Chapter 4
Living to tell the story
Healing, social denial and redress in Uruguay
This chapter focuses on healing and reconciliation after state terror in the context of enduring social silencing and institutional denial. It examines the relationship between healing, remembering and silencing processes based on an analysis of the experiences of a group of former political prisoners, survivors of prolonged detention and systematic physical and psychological torture, during and after the Uruguayan state terror regime. In the current literature on the politics of reconciliation, reconciliation is understood in a variety of ways from a process of overcoming a fractured polity (Barkan 2001; Minow 1999; Skaar et al. 2005) to the goal of “closure,” the ability to represent and make history of the traumatic events, or bridging fractured narratives into a “unified” representation of self, history and polity. In order to explore the relationship between personal and collective healing and the politics of social reconciliation, reconciliation is here understood as “a process of social healing” (Prager 2008: 405). In the Uruguayan case, the post-authoritarian transitional policies of “reconciliation” were marked by a systematic politics of denial and public silencing during the first twenty years of the “Politics of Oblivion” (1985–2004) (Bergero and Reatti 1997), a “No truth, no justice” version of attempts at dealing with the legacy of human rights crimes.
After the Cold War era's “dirty wars,” waged by militarized nation-states’ dictatorial regimes against their own citizens – labeled as “communist subversives” – several Latin American transitional societies in the Southern Cone faced similar problems in the 1980s. A problem that was presented as a “dilemma” of reconciliation after political violence: how to address past wrongdoing while dealing with questions of accountability and redress on the one hand, and political stability – or “governability” – faced with the legacy of the gross violation of human rights by exiting authoritarian military regimes, on the other hand.
This chapter looks at traumatic memory in a particular community, that of Uruguayan former political prisoners in the particularly unfavorable context of Uruguay's first two decades of ongoing transitional Politics of Oblivion. Uruguay's legacy of trauma and amnesia/latency under post-authoritarian transitional policies of denial and social silencing is used as a lens to analyse some of the complex cultural processes of the social dimension of traumatic remembering and healing in their intersection with state policy after state political violence. In this context, how were the silenced experiences of long-term political imprisonment under the civic-military regime (1973–1984) remembered and represented? What were the transmissible and non-transmissible or silenced aspects of prison and torture, and how did they relate to the possibility of personal and social healing and repair?
What official political memory excluded for decades was paradoxically sustained and “revived,” so to speak, in the intimate sphere of the private, inter-subjective and collective realm. Such cultural processes made it possible for the collective memory to be re-constructed and made readily available for its re-emergence and inclusion into the public and social culture decades later. I here attempt at conceptualizing the relationship between what I see as the formative layer of undercurrents of private memory, the possibility of healing as dependent on a supportive community, and the iatrogenic effects of an adverse socio-political public framing for transitional memory, reconciliation and redress.
The argument explores first the historical-political level by providing a brief historical analysis of the key features of the transitional context. Second, it examines the collective and intersubjective process of healing and reconstruction of Uruguayan former political prisoners by exploring three predominant themes emerging from my interviews with survivors of imprisonment and torture: 1) the individual experience of deep self-transformation and inner struggle; 2) the experience of an activist collective ethos or “code of conduct” that emphasized an implicit “code of silence” and rendered taboo the more personal, diverse and intimate experiences of suffering; and 3) how survivors tried to translate their personal experiences into shared narrative expressions that could overcome an imposed silence. In conclusion, I address some questions about the relationship between individual and collective trauma, healing and social reconciliation in the light of the case analysis.
The problem and its context
The Uruguayan civic-military regime of the 1970s unleashed against its own citizens a political violence unparalleled in its history. The politics of state terror were characterized by the widespread use of political imprisonment and torture, as well as exile and forced disappearance as a means of social control. These methods became emblematic of the political repression of the era. State terror regimes were forms of social control exercised by political and military elites aimed at destroying political contestation and resistance by demolishing the sense of self and severing trust among individuals and their families, communities and social groups (Lira et al. 1992). Long-term political prison and systematic physical torture as well as the development of psychologically sophisticated torture systems were central tools of Uruguayan state terror.
Considering its small population of barely three million at the time, and one of the most unionized and politically active populations in the world, Uruguay had the highest ratio of political prisoners in the world: one in every fifty citizens was detained and more than six thousand individuals were held as long-term political prisoners (Amnesty International 1979). As a result, one tenth of the total population, or an estimated 300,000 citizens, were forced out of the country, and about 200 Uruguayan citizens detainees disappeared, vanished without a trace, between 1972 and 1984 (Presidencia de la Republica 2007; Comisión para la Paz 2003; SERPAJ 1989).
Uruguay's post-authoritarian transitional regime dealt with the legacies of state terror by implementing extreme policies of denial and silencing of the human right abuses of the dictatorship, known as Uruguay's “Politics of Oblivion” (1985–2004). These transitional justice policies systematically aimed at blocking constituents’ ability to publicly mobilize and wage demands for redress and reparations, thus fostering a culture of ongoing impunity. The centerpiece of Uruguayan Oblivion was a 1986 statute of limitations officially known as the Ley de Caducidad (or Expiry Law). The “impunity law” – as it was popularly referred to – granted immunity to all military and police perpetrators of human rights violations committed during the authoritarian regime without any prior investigation or due process. In the name of “reconciliation among Uruguayans,” the Expiry Law emphasized institutional stability over accountability and thus denied victims any public recognition or redress for the crimes of forced disappearance, political assassinations and illegal detentions, the systematic use of torture, and the internal repression and forced displacement of thousands between 1972 and 1984, thus effectively silencing public debate and blocking trials and redress claims from 1985 to 2005.
