprisings, the 1935 uprising of communists in the Brazilian Northeast, resulted in extreme repression and the establishment of the Estado Novo dictatorship, and many participants and leaders were tortured when the uprising failed. One of the participants was an American, Victor Allan Barron. Smallman writes of Barron's fate on page 53:

Victor Allan Barron, an American who had formerly been a member of the Communist Youth, underwent horrible tortures after his arrest. [...] A naval captain (and doctor) supervised Barron's torture, as he was beaten, shocked, and had his testicles squeezed until he fainted. [...] According to Brazilian authorities, Barron committed suicide by jumping from the second floor of the central police station. It is unclear if he was dead before he went through the window or if he died in the hospital after the fall. In the U.S., Congressman Vito Marcantonio denounced Barron's torture and murder before the house of representatives. He read a statement from Joseph R. Brodsky, Barron's lawyer, who claimed personal knowledge of his client's torture: 'They beat him with belts and rubber hose; they burned and shocked him with live electric wires; they punched and kicked him around constantly and did not let him sleep for days." (emphasis mine)

It's worth pointing out here that, when an American was forced to sleep deprivation (among other horrors) in another country, a U.S. Congressman took to the floor to denounce the actions. Yet 67 years later, Bush administration legal counsels suggested that "sleep deprivation does not constitute" torture when we were using it on foreigners.

Many other people (including myself) have commented already on the double-standard of the U.S. under Bush, as acts that other countries previously committed that we called "torture" suddenly became legal when we were employing the same methods. Smallman's study (published in 2001, well before we'd even begun torturing people) offers just one more documentary piece of evidence into the hypocrisy of making "legal" the torture methods for which we have previously condemned others.

The Torture Memos

I read them. All of them. I screamed at the screen and my notes are filled with quotations from the memos followed by insults in all caps. Trend noted on my Facebook page: "Welcome to how I feel."

Of course we all knew that horrible things were done with the express permission of the Bush legal team. But it doesn't make reading it in self-righteous bureaucratese any easier.

I wrote about it over at GlobalComment.

“Shocks the conscience.”

That’s the test that Steven G. Bradbury, acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel in Bush’s Justice department used to decide whether or not an “enhanced interrogation technique” was torture. I won’t be the only one to suggest, after reading three memos by Bradbury and one by now-Federal Judge Jay Bybee, that perhaps Bradbury doesn’t have much of a conscience to be shocked...

In all of the memos, the description of waterboarding is chilling in its deliberate, specific confidence. The assurances that you can’t use the techniques on United States citizens just reminds me that in war, it’s all about Othering the opponent.

As long as it’s not you, it’s OK. When you read the calm descriptions of the techniques, you realize that the people writing the memos are supremely confident that these techniques will never be applied to them. They won’t. They may well be applied to our troops captured in battle, with the justification that we did it first, but Jay Bybee and Steven Bradbury will never be waterboarded, never be deprived of sleep for days...

The first Bradbury memo notes that, “Both KSM and Zubaydah had ‘expressed their belief that the general US population was ‘weak’, lacked resilience, and would be unable to ‘do what was necessary’ to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their goals.’” With this one sentence, the entire memo takes on a whole new meaning—as if the “enhanced interrogation techniques” are suddenly less about gaining actionable intelligence and more about one giant pissing contest between the U.S. and the “terrorists.”...

You can read my whole piece here. You can also read the memos in their entirety, with very little redacted, here. This was, as Greenwald noted, a win for civil liberties.

The Shock Doctrine 5: Cleaning the Slate

(previous posts here, Matt's posts here. also, Trend's corollary series here.)

"The economic plan has to be enforced, and in the Chilean context that could be done only by the killing of thousands, the establishment of concentration camps all over the country, the jailing of more than 100,000 persons in three years...Regression for the majorities and 'economic freedom' for small privileged groups are in Chile two sides of the same coin." -Orlando Letelier in The Nation, 1974.

