At the Limits of Justice: Women of Colour on Terror by Suvendrini Perera & Sherene H. Razack

Author:Suvendrini Perera & Sherene H. Razack [Perera, Suvendrini & Razack, Sherene H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781442616462
Publisher: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Published: 2014-09-11T11:00:00+00:00

The Biopolitics of Torture

Torture in Chile followed highly regulated and disciplined procedures. The torturers required intensive training, and the intimate encounter between torturer and prisoner was never left to chance. Torture, Richard Rubenstein observes, was characterized by “routinization, rationalization, and bureaucratization”; it became an ordinary and organized practice and an intrinsic element of the repressive state.14 Its practice was supported by other actions that were organic to the work of ruling. Torture took place in torture centres. Those centres were assigned budgets and personnel; they were embedded in institutional hierarchies; they were regulated, and their procedures were documented; they kept careful records, reflecting the intelligence-gathering purpose of torture. Torture machines were built and tested, manuals of torture were written, and torturers were properly trained in national and international training centres.15 Employment files were kept for torture personnel, who collected salaries and commendations. The pay for torture fed families and stimulated the economy.

In torture centres, prisoners were subjected to carefully calculated forms of torture that included electric shock, rape (often by animals or instruments), waterboarding, full or partial submersion in sewage or excrement, prolonged hanging or standing, asphyxiation, mock execution, the witnessing of the torture of other prisoners or family members, confinement in overcrowded cells or prolonged isolation, calculated beatings, and drugging. Pregnant women were subjected to electric shocks, which were sometimes applied directly to the fetus through the uterus. Many of these pregnant women suffered miscarriages, and some were forced to give birth to children conceived through torture.16 Doctors and other health professionals were employed to monitor and regulate the intensity and duration of torture, often providing “aftercare” such as pain medication and the regulation of water intake so as to ensure the prisoner’s survival and, thus, the prolongation and efficiency of the torture.17

Tomas Moulian argues that Chile’s transformation to neoliberalism was strengthened by the terror practices of the dictatorship, the objectives of which were not only to repress internal enemies but also to bring about a new social order.18 Central to Moulian’s argument is that without torture, the neoliberal authoritarian regime could not have arisen, for both revolution and torture were part of a regime that extended from the level of the state to the most minute practices of power on the surfaces of bodies. According to Marnia Lazreg, torture is a practice with “layered meanings” – that is, meanings that can be traced through complex social relations extending from the most intimate encounters between torturer and prisoner to larger social reordering projects in which torture becomes part of “techniques of population screening and social engineering” as well as a catalyst for “identity formation and crystallization.”19

That torture is bureaucratic in nature does not mean that, as Moulian suggests, the “cruelty of the regime was impersonal and cannot be explained in terms of the psychopathic actions of individuals with sadistic tendencies” who simply “carried out their ordered tasks and followed the rules of the trade to which they were assigned.”20 Rather, the actions and complicity of torturers were part of

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