This policy presented a stark contrast with Uruguay's neighboring Argentina and its groundbreaking initial 1983 politics of recognition, truth-seeking and accountability. As described by its supporters, Caducidad was aimed at “turning the page” and “sealing the past” in the name of reconciliation for “all Uruguayans” to “heal the wounds of the past” and “move forward to the future” (Roniger and Sznajder 1998; Fried 2004, 2001). Those who continued to advocate for its illegality and unconstitutionality were labeled by the prevalent discourse as having “their eyes at the back of their head” (ojos en la nuca, oft-quoted infamous phrase by President Sanguinetti, the law's mastermind). Two major massive popular civic mobilization efforts – in 1989 and 2009 – against this immunity ultimately failed to overturn the law – with 53.7 per cent in 1989 and 52 per cent in 2009 voting against overturning the law – showing that the level of political polarization over issues of truth, justice and accountability has remained stable over the past decades.
The policy instituted a continuity with state terror policies because the law cancels the state's right, duty, and ability to punish crimes. This state of impunity in many post-conflict or divided societies after explicit political violence is based on a paradoxical system that dissolves any sort of punitive action against certain specifically defined categories of citizens, in some continuity with the dictatorial regime's citizen classifications according to a code of “level of allegiance” or “dangerousness” to the regime (Categories A, B or C – C being the most dangerous, see Lubartowski 2011: 5). The transitional regime divided citizens between those legally accountable – civilians – and those unaccountable before the law – perpetrator military and police officers and their allies.
These ongoing official policies and culture of impunity endured over four administrations – Sanguinetti (1985–1989), Lacalle (1990–1994), Sanguinetti (1995–1999), and Batlle (200–2004) – where the two traditional parties were alternating in power. No public accountability, official recognition, comprehensive public truth commissions, public apologies, or integral policies of reparation were implemented during this time, and public debate on pending human right abuses was kept under public control until the early 2000s, despite the regional and international context of increasing visibility and growing international pressure to honor international human rights treaties and build accountability.
Trauma, healing and reconstruction after prison and torture
The difficulties of healing from and transmitting the experience of the pain and suffering from torture in the context of state terror have been well explored in the literature (see Deustch 2007; Quiroga and Jaranson 2008; Scarry, 1985). Torture not only shapes the individual's sense of being and indescribable forms of embodied knowledge in ways that make its expression, sharing, and representation to others, and hence healing, problematic, but also affects modes of memory, transmission and sharing of the experience both in private and public settings.
Traumatic remembering is here conceptualized as a social, cultural and collective concept. I draw heavily on Prager's (2006) works on trauma, mourning and temporality (see also Prager 2008, 1998, and Volkan et al. 2002). My starting point is Kai Erikson's (1976) classic definition of collective trauma, where trauma is seen as a blow to the community's solidarity and sense of community that manifests belatedly over time, and build on more recent approaches in the social sciences and the humanities that have moved towards a notion of trauma which lies not in the events themselves but rather in their constructed cultural meanings as a result of processes of subjective and collective retrospective reconstruction (Caruth 1995; Prager 2006, 1998; Alexander and Smelser 2004) that understand traumatic memory as a culturally mediated, socially embedded and intersubjectively embodied process.
Following this understanding, trauma is not the mere result of an individual's pathology but also the result of a failed social process, which provides no solutions for mourning losses and emotional closure or collective redress (Prager 2008). The case study presented here was a traumatic process not only actively perpetrated by particular agents – the state – but sustained by the social, political, and cultural conditions and institutions – the policies of terror and of ongoing denial – that made it possible; a social process sustained by social agents and institutions. By contrast, a redressive community and public policy, argues Prager (2008: 407), “orients itself to the reinscription of private experience” to develop an encounter with self and other where one can come to experience the other in the present as “distinct from their pasts.”
I found that the former political prisoners I interviewed1 very rarely addressed personal stories of torture and prison years directly or explicitly. The painful and humiliating aspects of their experiences fell into the gravitational field of intersubjective silence and denial, and had been only transmitted implicitly or via uncomfortable silences or avoidance. Such observations were verified by published reports and interviews with therapeutic teams servicing this population with decades of experience (Giorgi 1995; Robaina and Busch 2007). These experiences were channeled through survivors’ metamorphosed identities after detention, prolonged prison and liberation, the physical and emotional climates they inhabited, the objects and mementos they treasured, and the relationships and lifestyles they cultivated or avoided.
The subjective experience of torture: the “tug-of-war”
The torturer's ‘Scream all you like, your resistance is completely futile, no one will ever know.’ This point about no one's ever knowing was the very subject of the torturer's discourse. Do you understand? That's what the torture was all about …
Marcelo Viñar cited in Weschler 1994, italics in original
The extreme experiences of political imprisonment and torture challenged the person's limits from their detention to their release and beyond, re-shaping their personality, self-image, and identity and establishing ongoing and enduring patterns of communication and silence.
