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Tina Rosenberg's book, The Children of Cain (1991), has six chapters devoted to examinations of violence in Latin American nations. Between 1985 and 1990 she lived in Nicaragua for two years, three years in Chile, and got around a lot. Each of her chapters follows a formula. She selects one or two citizens through whom a national experience is communicated. However, these individuals aren't necessarily meant to be representative. Nor is her subject matter a particular country, although the recent history of six nations is discussed in some depth here. Rosenberg is pursuing a broad investigation into the whys and wherefores of violence throughout Central and South America. Her hope seems to be that the group portrait, set against the Pan-American vista, will reveal an understanding not possible when looking at a single case, or a single country.
Not altogether unlike Hanna Arendt at the Nuremberg trials, she wants to investigate the nature of evil. In her estimation Latin American violence is evil in a way that the violence of the United States is not: "It is more evil." Why? Chiefly because it's organized, usually by governments, whose existence is theoretically owed to the very people against whom this violence is directed, and, finally, this open undeclared warfare is rationalized by large numbers of people who prefer not to look very closely.
An Engineer of Progress
Kate's sister Liz is married to a French citizen named Olivier whom everyone affectionately called "Ollie." So, for a time, he was my brother-in-law. Which is not to say that I disliked him, only that we were thrown into an acquaintance that would not have come about otherwise. I was cordial with him and vice-versa, but his work abroad meant we rarely met. As a production engineer for Renault, he was regularly being moved around from one plant to another. First he and Liz lived in Bangkok. Then they were sent to Kuala Lumpur, and so it went. Eventually it dawned on me that this wasn't such a glamorous life for Liz and their kids. Every year or two they dumped all of their friendships and started another round of language courses.
When Liz announced that Ollie had been transferred to Colombia her family openly voiced their misgivings for the first time. "The drugs..." somebody would start to say and then shake their head. There were lots of frowns but Ollie prevailed. At Christmas he sent us greetings on a tape he made while driving home from work. At one point I remember he had to halt his message long enough to pay a toll. He used his time efficiently.
The next Christmas Liz and Ollie flew back for the holidays. After dinner Ollie urged us to come outside to see the globo. This unusual device proved to be a miniature balloon and gondola. The balloon was made from paper, much like a Chinese lantern, but more than a yard in diameter. The wooden gondola was suspended by stiff wires that would keep it positioned under the open end of the balloon. Ollie lit a can of sterno and then put it in the gondola sitting upright on the driveway. Next he maneuvered the limp balloon over the open flame and fastened the wires of the gondola. As it gradually filled with hot air, a white illumination flickered inside the paper balloon.
No one spoke. It was very cold and we hadn't put on our coats. A heavy layer of snow had fallen the week before and covered the backyard. I could see other people, in other houses, moving about in rooms bathed with warm yellow lights. Liz and Kate decided not to wait and took the kids inside. When the balloon had fully inflated it lifted off suddenly, rising up over the tree, and kept soaring upward, surrounded by white stars in that perfectly breathless, speckled night.
Colombia was and is the exception to Rosenberg's thesis. There the rule of law is a charade; the government, a paper balloon. What she does, and does with real acumen, is to outline how the business of killing was privatized. In the complete absence of any recourse to legal protections a cottage industry in contract killing sprung up. Initially employed by the drug cartel, these killers' services were quickly snapped up by anyone with a problem that needed to be resolved.
The most recent figures I've seen now calculate Colombia's murder rate at almost 90 citizens per 100,000. This is currently about 9 times the rate in the United States. There is no other country in the New World that could hope to match Colombia's achievement any time soon. Runner-up Brazil is lagging far behind at a mere 20 per 100,000. Lest I leave the impression that all of this hard work is being done by some enterprising youngsters, I should note the military is assassinating members of the leftist parties at a rate of about one per day. The police and their allied death squads are also busily engaged in an ambitious project aimed at "social cleansing," last reported to be succeeding at a rate of 1,500 victims per year. The right-wing paramilitary groups who have also joined in this public initiative to rid the streets of the homeless, homosexuals, gangs, thieves and prostitutes go by such prosaic names as "Love for Medellin" and "Death to Car Thieves."