Less than a month after writing this, former Chilean defense minister Orlando Letelier was dead, killed in Washington, D.C. when a bomb went off in his car. The assassins were found to have been admitted into the country with the knowledge of the CIA.

Klein points out that public opinion (media opinion, anyway) outside of Latin America voiced approval for the economic policies in Chile, Argentina, and the rest of the countries of Friedman's revolution even while condemning human rights violations. In this chapter, she sets out to prove Letelier right, linking the economic shock policies with the physical torture and shock of the citizenry.

Free markets have been sold to us as a benchmark of a free society--I've harped on this before, with my ever-present joke that when Bush said "Freedom" he meant "Free markets." But in Latin America free markets came with the most abject repression of people imaginable. Klein notes that the regimes' "cleansing" policies focused on the young--in Argentina, 81% of those disappeared were between 16 and 30 years of age. They also focused on uprooting leftist ideologies, in one case going into a Ford factory and pulling out union leaders--with the help of the factory foreman.

The repression included bookburning, punishing musicians and writers, firing professors or imprisoning them--tellingly, Klein says, most were from economics departments.

One thing she noted that I found interesting was that in Chile, gender norms were rigidly enforced. Men could be arrested for having long hair, while women were arrested for wearing pants. Klein doesn't make much of this point, so I want to spin it out a little bit. Again, the association between the radical free-market economists and the cultural conservatives (in this country and elsewhere) often seems strange: I've noted that Friedmanite markets are hardly a "conservative" position. They are as radical and revolutionary as any Communist idea.

Yet we see them again and again coupled with militarism and cultural conservatism, coming in on a wave of torture, death, terror, and strictly enforced gender roles. Klein writes of babies being taken from families that were opposed to the regime (often prisoners who were then killed) and given to proper ideologues to raise in the "right" way.

The whole process was about keeping the people under control. Keeping them from fighting back. Torture was used not to gain information, but simply to break people. And we see the reflection of this in our current debate over it. Though it is widely known that torture is a shitty way to get information, it's an excellent way to break people down.

Klein notes that torturing people until they informed on others or even tortured others to stop themselves from being tortured indoctrinated them into the capitalist mindset: look out for #1.

It's terrifying stuff, this book. It's absolutely horrifying. I'm glad I'm only reading it chapter by chapter, once a week--it allows me breaks in between for movies and comics and other lighthearted things before I delve back into the horrors that have been inflicted if not in our names, with our government's approval.

Still, there are bits of inspiration in here, too. I leave you with a quote from Allende's last public address, as the military closed in on him:

"They have the strength; they can subjugate us, but they cannot halt social processes by either crime or force. History is ours, and the people make it."

Argentina's Military Officers Now Can Be Tried for Torturing Their Own Soldiers

I've dealt with cases of justice against Argentina's military regime several other cases before. However, a particularly interesting new ruling occurred last week, in which an Argentine court ruled that the torture officers inflicted upon their soldiers during the Malvinas/Falklands War constitutes a "war crime" and a "crime against humanity." The ruling opens the way for prosecution of officers, many still active and fairly high in the military chain of command, who tortured their soldiers before sending them off to the 1982 war with England. The accusations number over 70, alleging incidents of staking soldiers to the ground with a mask over their faces, being forced to stand in holes filled with water up to their wastes for hours on end, food- and water-deprivation, and "direct physical torture." I really don't know where this will lead (though one person quoted in the article said that Argentina will "have a year full of headlines coming"), but it does offer some important insights into how poorly Argentine military conscripts and soldiers were treated by their own officers. We (myself included) too often simplify the Argentine military (and other military dictatorships) as monolithic entities that acted as a unified whole from top to bottom. This ruling is excellent not only for the path to justice it opens for dozens of soldiers, but also in revealing just how pervasive torture was in the Argentine military (when you're using it on your own soldiers, it's pretty deeply rooted), and how dynamic and heterogeneous militaries (in charge of governments or not) are in terms of class, race, ideologies, and numerous other factors.