The Detention
As the following accounts indicate, the profound identity transformation started from the very moment of the detention and was sudden. Ana and Roberto – aged 50 at the time of interview – were recently married engineering students about to graduate in the early 1970s. They were apprehended together in their early twenties due to their guerrilla connections, and spent eleven and a half years in separate prisons, isolated from each other. In a joint interview, they remarked: “In a second we lost contact with the world, with our world, with everything – our relationships, friends, compañeros – and we got separated for eleven and a half years!” (Ana 2001, speaking for the couple's experience, with Roberto present).
Isabel (age 49), who became a political prisoner as a member of Movimiento de Liberacion Nacional-Tupamaros (MLN) when she was in her early twenties, remembered:
My neighborhood cell hadn't been active for some time, but one of our compañeros did not show up to a meeting we had, and we knew something must have happened. I was considering whether I should leave … but where could I go? I had no contacts. I didn't have a passport, and what would I say at home? Where could I go? Also, once you left, you never knew if you could come back, if they would come and get you or not … I thought, ‘No. I'll go home and think about it tomorrow.’ Well, tomorrow never came: that night, they came to get me …
Isabel 2001
Maria – now in her 70s – was in her fifties and was a witness when the military came to detain her husband, a high profile member of the Communist party. She decided not to leave the country, despite the grave danger. Her daughter, Marta – age 50, then in her thirties – and two young grandchildren took refuge in the Mexican embassy and were eventually flown out of the country. Maria consciously chose to stay and would eventually be detained herself:
I wanted to live all these experiences with my husband. I knew if I left we would just turn into two completely different people. I felt that, if I stayed, I was doing something for him … Little did I know! I couldn't do much for him when they took me away … [ironic smile] I was in prison for five years and I came out before him. So I was the wife of a desaparecido when my husband was incommunicado for a few months, then I was the wife of a political prisoner, then I was a political prisoner myself. When we came out, it was very important for our couple to have had the same experience, it was a fact that held us together. We could understand each other.
Maria 2001
Most former political prisoners who were interviewed extensively acknowledged, to some extent, that they had at the time denied the risks they were facing. When the detention came, even if it had been foreseeable, it came as a shock. They had all dreaded what political repression would do to them, who they would become, how estranged they would become from their loved ones, and whether the experience would tear them apart. Ana commented:
I arrived at the female prison with my waist-long hair, wearing blue jeans, a blue T-shirt, and a red shirt. I was wearing my wedding ring and a pair of earrings I had been wearing since my teenage years. They put me in a cell and they immediately started transforming my looks: they gave me a radical haircut, dressed me with a gray bag they called “the uniform,” with a number and a red pocket in the front. From there on, I would be called by my number, no more by my first name. They took my ring and earrings. Nothing that reminded us that we were women was allowed.
Ana 2001
The physically and psychological transformations were dramatic. The prisoners were forced into a constant state of alertness that would become a long-term pattern. They learned “to see without looking, to hear without listening, to know without showing that one knows” (Liscano 2001). Prisoners were immediately deprived of any familiar connection, and confined to a solitary struggle that immersed their bodies in pain, and the fear of pain, as a means of torture. This confronted them to their own limits for survival.
Torture resulted in both a struggle between the victim and her victimizer, and a psychological “tug-of-war” within, a struggle between the psychic pain of betraying and harming those one loved and the physical pain inflicted by the enemy. In the near-death experience of torture, the prisoner was forced to make the terrifying and soul wrenching choice between preserving her body and keeping her soul. The consequence of failing to resist and giving in to pain – in exchange for physical survival – entailed the social risk of publicly showing weakness in her commitment to her values, to the revolutionary cause, and her commitments to activist ideals. Giving in to the agents of the repressive apparatus would mean defeat. Torture had deterrent and social control effects because the pain of the victims’ bodies and the silencing of their voices broadcast a message of threat and fear to the public (Lira and Castillo 1991). Thus, torture's damages are a result of what Viñar has called the “demolition of self,” when a prisoner is forced into confession and thus is referred to as “broken” (quebrado, the activist term) or “demolished” (Gil and Viñar 1998). Those who were physically destroyed but resisted without providing any significant cooperation to their enemy are seen as “intact” in their dignity, in one piece (entero).
The image of “demolition” highlights the power of silence under a climate of threat, fear and pain surrounding the knowledge of torture. The prisoner's drama is precisely fashioned after this invisibility and incommunicability of the prisoner's suffering. Her voice, body and psyche are turned into weapons against the victim's own self. “Nobody will ever know …” whispers the torturer to victims. It is a knowledge known and unknown at the same time – known via unusual channels and tacitly kept quiet by victims and “others.” The torturer's reference to the absence of witness is precisely the crucial aspect of the torture process and its impunity – yet once in face of real others, upon release, even decades later, remembering and witnessing remains extremely difficult. Analysts have noted that, unlike literature that has documented survivors’ felt mandate to bear witness – as documented in the voluminous Holocaust literature (see Caruth 1995) – Uruguayan former prisoners, even when seeking psychotherapeutic help, have “a past that they have difficulty remembering” (Giorgi 1995: 60). Torture accomplishes its enduring damage by destroying victims’ paths of expression and thus their ability to share their experience. Words fall short, and outsiders to the experience have difficulty grasping it and may prefer to remain unaware or deny it (Scarry 1985: 4). Many of the interviewed former prisoners felt that those who had not lived through torture could hardly understand or imagine the ineffable experience.
Torture
During torture, one prefers to die. One ends up asking their executioner to please kill him. The executioner answers: “That's what you would like, that we kill you. But we are not going to do it.”
