Fear at the Edge – State Terror & Resistance in Latin America - Hardcover

Corradi, Juan E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520077040 ISBN 13: 9780520077041

Publisher: University of California Press, 1992

Synopsis

Despite the emergence of fragile democracies in Latin America in the 1980s, a legacy of fear and repression haunts this region. This volume chronicles the effect of systematic state terror on the social fabric in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. The contributors, primarily Latin American scholars, examine the deep sense of insecurity and the complex social psychology of people who live in authoritarian regimes. There is discussion of Argentina, where the brutal repression of the 1976 coup almost completely smothered individuals who might once have opposed government practices, and Uruguay, where the government forced the population into neutrality and isolation and cast a silent pall on everyday life. Accounts of repression and resistance in Chile and Brazil are also vividly presented.

About this title

About the Author

Juan E. Corradi is Professor of Sociology at New York University and the author of The Fitful Republic: Economy, Society, and Politics in Argentina (1985). Patricia Weiss Fagen works for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in El Salvador and is the author of Exiles and Citizens: Spanish Republicans in Mexico (1973). Manuel Antonio Garretón is a member of the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences in Santiago, Chile.

From the Back Cover

"A genuinely interdisciplinary work . . . the best attempt I have ever seen at a truly unified intellectuals' approach to an important issue."—Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Georgetown University

"Very seldom does a collected volume achieve the academic quality and internal coherence that one sees in this case. It is a major contribution to comparative research on post-authoritarian situations."—Carlos Waisman, University of California, San Diego

From the Inside Flap

"A genuinely interdisciplinary work . . . the best attempt I have ever seen at a truly unified intellectuals' approach to an important issue."—Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Georgetown University

"Very seldom does a collected volume achieve the academic quality and internal coherence that one sees in this case. It is a major contribution to comparative research on post-authoritarian situations."—Carlos Waisman, University of California, San Diego

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America

By Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, editors

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, editors
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520077040
One—
Fear in Military Regimes
An Overview
Manuel Antonio Garretón

Fear is inherent in human society. Fear underlies the precarious edifice of the human condition: we fear death, loss, society, the past, the future, pain, and the unknown. Just as death cannot be defeated, the essential battles with fear cannot be won; the conditions that produce it can be ameliorated, though, and the specific circumstances associated with it overcome.

Our subject is not the existential fear that is an integral part of the human psyche but politically determined fear, the fear associated with political regimes. Just as psychology looks at individual fear, the social sciences look at collective fear and the social conditions that produce it and allow it to be overcome. Because all societies and political systems consciously manufacture and then wrestle with fear, they can all be classified by their dominant fears. Although democratic regimes have not entirely dispensed with fear, they do generate mechanisms that discipline and overcome certain types of fear. Here, however, we shall focus on those historically regressive regimes in which the dominant fear is the primary fear of death. It is no coincidence that the positive theme in these systems is that of human rights, a historically and culturally determined extension of the right of life.1

We shall confine ourselves to the problem of fear in a particular type of regime, the military dictatorships that emerged in the Southern Cone during the 1970s. Because we define authoritarianism as a regime, as a type of relation between state and society, and not as a type of society, we

will not be looking for any generic relation between authoritarianism and fear that might cover all social spheres and individual personalities. Rather, because military dictatorships are a historical type of authoritarian regime, we have to look at their distinguishing features and the particular consequences for fear.

For the purposes of this analysis we need to distinguish first between the dominant types of fear and second between the groups that experience them. There are two basic types of fear, which can be described in the context of infantile experiences: the "dark room," and the "dog that bites." The first is fear of the unknown, a sense of insecurity about something bad: we know the threat exists, but we do not know its exact nature. In classical sociological terms this qualifies as fear of an anomic situation; although the blow or harm is seen as imminent, we know neither whence it comes nor how hard it will strike. The second type of fear is stimulated by a known danger: the subject anticipates the harm he or she will suffer, and fear springs from a remembered experience with whose harmful dimensions the subject is completely familiar.

With respect to the subjects of fear, those who are afraid, we must distinguish between the losers' fear and the winners' fear within political regimes; the relations of these subjects are defined as asymmetric and normally conflictual or antagonistic. The losers' fear is pervaded by a sense of defeat, a perception of the overwhelming power of the enemy, a feeling of failure or weakness that cannot be blamed on others, and a sense of having lost the opportunity for personal or collective realization. It combines fear of terror or repression with terror of the future—namely, a new situation that will be fraught with unknown dangers.

The winners' fear stems from the trauma experienced before the victory, from their perception of how their victory has affected the losers, from their suspicion that the repressive mechanism unleashed might become an uncontrollable Frankenstein, from the sense that victory is ephemeral and that the tables might someday be turned on them and the losers will take their revenge.

These fears feed on one another despite the fact that they are independent of each other and have their own separate dynamics. Both fear of known and unknown dangers and the dialectic of the winners' fear and the losers' fear pervade the emergence, development, and end of the military regimes, and have significant bearing on the processes of democratic transition and consolidation. These regimes can be seen as systems that produce fear and that are challenged by processes and struggles to overcome it.

