Abstract
Drawing on his personal experiences of torture in Paraguay as well as his training as a psychiatrist, Carlos Alberto Arestivo explores torture’s interpersonal dynamics and its embeddedness—as a political strategy, a set of techniques, and lasting scars—in societal institutions and ideologies. That the focus of torture is on dissemblage of the victim’s social world and the destruction of his or her personality reveals that in its terrible, intimate encounters, torture makes personal the desire of one worldview to vanquish another. Perhaps most devastatingly, Arestivo’s essay concludes that when all other social bonds have been destroyed through torture, the last one remaining to the tortured is the one that has involuntarily been made with the torturer.
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Notes
- 1.
François Roustang , Vínculo de libertad (Asuncion, Paraguay : Centro de Documentacion y Estudios, 1989), 1.
- 2.
Roustang , Vínculo de libertad, 1.
- 3.
Editors’ note: The Oganization of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights defines liberticidas as the anti-freedom statutes 294 and 209: the so-called Defense of Democracy and the Defense of Public Peace and Personal Freedom laws, respectively, which outlawed communist and other leftist political parties and severely punished individual members. As the Commission’s report on Paraguay states, with these laws, “Freedom of thought and expression is stringently limited, as are the right of assembly, political rights—and even the right to work, which is enshrined in the Constitution itself. The lack of precision in defining punishable conduct grants broad discretionary powers to the judicial authority responsible for applying the law.” The laws were repealed in 1989 under General Rodriguez. See the Annual Report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 1989–90: Paraguay , OEA/Ser.L/V/II.77 rev.1, doc. 7, 17 May 1990. Available at http://www.cidh.org/annualrep/89.90eng/chap4f.htm
- 4.
Translator’s note: Possibly a specifically Paraguayan reference to the junta directiva.
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Arestivo, C.A. (2018). Torture: The Catastrophe of a Bond. In: Moore, A., Swanson, E. (eds) Witnessing Torture. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74965-5_1
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