Carlos Liscano 2001: 61
Torture, as an extreme near-death experience of bodily harm and psychic humiliation, often made invisible and out of the range of common knowledge, has been compared to a symbolic experience of death. Former prisoner accounts and human rights reports often compared Uruguayan prisons to the experience of being “buried alive.” The mother of a disappeared prisoner described her image of the worst torture: “When I imagine hell, it isn't a room where I am alone and being tortured, it is a comfortable chair where I sit to wait … for eternity” (my emphasis).
Once in detention, some of the worst moments political prisoners recalled in my interviews were not moments of pain endured under their torturer's hands, but rather the times they were left waiting, in between sessions, hooded or blindfolded, at the mercy of their own imagination, faced with the anticipation of impending horrors, surrounded by the sounds and smells and fragmentary images of the others under torture:
One thing is to be tortured non-stop, another, very different, is to be tortured for 4 hours and then to be left alone for 4 hours, or days … What I mean is that, when they leave you alone but you know they will be back … that is terrible, because you spend all your time consumed by the waiting, expecting them to be back … That time is already torture, it is part of torture. Torture is not someone asking you things and forcing you to talk. Torture is really the time you are left alone, all by yourself, to face yourself …
Isabel 2001
Similarly, Maria said: “It was really terrifying … the feeling of dread as They approached, and the awful sense of relief as they took other prisoners instead of you.” This process of facing one's limit was a psychological struggle with oneself. As a defense, victims often developed a kind of splitting mechanism between a body in indescribable pain and a psyche in struggle with itself that analysts have labeled a “double sense of agency” (Scarry 1985: 48).
You think all the time. I was worried for a long time about what I might say or not say, trying to get to guess what they knew already and what they did not know – my head was spinning at a thousand kilometers per hour. I remember I felt as if my mind was running wild, you see? Thinking … thinking … very, very busy, trying to establish what the situation was. I knew there were things I shouldn't tell but … which ones? What was the limit? And so all my energy would be spent doing that.
Isabel 2001
Your main worry is to not talk. You are exhausted, dead tired and broken. They destroy you during torture. You need to rest but you cannot let go because you are praying that they will not catch you at a weak moment, when something can come out of your mouth. This is a constant struggle because you are dead tired and you are permanently trying not to think of the things you know. You don't know what strategy they will use; you don't know what they will do to you … But under no circumstance during torture can you allow yourself to think of the things you know because what you are thinking may come out … So you need to think of the gray clouds, of the little birds [smile, ironic tone].
Ana 2001
This defense is a complex mechanism that added layers to the struggle to keep silent and whole. In their struggle for physical preservation, individuals were drawn to collaboration with their captors. In their struggle to maintain psychic and moral integrity, to survive with dignity and continuing commitment to the values they fought for, against psychological breakdown despite the intense fear of pain and death, physical pain was set against the moral pain of betraying their own beliefs, their comrades, and their life's values. In this psychological tug of war, “splitting” mechanisms formed enduring dynamics of emotional distancing from the painful experience.
Years later, former prisoners still had an “impermeable layer” – what one of my interviewees called la capa, as it is referred to in inner circles – a form of emotional distancing or silencing that precludes any narrative reference to the extreme vulnerability and pain suffered. This was a mostly unconscious protective mechanism that endured from the times of the dictatorship. Former prisoners kept their cognitive knowledge of torture at a safe distance from their own emotions of the experience. This emotional muting can persist for great lengths of time, even decades, and is conveyed through a reluctance to talk, particularly about the most humiliating, undignified or debilitating aspects of the experience.
Over the decades after prison, this “protective layer” sometimes wore off and became obvious at times when people “broke their silence,” in contrast to the concomitant sense of obligation to bear witness often found among survivors and well documented in the literature (Eitinger 1987; Caruth 1995). For example, when I first asked Maria if I could interview her, she immediately replied with no hesitation: “Certainly; I consider it my duty. The private is public” (Maria 2001).
I understood this to mean that, despite the fact that torture and pain are intimate experiences, despite la capa (the protective layer), she felt obliged to tell the story and pass it on to whoever would listen as it was the least she could do to preserve the memory of what happened and to prevent it from happening again. But a few minutes later she added, as if reflecting on what she had just said: “I have always considered it an obligation to talk about this … But one cannot live opening the old wounds every day … I don't talk about this every day, but I don't avoid telling my story either” (Maria; my emphasis). Countering the forces making former prisoners feel the weight of the obligation to remember and bear witness, are enduring emotions of pain, suffering, and humiliation – “the old wounds” – that work on a daily basis to block memory during ordinary social relations. (This is concomitant with a social reluctance of others to “ask” – usually described as a “double wall” of silence).
When I asked Maria if telling me her story was traumatic or painful for her, she spoke of the defensive and emotionally numbing mechanism described above as follows:
This is what happens to me: it is as if I have two different layers of approach to the topic … I can tell it ‘from outside’ … But … at a certain moment I start to feel a knot forming … ‘What's going on with me?’ Suddenly, it is as if I have been creating an isolating, impermeable layer, and all I can talk about is above that layer. And one day, you go beyond the layer [to the inside].