The Shock Doctrine 2: The Torture Lab

Edit: Go check out Matt's post on this chapter, including some more linkage to the shock experiments Klein wrote of.

(If you have no idea what I'm talking about, click the Shock Doctrine tag below to take you to the first installment and the introduction.)

Chapter 1 of The Shock Doctrine may be one of the hardest things I've ever had to read. Naomi Klein is investigating the ideology of torture, and drawing comparisons with the ideology of radical capitalism.

I call it radical capitalism because in some sense, so far, the point that I've taken from the book is that this type of Chicago-boys disaster capitalism is a revolutionary ideology. And the problem with ALL revolutionary ideologies, whether they be this type of capitalism, the communism in opposition to which it was defined, or even radical feminism, is that they require a blank slate upon which to build. And it is impossible to create that blank slate without utter destruction of what was there before.

(Once again, I will refer to Obama's pragmatism and the quote from his inaugural address, "The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works.")

Erik asked in comments on my first post if capitalism was the last ideology, and I don't know. What I do know is that if news reports like this one are to be believed, the neocons haven't given up yet on their radical capitalism, and are blaming Bush, in fact, for not being ideological enough. And so we still discuss.

Matt noted in his first post that this kind of capitalism was "(Creative) destruction in order to cleanse the world of corruption." And in this chapter Klein delves into literal shock therapy and torture to draw frightening conclusions.

Torture is not incidental to Iraq war policy, Klein shows. Instead, it is an outgrowth of the very same ideology, which Klein sums up so well:

The problem, obvious in retrospect, was the premise on which his entire theory rested, the idea that before healing can happen, everything that existed before needs to be wiped out. (57)

By telling the story of Gail Kastner, a woman experimented upon and broken by CIA-funded experiments at McGill University, Klein brings painfully home what was done to people. Again, she knows how to make the story stick and make it personal. And the most frightening thing that she tells us isn't just that our governments conspired to torture innocent civilians who made the mistake of seeking help for anxiety, but that the people who did this believed they were doing good.

It is easy to write off the neocons as evil. Dick Cheney provides a particularly easy punching bag for those of us on the left. But Klein shows us both that these policies were in effect long before the rise of Cheney and Bush (the shift not being in policy but being in openness about policy), and that these people quite often do think in a strange way that they're helping.

Because yes, capitalism is predicated upon greed and the people who force it on the rest of the world are thinking about their own enrichment. But they are also true believers, and this is what's so scary.

The aftermath of the RNC.

Over at Taking Steps, there's video and her excellent writeup on the fallout from the arrests at the RNC protests. Please read it.

Fantastic

I feel so good about my government today, knowing that they based the Guatanamo interrogations on a discredited 1950s Chinese commnunist torture manual used to gain false confessions from US prisoners during and after the Korean War. I'm not sure what is more disgusting, that they used a manual that they knew created false confessions or that the government so blatantly supports torture that they would use such methods to begin with. Really, did they think their interrogations would provide true confessions? Did they think because they were Americans and righteous or something that they could tell true from false? They probably did.

In Brazil, Torture Didn't Go Away with the Dictatorship

Several scholars (most notably, Thomas Skidmore) have pointed out that the Brazilian military dictatorship's use of torture was far from being a sudden shift in the politico-criminal landscape, pointing out that torture had been used against criminal suspects and the (Afro-descendant) poor since at least the late-19th century. (Skidmore suggests that the use of torture against darker-skinned "criminals" is a direct legacy of slavery, abolished in Brazil only in 1888; while it's difficult to quantitatively prove this, it makes a lot of sense).

And just as the dictatorship didn't initiate torture in Brazil (though it certainly did escalate it), torture didn't end with the military governments in 1985, either, and continues to be a problem today, as evidenced by this story:

The O Dia newspaper said a reporter and photographer for the paper were abducted with their driver May 14 and held for nearly eight hours in a western Rio de Janeiro shantytown where they had been working undercover.