This is the most recent statistical information. In the late 1980's, when Rosenberg was in Colombia, things weren't quite this bad. Then the murder rate was only 80 per 100,000.
I can remember just little things that were barely registering in my consciousness. Like Ollie responding to my tentative questions very testily. "It's the Americans who use all of it. If it weren't for people in the U.S. the Colombians wouldn't be in the cocaine business," he snapped. Or Liz mentioning the private security guards at their gate, around the clock. It was hard to think of Ollie as an agent of a multinational corporation. And Liz as his hapless, doting wife. Or the two of them holed up in the world's murder capital just to make a few bucks. Gee, he was my brother-in-law, even if he was a little brusque.
Then one day at a library I read an article in The Nation in which the writer described how she had drank coffee in a Colombian restaurant while her companions at the table struck a deal to bump off somebody. The author was amazed to realize that, after little more than a week in Medellin, she was so thoroughly acclimated to the reign of violence that she hadn't even blinked. I xeroxed the story. The next time Liz flew back I even showed it to her.
The scene in the restaurant appears at the opening of Rosenberg's introduction to Children of Cain. And the story is repeated in the first chapter on Colombia. By telling the tale twice she wants to make it plain how decisive this experience was as an instigation for her book. She also means to demonstrate how violence had permeated and anesthetized the entire country. A benumbed onlooker, she was no different than anyone else. Her aim was to understand the people who make violence possible.
The second chapter turns to Argentina and one of the most notorious of the Navy officers responsible for torture and disappearances. Alfredo Astiz was the only official at a junior rank to be tried for his crimes. It hardly seems worth noting that he was found innocent. The guilty verdict rendered against the generals themselves only amounted to a house arrest--with family and servants.
The Argentine military waged the 'dirty war' (a term they coined) for seven years between 1976 and 1983. The war was fought against an invisible "insurgency," a concept that would prove to be a cornerstone in their rationalizations for what went on. This philosophical construct had real resonance in the Navy, the elite of the armed forces. Among the most informative elements of this chapter is the historical overview of foreign influences in the training of the Argentine military. Prior to W.W.II, Rosenberg writes, the Germans had effectively colonized the education of military officers. After the war the Americans had a dominant role. The notion of an enemy within, an insurgency, was our export. Her interviews with American and Argentine officials met with consistent denials that techniques of torture were an explicit part of the curriculum at the School of Americas. However, the excerpts from one of their manuals printed in The New York Times a year ago proves just how close to the surface the topic lay.i
Although Rosenberg does not dwell long on the methods of torture that the Argentines worked out for themselves there was just enough detail to remind me of a very unusual book I read some years ago. Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) is not light reading. The author crafts a very sophisticated theory about creativity and its relationship to the human body. At the time that I read the book my concentration was just about shot. Nevertheless, I was shaken into full attention by the initial section, an analysis of the structure of torture, based on an excruciating knowledge of what had transpired in South America and elsewhere. What I recall most vividly were brilliant reflections on the affectionate naming of various instruments and processes, a vocabulary that served to strike terror, disassociate reality, and anthropomorphize the machinery of torture. Scarry held up torture as the apotheosis of the 'Unmaking' alluded to in her subtitle.
Since 1983 the Argentine military has stonewalled any investigations into their activity. When, in 1995, Adolfo Scilingo broke the code of silence and described drugged prisoners being pushed out of airplanes flying over the Atlantic Ocean, there was some renewed hope of prosecutions. The final image that Rosenberg offers in this chapter is Astiz's air of certainty he would be immune from any retribution. However, a recent report suggests Astiz' fearlessness may have been weakened over the years since. On the other hand, the Navy is not without its resources. On Friday Scilingo was attacked in the street. His assailants carved the initials of three reporters to whom he had given interviews on his cheeks and forehead.ii
The chapter on Peru lays out the lives of two people in their mid-twenties, both living in the poor neighborhoods of Lima. Gladys has two children and two brothers who are mentally ill. She takes care of all of them. She has tuberculosis and is intermittently taking treatments that are inevitably interrupted because she can't pay for the drugs or the supplies run out. Javier is a member of the Shining Path. He has spent time in prison and participated in the coordinated riots of 1986 that led to the killing of two hundred and fifty of his comrades at three different jails. Now free he is studying the law at a university. In Gladys, Rosenberg seems to be arguing that here are the extremes of poverty that have given rise to such fanatical groups as the Senderos and the less militant Túpac Amaru. But understanding Javier's embrace of a Maoist orthodoxy is a murkier matter that Rosenberg seems to connect with the authoritarian nature of Peruvian education.