Maria 2001
Maria implied that, without the protective layer, talking or communicating about the experience from the “inside” brought what she experienced as an unmanageable stream of emotions and tears. This is something that I found repeatedly mentioned by all of my interviewees of this generation of 1960s activists. There was a split between their cognitive acknowledgment that telling the story and breaking the silence was their obligation – in honor of those who did not make it, to expose the brutality of their captors and bring them to justice, and so on – and their shielded emotions – purportedly a defense against overwhelming grief, humiliation, shame and rage. The presence of the layer, even if protective, also poses a problem for former prisoners themselves when they try to connect to their genuine emotions and make the effort of conveying them to those who do not know the experience:
The experience is so different for those who lived it – and the level of evil … You try to make a representation of the experience for those who are listening to you, and it is very difficult because, to achieve that representation, you have to draw the events from that more painful layer, and those who listen then, have to imagine it or invent it, who knows … [But] if we are not able to document what happened and the suffering involved, it is as if it was done repeatedly and doubly … How can you ensure the “Never Again” if people are not aware of how you got to say “Never Again”? What could “Never Again” mean to those who do not know what happened? The isolating layer was necessary to be able to tell and to go on living, but it is also important to be able to connect with the sadness and emotion of what happened, otherwise the “Never Again” has no meaning.
Maria 2001
What does this “internal” emotional distancing and silencing process mean to the possibility of healing and social repair in this community of former prisoners, in the context of ongoing public silence? This emotional layering of the torture experience that emerged powerfully in all my interviews was made even more complex by the seemingly insurmountable difficulty of communication between those who lived through the experience of torture and thus “knew” it at an embodied and emotional level, and those who know intellectually or elliptically about the experience but could not “feel” it. As Uruguayan author Carlos Liscano (2001: 33), who belongs to this same generation of former political prisoners, wrote: “Nobody will ever know the details of torture. They are a truth only the body knows.” Likewise, Isabel evoked that torture “is something so extreme that, if you haven't lived through it, it is very difficult [to know/transmit].”
A thick double layer of secrecy remained, the emotional-defensive one, embedded in a social context of public denial where no one wants to ask or know what happened, silencing taboo subjects such as the humiliating conditions, the pain and suffering, as well as the untold stories of what experiences personally brought these people into their activism and hence the risk of state repression, and what perpetrators did to them.
The collective “code of conduct” versus personal narratives
Above, an interviewee evoked the image of torture as an eternal wait. My own image of hell is, by contrast, a Sartrean one: a room full of people where I am forced to live eternally, deprived of any solitude or intimacy, in a room buzzing with non-stop activity, regulated by rigid, yet arbitrary, changing rules, under the constant watch of others. This image of a collective prison is, in fact, very close to what actually happened in Uruguayan political prisons.
Prisoners were constantly under surveillance, in a total absence of privacy, except for those placed in solitary confinement – where, ironically, the privacy was too extreme and prolonged. In the female political prison, Punta de Rieles, women were either locked up in groups of four to eight or confined to barracks of twelve, twenty or forty prisoners, sometimes for years. The male prisoners, confined to the Libertad prison – ironically, a prison established for political prisoners in a little town called Freedom – were put in cells of two or three, or sometimes in isolation. There were no collective barracks, but the prisoners functioned as collectives by “floors” and they had a prison canteen that became the center of collective activity. These environmental arrangements shaped the prison experience as a pre-eminently collective one, particularly for female prisoners. This was reinforced by the collectivist cultural “codes of conduct” predominant in the leftist activists’ political organizations and socialist or communist/collectivist ideologies. The prison group became a second family. In fact, as a result of the years of de-socialization and re-socialization into these groups – which sometimes became their main emotional support – prisoners sometimes held the prison group emotionally closer than their blood relatives.
Even when the “tug of war” discussed above came through as crucial for the survival of the former prisoners I interviewed, when one asked a former political prisoner how she survived, her typical initial response, rather than invoking her own individual resources or actions, was to call upon the collective solidarity of others to survive and resist. For example, Ana said: “We managed to live together and survive in the best way possible by sharing as much as we could.” In the context of a state controlled prison under a terror regime, maintaining solidarity and sharing was a highly risky and exhausting survival strategy.
Except for family visits that sometimes turned into experiences of high stress, used by authorities to purposefully inflict further psychological suffering – by canceling them without notice, or by harassing family members and children – prisoners were totally isolated from the outside world. By necessity, prisoners shared strong emotional bonds and intense intimacy with each other. Everything was debated collectively, everything was shared, from the contents of the family package, to love stories and the caring of the babies born in prison.2 Even “intimate” letters from partners were shared with the collective to inspire the compañeras. “The group was prioritized,” said Ana:
At that time we were all wound up with collectivism; obviously we were all concerned with collective projects … We always talked about it in such a collective way, that it is difficult … [to talk about] your personal, intimate experience. During torture you are absolutely alone. Well, alone, at least you don't know who is there, if there is anybody out there …
Ana 2001
This collectivist political ethos shaped a cultural “code” for activists to seek collective solutions to their problems. The line between the personal and the collective became so blurred that, when prisoners talk about their prison years, they tend to tell their stories in the plural as when people tell their couples’ or family's stories. Prisoners were continually exposed to the eyes of others. Like private property, private matters and forms of individuality were considered a luxury or sign of ideological weakness. Before prison, as activists they had valued a life devoted to collective projects and social change under the aegis of such collectivist codes. Any individual decision or initiative was considered by the group as individualistic, “bourgeois,” selfish, and “personalistic,” a heavy criticism, as seen through the lens of the revolutionary ideology of the times heavily influenced by Marx and Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Kaustky, Mao, and Ho Chi Min. For decades, collective narratives and populist interpretations of the prison experience became dominant and strict moral codes were applied to those who did not abide by the collective versions and group decisions.