They said they were taken to a "private prison" and beaten, given electric shocks and had plastic bags placed over their heads. The journalists suffered no lasting injuries and were released with orders not to identify their captors, O Dia reported.

Rio state security chief Jose Mariano Beltrame said active-duty police had been linked to paramilitaries who control the Batan slum where the journalists said they were tortured.

On Monday he said it was possible police were part of the group that tortured the journalists.

Sadly, the only thing that makes this news is the fact that the tortured were journalists operating undercover in a favela, rather than favelados themselves. The continued torture of favelados is common enough that children in the favelas who play "cops and robbers" often put plastic bags over the heads of the "robbers," mimicking what they see regularly. Yet these cases of police torture rarely make news either in Brazil or in the international community. Human Rights Watch has monitored the situation, but little has been done in spite of over 1300 complaints between October 2001 and July 2003:

There have been credible reports of police and prison guards torturing people in their custody as a form of punishment, intimidation, and extortion. Police have also allegedly used torture as a means of obtaining information or coercing confessions from criminal suspects. Abusive police officers are rarely sanctioned, and abuses are sometimes justified by authorities as an inevitable by-product of efforts to combat Brazil’s very high crime rates.

I've said this before too many times to even cross-post, and I'll say it again. Until the Brazilian state does something to aid the poor, give them legal recourse, guarantee their basic human rights, and crack down on police who act like greater criminals than the "criminals" themselves; until society gets rid of the attitude that being poor is itself a criminal act, stripping you of any basic guarantees of human rights or the state's protection; and until the media stops treating all murders in the favelas as the deaths of "traficantes", Brazil has a long way to go. And such changes are so deep and counterintuitive to the way things work now, there really isn't much hope for change right now.

Attitudes towards Torture and Homosexuality in Brazil

There is a disturbing, if not altogether surprising, poll this week that shows just how far Brazil has to go in overcoming its prejudices towards alleged criminals, homosexuals, and racism. An IBOPE poll asked a number of questions based on social issues. Among other things, it reports that 26% of the people it interviewed said that they would torture suspects if they were a police officer. I find this rather remarkable, too, given that just 25-30 years ago, significant portions of society (including white-collar and the middle-class sectors) were speaking out against torture during the military dictatorship. The fact that people seem to have forgotten the torture during the dictatorship isn't so surprising to me, particularly given that torture has been used against the poor and criminals for over a century (even if not always called "torture"), but the fact that you still have 26% who say, "sure, I'd torture a suspect" is disturbing, to say the least.

The depressing figures also extend to attitudes towards homosexuals. I commented earlier on the possibility of civil unions becoming legal in Brazil, but pointed out that there probably would be significant social hurdles in overcoming prejudice. The poll seems to support the latter point, as 33% say they would abandon a friend if he or she admitted his/her own homosexuality.

Unfortunately, I was unable to get any more information (including what the reports on racism were), thanks to Globo "offering" me to read the rest of the report by paying only 36 reais for their online service, but the day I knowingly and voluntarily give O GLobo money will be the day I day, so I can't report on the rest. Still, while it does mean 74% said they wouldn't torture, and 67% would remain friends with somebody even if that friend announced her/his homosexuality, the figures 26% and 33% are still significant.

Torture and the Bush Administration

Yep.

Rev. Christian von Wernich Sentenced in Argentina

Following up on this post, Argentine courts found Rev. Christian von Wernich guilty of conspiring with the military during Argentina's "Dirty War", and a tribunal has sentenced him to life in prison. There isn't much I have to add from my original post. It's just worth repeating that, even if this decision ends up being the first and last of its kind, it's good to see that not only a clergyman punished for his role in the repression, but to see that the Church and Argentine society have been forced to deal with the Church's role in the brutal repression of the dictatorship.