At some level I think these movements can only be understood within the context of the prison experiences of their members. My sense is that Rosenberg's portrait of the conditions under which these groups used to be imprisoned is now out of date. Under Fujimori I think that the members of either of these groups have been routinely separated, prohibited from forming or continuing any association behind bars. Often this means these revolutionaries are simply kept in total isolation. I've read one news article describing the prison where Lori Berenson is being held. You may recall that Berenson is the U.S. citizen jailed for aiding the terrorist activities of the Túpac Amaru prior to the Japanese embassy takeover. If the conditions of her incarceration are typical, it's not hard to see why the first plank in the demands that came out of the captured Japanese embassy was the release of Túpac Amaru prisoners.iii
Some portions of Rosenberg's chapter on El Salvador may already be familiar territory if you've had a chance to read Joan Didion's Salvador (1983). Nonetheless, Rosenberg's summary of the violence that began in earnest in 1980 has the benefit of a longer view, extending over the whole decade of the 1980's. And, as is true throughout, there's an excellent recapitulation of the period prior to this. Her twist on the American support (a 4.5 billion dollar investment) for the government's counterinsurgency measures is to look carefully at the culture of the rich Salvadoran oligarchy.
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The final essay looks to very ordinary middle-class people to fathom how Allende's government could have wrought the likes of Pinochet. There is no small irony in thinking about this issue on the 24th anniversary of the coup. Thursday's special edition of CHIP News will provide you with more food for thought.iv The following day (Friday) CHIP reported scores of arrests. Anyway, Rosenberg's account can make you feel that willed cloud of unknowing that has swirled in Chile for so long. Not unlike the one that wafted over this country between 1980 and 1992.
Rosenberg's freelance work gained her an unprecedented award. She was the first freelance journalist to be given one of the MacArthur grants. Her next book, about Eastern Europe, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1996. Children of Cain is a savvy overview, written by a woman asking the right questions. There are far more complete contemporary studies of Latin American politics around. Jorge Castañeda's Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left After the Cold War (1993) is one example. But Rosenberg's grasp is more humane, and for that reason, more useful in the long run.
-September 15, 1997
Endnotes
i "Be All That You Can Be: Your Future as an Extortionist," New York Times, October 6, 1996.
ii Both of these news reports were written by Calvin Sims. The account about Astiz is titled "Torturer Now Leads Tortured Life," New York Times, August 12, 1997. The attack on Scilingo was described in a front-page story titled "Former Naval Officer Who Bared Argentine Atrocities Is Slashed," New York Times, September 13, 1997.
Although the current government in Argentina has attempted to bury the past, it's difficult to imagine how this will be accomplished without accounting for the disappeared. The anguish of their families continues unabated. See, for example, The Vanished Gallery at http://www.yendor.com/vanished
iii The article about Yanamayo prison was written by Lynn F. Monahan. You can find it on a web site at http://www.freelori.org This is the home page for the campaign seeking Berenson’s release. The Monahan article is titled "American Woman Faces Bleak Life in Peru's Mountain Prison," A.P., January 12, 1996.
iv Although every one of these articles in the September 11th edition are fascinating, the interview with Allende's widow and the news story about Pinochet's "foundation" seem to have the most bearing on Chile's future. See www.chip.cl
Editor’s note: Unfortunately now these older issues of CHIP News are only available for a fee.
