Tortured Citizens: Terror and Dissidence in Luisa Valenzuela and Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

At their founding near the turn of the nineteenth century, many nation-states in the Americas celebrated personal freedoms and political democracies that they claimed were inherent to American societies and peoples. By the late twentieth century, however, military dictatorships and other forms of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes governed a notable portion of the hemisphere.¹ In noting this transition, I am not suggesting that antidemocratic regimes did not exist in the Americas prior to the twentieth century nor that the Americas were the only geographic region in which authoritarianism flourished during recent decades. However, the preponderance of antidemocratic regimes in the late twentieth-century Americas is worth noting in this study. The state policies depicted in the narratives examined in previous chapters—those associated with the Brazilian empire, the Mexican Revolution, and the antebellum, Civil War, and Jim Crow eras of the United States—all fell far short of establishing the wide-ranging personal and political freedoms they claimed to promote, but none of the nation-states in question explicitly characterized their policies as antithetical to freedom.