It is really demanding to live together with a bunch of people 24 hours a day under those conditions … Everything was collective! That was quite unbearable for me; it was very intense to be together all the time. I was in a barrack with 40 other women … We had two barracks on that floor, a total of 80 women. It becomes an inescapable pattern of behavior …
Isabel 2001
This code was originally drawn from accounts of the European resistance during World War II, charged with moral judgments and ideological class assumptions of how a “true revolutionary” proletarian or working class activist was expected to behave, always prioritizing the collective “good,” the revolutionary cause, and its political organization.
Transition and liberation
When the last political prisoners were released en masse in March 1985, during the initial effervescence of the political opening with the peoples on the streets, personal stories were simply not heard. Prison accounts typically transmitted emblematic stories of famous political prisoners who had become symbols of the heroic collective resistance who, in these idealized collectivist narratives, were being released by the Uruguayan peoples’ resistance movement. Personal stories told in an individual key simply “did not count.” What mattered at the time was to claim collective victory in the name of the Uruguayan people who had resisted the fear of “the dark years” of dictatorship and had finally defeated the “enemy.”
More than sixteen years after her release, in 2001, Ana's testimony of her eleven years in prison (1972–1985) was for the first time written in her individual, personal voice: “I thought that my story was not important. I thought that nobody was interested in what I went through.” (Ana told me about it in her interview in 2001, her memoir was published in 2004). After her release, as Isabel put it: “People would clearly tell me: ‘You must forget. It is better not to talk about this. Let it be … Ya pasó. It is over’” (Isabel 2001).
This collectivist “code of conduct” that regulated what was considered “adequate” and “moral” behavior during prison and torture persisted for decades. The code had originally been part of the activist's “security system.” This regulated how a militant should behave under the hardship of detention and torture, to avoid compromising the political organization's leadership and fellow activists, and to minimize one's own vulnerability by severing social relations with non-militant others, keeping concrete information to a minimum, and achieving a moral or ideological triumph over captors. Faced with the escalation of repression, organizations had tried to prepare their activists. Many among this generation mentioned having read old World War II manuals about torture beforehand. The famous novel by André Malraux, Man's Fate (La condition humaine), was referred to as widely read among the revolutionary leadership of the 1960s generation. The predominant judgment about torture was that a committed activist had the power to resist it:
‘The militant shall be able to sustain his ideas’ … This was an idea we supported in the abstract, at a time when one could have not imagined that Uruguay was ever going to have torture … It was discussed intellectually.
Maria 2001
According to the code, the collective project of “the organization” – whether socialist, communist, or guerrilla, of the myriad in existence at that time – was deemed more important than any personal or family projects. The strict activist codes, implicit or explicit in most interviews with former prisoners, were deeply engrained and functioned as strong elements of social cohesion and membership, according to the Marxist ideology of class cooperation and class alliances. These codes were rarely questioned – although they might be questioned in the intimacy of face-to-face interactions, away from “organizational” settings. My interview data showed that these codes endured with remarkable strength over the years.
The actual prison experience confronted many with the tough reality that their organizations were fragmented or destroyed, the leadership captured or in exile. Confronted with such reality, many did not fully comply with the code:
I did not have a “militant attitude.” I realized that over time. There were people who kept accounts of the trips, this route takes a long time, therefore is long … checking if they could recognize anything … etc. I am incapable of recognizing anything; I am always disoriented! Right? [laughs] All I knew was that they had taken me away, that I was not coming out, and that I was in deep shit! That was it … I had a pretty defeatist attitude, because of the situation. I did not feel that I had to stick it out to defend an organization … to defend who knows what. Other people went through it with a much more militant attitude.
Isabel 2001; my emphasis
Many of my interviewees over the years, including informal conversations on taboo subjects, claimed that they soon surmised that they must have been reported by their own comrades under duress. According to the codes, these “fallen comrades” had “betrayed the cause.” How could this be judged from the outside? On a rare recorded interview where this is explicitly discussed, Isabel stated:
When I came out [of prison] I felt people were talking too easily about who “talked,” who “did not talk” … It made me mad: How can you judge so and so if you do not know? I can only talk about what I know about myself and those who “fell” with me, because I talked with them about it. But I cannot talk about what others did that I do not know. It is just as if you were going to discuss problems in your couple, there are things that you only talk about with your couple because this is very intimate. Only you can know what was at stake at that moment, you and those who were right there … The majority of the people talked, gave some information. It is a myth that militants do not talk. I didn't believe that even before I fell. If that were true, half of the people who were caught wouldn't have been, isn't that right?
Isabel 2001
After liberation, the code emphasized collective political action over the personal, individual action of telling the story. Personal and individual behavior continued to be regarded with suspicion.
