Technology
and Totalitarism
Coercive
techniques in Argentina's Dirty War (1976-1982)
With
many techniques modeled on Nazi Germany, such as the proliferation
of concentration camps that were referred to as "Clandestine
Detention Centers" (Centros de Detención Clandestina),
the Argentinean military junta's rationale for dealing with
the 1970's guerrilla, and with dissent in general, included
the implementation of torture sessions whose paradigmatic
element was the electric prod, commonly known as picana eléctrica.
Applied to the detained person's body on a wet surface, this
electricity conductor, cheap and effective, was supposed to
provoke the disclosure of information about secret activities,
implicated persons, etc. The electric prod was developed in
the stockyards in Argentina and began being used by the police
in 1932. "The electrical picana operates on direct current,
but it can be plugged into the wall socket of the victim's
home with the aid of a transformer. It is transported in a
suitcase and usually powered by an automobile battery. It
is manned by two people. The first worked the bobbin raising
and reducing the voltage. The other applied the electricity
by applying a pole to the victim." (See http://www.reed.edu/~rejali/articles/electric.html)
Even when it is illegal, there have been reports of the use
of picana in police patrols and detention cells to this day.
The
methodologies implemented during the Argentinean Dirty War
were imposed by intelligence offices located in Argentina
and the US, and learned by Latin American personnel in the
infamous School of the Americas. In "C.I.A. Taught, Then
Dropped, Mental Torture in Latin America." (The New York
Times -01/29/1997), Tim Weiner gives an account of the many
manuals through which the CIA trained personnel to conduct
interrogation sessions in a successful manner. According to
Weiner, the Agency recommended coercive techniques that did
not rely upon the use of physical brutality but more on indirect
torture, like being "required to maintain rigid positions
such as standing at attention or sitting on a stool for long
periods of time." In this way, "the immediate source
of pain is not the 'questioner' but the subject himself."
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The
Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo:
Blood links: Contesting disappearance.
Genetics
and technologies of DNA tracing are, since the end of the
90's, integral to the Abuelas activism in their fight for
the restitution of the children of the disappeared that have
been kidnapped and are being kept captive in their appropriators
homes, living under a fake identity without any knowledge
of their true origins.
"There
may be a total number of around 500 children that have been
kidnapped and in many cases such kidnapping was not declared
by their relatives, either due to ignorance of the means available
for doing so or because they did not know that their mothers
were pregnant at the time they disappeared." (http://www.abuelas.org.ar/)
Abuelas needed a methodology that could retrace blood links
in the absence of direct relatives (the disappeared parents
of the kidnapped kids) through DNA. With the help of the international
scientific community, Abuelas could finally locate a way of
establishing genetic liasons and, in this way, return these
kids their lost identities. In 1989, the Abuelas established
the national genetic bank of relatives of disappeared children,
one that will survive them and can be utilized in the identification
of the children as they become adults
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