This was reinforced by the predominant cultural and political climate of “transitional effervescence” that opposed the need to “do” against the need to “voice” stories at a time when the recently released prisoners were too busy reconstructing their lives. There was “no time to waste” on mere “talk.” Thirty years later, Liscano masterfully captures in his writings this sense of urgency among prisoners in the days after liberation. Here he reflects on the cultural climate among activists who expressed the need to make up for “lost time” in reconstructing their – political – life and in participating politically in society, which had been banned for such a long time:
In an instant I will have to start deciding. I am already making decisions, and I cannot make any mistakes. It does not occur to me that the first thing I should do would be to sit down and take a rest. Nothing. My thing is to do, to do, to do, right away. The journey I started towards freedom is a waste of time. I should already be there, doing something … I will also feel, in a little while, that I am in the hardest moment in my life.
Liscano 2001; my emphasis
This sense was strongly expressed among my interviewees. As Ana put it:
There were many people who had started to tell what happened to them, that was true, but they did not find the space [to be listened to]. It was more like you needed to listen to others and become the receptive ear, rather than tell your story. Like you never got the opportunity. In the family it was impossible. Among others, when they did ask a question, maybe the younger people asked. Most people did not ask anything; they did not ask. They asked specific questions, such as “how are you going to solve this or that?” But other than that, nothing. We had to go out and do activist work, go out and do, do, do.
Ana 2001
Thus, the enduring activist code had the unintended effect of further silencing personal narratives as unimportant, and of filtering out “negative” or overwhelming emotions as dangerous. Combined with the intersubjective and psychological dynamics that made the transmission of the experience to others extremely difficult, and made life's tasks after prison to focus on the present and future rather than on the past. Embedded in the public politics of oblivion, it would yet take decades before some of these survivors could start having the mental and social space to look at the past with an eye to create a different kind of transmission and break the layers of silence.
Translating the embodied memory of pain into a shared narrative
To break their silence and share in an empowering way what became a symbol of their emotional pain and sense of defeat, former prisoners would need to tell their story in front of “others” willing to listen: an empathetic audience in a “redressive community” (Prager 2008). This is a process that is only possible under certain social conditions of mutuality where a minimal basis for mutual trust rather than suspicion is present and created (Prager 2008: 416–18). Finding a creative narrative vehicle to make the experience sharable in words or images is a highly complex process believed to be crucial to healing (Scarry 1985: 6). It takes time as well as certain emotional and social conditions such as self-empowerment and personal resilience, as well as a talent to express, sustain and render it public.
But this processing of the past to make it available for future learning was delayed by the status quo of “arrested development” of mourning and emotional processing. Telling the personal story of prison and torture was not only hindered by the inner psychological dynamics of the survivors, overwhelmed by the practical demands of recovery and reconstruction of their lives after their liberation. Embedded in the social denial and transitional Politics of Oblivion, their reluctance to tell was further reinforced by a collective activist “code of conduct” which underlined the importance of – traditional political – collective action and questioned the appropriateness of personal testimony. There was “no time to waste” in telling one's own story in the face of the multiple tasks to accomplish in solidarity with others. Collective processes continued to be given priority over personal projects, as these codes drew an ultimately fallacious but powerful dichotomy between “sharing stories” (contar) – seen as a personal, individual action with no political end – and “doing [politics]” (hacer), which was seen as collective political action that is considered the only path to social change. Only more recently, in the past decade (2001–2010), more personal narratives and memoirs daring to have a personal or even controversial voice have slowly started to be published and find an increasingly interested larger public audience (Fried 2006). Transmitting the experience of prison and torture was and remains a high-wire act that demands tact. Transmissions have remained elliptical. They combine the fear to transmit “toxic knowledge” and thus extend the damage, the tact to seek subtle ways to share what happened and, at the same time, neutralize any potential harm the stories and lessons can cause.
Public denial combined with the “collectivist” activist codes shaped these survivors’ intimate communications, and confined them to the solitude of their inner thoughts with scarce opportunity for shared, empathetic listening and understanding, a crucial aspect of ordinary shared memory processes. Thus, finding a voice to put into words or “translate” the experience of the victims of torture was hindered for decades.
Analysis: living to tell the story
The central question of this chapter concerned the relationship between trauma, silencing, remembering, and healing. How were the experiences of the former political prisoners to be healed, in the double context of a Politics of Oblivion and the collectivist codes of behavior?
The selective stories analysed here suggest that the answer, in the form of a multi-layered social process of denial and silence, produced paradoxical results. While it engendered an even stronger sense of moral duty among former political prisoners to bear witness, it also further built a double wall of silence that produced a muted emotional climate and tacit silence that reinforced painful divisions of the past between survivors – inner-group – and “others” in society. This, in turn, prevented the emergence of empathetic listening and compassion, two key ingredients in our understanding of healing and reconciliation.
Rather than an expected “compulsion to talk,” a double layer of silencing patterns and practices was observed to have formed between the community of Uruguayan former prisoners and others. Survivors transmitted memories of their experiences of prison and torture during the dictatorship mainly implicitly, through the inter-subjective and emotional dynamics of their survivor identity and the institutional and collective ethos of silence. They explicitly shared some filtered and selective prison stories of the more “positive” outcomes of prison, uplifting stories of the “achievements of the human spirit” under duress, stories of solidarity and mutual help among the “new family” of fellow prisoners, thus tending to not reveal more negative stories that reflected undignified or humiliating aspects of their experience, such as bodily harm or pain, betrayal and collaboration, abuses of a sexual nature, and systematic torture while pregnant. Taboos persisted with regard to the details of torture, collaboration, captors and perpetrators. The personal details and the dynamics of their political errors and defeat remained silenced, unexamined, mostly contained or protected under a multi-layered wall of silence.
At a wider level of analysis, the evidence in the national cultural and political landscape strongly suggests that far from achieving reconciliation and closure, the Politics of Oblivion have sustained and perhaps even further extended the problem of coming to terms with social divisions and polarization over the human rights violations and even over visions of the national polity, its past and its future, leaving a legacy of pending accounts and increasing, not decreasing, polarization. By not publicly addressing the crimes of the state, Uruguayan authorities not only failed to institute any kind of public policies or resources for a genuine coming to terms, reconciliation, restitution, and healing for all individuals and communities affected by state terror, but also reinforced the ongoing polarizations enhanced by the enduring culture of impunity and social denial. In fact, these policies contributed to block these communities’ ability to publicly express and mourn their losses and work through their experiences and created categories of citizens subjects to different kinds of rights, and some devoid of rights altogether – like citizens who suffered “forced disapperance”, torture, political repression. Oblivion also produced the paradoxical and unexpected effect of prolonging, instead of cancelling or “sealing,” the memory of the conflict, thus leaving survivors and their families to their own resources to carry the burden of searching for public acknowledgment and accountability to this day. This may help explain the motivation for traumatic experiences and redress movements that have endured in the private realm through decades and across generations to re-emerge in the public eye, as my work of the past decade documents (Fried 2011, 2009, 2006, 2004, 2001).
Conclusion
It would not be until the leftist opposition's new President Tabaré Vazquez, of the Frente Amplio Party, took office in 2005 (2005–2009) that the legacy of pending human rights issues would return to the political center stage again and the tide of impunity and silence would slowly start to turn. Yet, even during a second administration of Frente Amplio – with a new leader, President Jose (el Pepe) Mujica (2010–2014), who is himself a high profile former Tupamaro guerrilla movement leader held prisoner in infra-human conditions for over a decade – the Expiry Law has remained in full force and effect. But not for long. As this chapter draws to an end, the lack of political will to nullify the law through parliamentary action has just suffered two major institutional blows. One coming from a national institution: the Supreme Court of Justice has pronounced the law unconstitutional already in three instances of forced disappearance (October 2009, November 2010 and February 2011. The most recent ruling has come from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2011), the highly respected regional Judiciary System, which declared Uruguay responsible for the human rights violations, investigation, prosecution and reparations to the victims (Gelman Case vs. Uruguay), and will force Uruguay to find a legal avenue to eliminate the Expiry Law from its national judicial order.
The Uruguayan State, to this day, does not have a systematized, integral conception of a state policy for human rights, and the agonizing impunity law continues to polarize debate. But this is not the end of the story for the Ley de Caducidad and the social and political struggles to undo it, or of the remembering and redress movements for accountability and reparations over the issue of torture in Uruguay. As the organization of former political prisoners (CRYSOL) now reconsiders opening new cases of torture – no such case has yet ever been filed in Uruguayan courts – the Inter-American Court's ruling has once again re-opened the hotly debated question of the “pending business” of truth and accountability of human rights issues and diverse voices stemming from the dictatorship. Whether this sentence on the Gelman Case will become Uruguay's “Pinochet case,” or Achilles’ heel of Caducidad, remains to be seen. As the prevalent judicial and social culture of impunity is being challenged and dismantled, further research needs to be done on the relationship between remembering, reconstituting, bearing witness in private and in public, and the possibility for a national and regional polity of “healing from history.”
Recurring and increasing demands for truth, memory, and redress over the past decade have shown that, despite the power and remarkable resilience of the Politics of Oblivion, it did not ultimately achieve the expected social reconciliation or closure. Polarizations have persisted and intensified and civil society has become increasingly aware that the past is not only not past but is ever more present, as periodic cycles of public debate and contestation resurface and break the silence in national – and increasingly regional and transnational – ways regarding the state's responsibility and accountability for gross human rights abuses.
Finally, I see here trauma as an alternative form of moral accountability in a system of social insurance. Survivors under similar conditions worldwide seem to contract a powerful debt which obliges them to remember. This moral debt or obligation transforms memory even more deeply into a form of moral accounting. Building on Marcel Mauss’ (1967) anthropological work on “moral mutual obligations” and “social insurance,” I think of traumatic memory as a “moral economy” that reminds members of society of a social breakdown that has yet to be addressed. I suggest that traumatic memory has the paradoxical effect of destroying and re-drafting social moral boundaries while at the same time reinforcing such mutual obligations. Perhaps after three decades, Uruguayans are finally starting to witness such moments of re-drafting of boundaries.
Social healing and reconciliation cannot be addressed or repaired only at the level of individuals or families. The solution has to come from the collective levels that jointly contributed to the escalation of violence and subsequent silence and secrecy that enabled it, and the endurance of state crimes and the ongoing regime of impunity that endures to this day. Social healing and reconciliation will become possible only when the social as well as the political community can recognize the harm done and take steps to involve the whole community, the society, and its responsible institutions to “heal the wounds” and initiate an integral redress policy to change the culture of silence and impunity that will re-establish new boundaries between the past and the present.
Notes
1 All interviews are key representative selections from a much wider sample of eight families of political prisoners, all conducted in the context of a broader research project in 2001 on collective memory and intergenerational transmission (see Fried 2004).
2 There are 76 documented cases of babies born and held under captivity between 1972 and 1980 as shown in research by Dr Alvaro Rico's team (Presidencia de la Republica 2007).