The Military Regimes of the Southern Cone

This chapter will not touch on the debate over the nature of the military regimes that were set up in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. We shall take only a brief look at some of their characteristics, which are described elsewhere in more detail.2 These regimes were at the same time institutional forms, a distinct phase of the development of capitalism in such societies, and the expression of a new type of militarism; they cannot be reduced to either one of these dimensions. These factors played into each other in various ways. First, the military regimes were associated with the denouement of a political crisis, itself a manifestation of the generic problem of hegemony, which has been endemic since the demise of the oligarchic state. This political crisis was characterized by the high degree of polarization between the active and mobilized popular sectors—whose political expressions had participated in power to different degrees—and the dominant sectors—who saw this situation as catastrophic, a zero-sum political crisis in which everything was at stake. The dominant sectors were able to instigate their fears in the middle classes. Second, however, these regimes can be seen as a part of the modernization, professionalization, and ideological homogenization of the armed forces in the context of their dependent position in the U.S.controlled geopolitical system. Third, the military regimes under consideration were committed to restructuring their respective capitalist systems and then reinserting them into the global capitalist system.

The foregoing analysis allows us to understand the double logic, or two-dimensionality, of this historic type of regime. On the one hand, the regimes were reacting against something, be it populist society, the "state of compromise," or state-activated popular mobilization, and on the other they were attempting to construct something entirely new. Catalyzed by the political crisis—perceived by some sectors to be terminal or catastrophic, a clear threat to their social position—the regimes attempted to disarticulate the former society. The touchstone of this reactive logic was repression, whereby the regime relied on a powerful apparatus that employed vast quantities of resources and hitherto unprecedented techniques of brutality. The intensity of the reactive dimension varied by country, according to the nature of the crisis that preceded and provoked the military coup, the concomitant degree of radicalization and polarization of society, the level of activity and organization of the popular sectors or their political expressions, and the homogenization and efficacy of the military/repressive apparatus.

The process in the Southern Cone, however, involved more than disarming, disarticulating, fragmenting, or repressing the opposition. The goal of those military regimes, in contrast to that of more traditional dictatorships, was to transform society. Their plan was first to re-create the relations between the state and civil society in order to institute a nonredistributive, nonparticipatory brand of capitalism, and then to reinsert their respective economies into the world system. We shall call this the foundational or transformational logic or dimension of the process. Just because it failed does not mean it was not a basic goal of this type of regime. The main determinants of this dimension are, first, the capacity to constitute a hegemonic nucleus in the heart of the victorious coalition that induces part of the civilian sector (the bourgeoisie, technocracy, conservative intellectuals) to cooperate with the military sector in guiding and leading the attempt at capitalist recomposition. The second factor is the degree to which the society, or significant sectors within it, resist the state-induced transformations.

Different Southern Cone regimes placed emphasis on one dimension or the other and in some cases gave equal weight to both. The distribution of the emphasis allows us to differentiate phases in their development. Thus we can distinguish a reactive from a foundational phase, and a phase in which the transformational dimension predominates even while the reactive dimension remains.

Other phases are derived from these two. One, denned by recurring crises, comes about when the regime has exhausted its capacity to transform society or is having difficulties in the implementation phase; at this point the regime's principal problem is how to survive, not how to repress or to change the society. Another is the period of crisis accumulation, defined as a terminal phase when the main problem is how the regime is to withdraw or exit; it is, in other words, the final administration: the administración de salida . This phase either predates or accompanies the phase of transition between the military regime and the political regime that replaces it. The so-called dirty war is a good example of the reactive phase, while "economic miracles" or "booms" herald the foundational phase. Popular mobilizations against the regime illustrate the phase of recurring crises, while mobilizations and negotiations (direct or indirect) between the military and civilians, together with the resurgence of political parties, characterize the terminal and transition phases.

Although there is a high probability, historically speaking, that these phases will follow some sort of chronological order, there is no necessary

sequence, and, apart from the terminal and transition phases, they can follow in any order: the process can jump about from one phase to another and then double back to a previous phase. Likewise, each phase contains, to varying degrees, elements of the other phases.

The Phases of Fear

The Reign of Terror

The object of the reactive phase, which usually follows directly after the installation of the military regime, is to deactivate and dismantle the previous sociopolitical system. Although it does not necessarily rely exclusively on repression, it is first and foremost a military phase; because the hegemonic civil nucleus has yet to be consolidated, the specific nature of the transformation remains undefined. The lack of a consensus within the governing bloc as to its future course leads to a consensus on the elimination of the enemy at all costs. This enemy is usually the sector that was overthrown by the military coup. It includes those who are defined as collaborators as well as political society in general; all those who are blamed for the "chaos" that originally gave rise to the coup are considered traitors and enemies of the state. Although technocrats and conservative intellectuals struggle to impose some direction on the concentrated power of the armed forces, they do not have a well-defined project that goes beyond the task of "order or stabilization."3 Although the military coup implied the victory of one group over another, the winners still define society as being in a state of war; citing it as necessary and unavoidable, they justify the repression both to their supporters and to the silently complicit society as a whole. The predominant ideology is military and bellicose, and is defined by the so-called national security doctrine.4

Opposition in the strict sense of the word—a realm of forces comprising recognized intermediaries, adversaries, and alternative projects—does not exist in a society subjected to the culminating phase of state repression, the period when both tacit and explicit support for the coup is at its peak. The situation is still basic; primary concerns are resistance, physical survival, and, at most, organization. Therefore, subjects such as the right of life and human rights in general, which in turn highlight the role of national and international figures and institutions that speak this universal "metapolitical" language, are given priority. In some countries the churches are key, and in others the human-rights commissions.

At this time fear seems to pervade society as a whole. Each person seems to be facing the extreme Sartrian dilemma of having to choose whether to be a hero or a traitor. Everyone is afraid of everyone else. And this climax of fear is exacerbated by the official rhetoric, which activates the fear of the winners by showing how close they were to a catastrophe and that of the losers by demonstrating what the repression has accomplished. By denouncing the presence of the hidden enemy who has yet to be completely eliminated and by calling on society to collaborate in the final "clean up," such rhetoric stimulates fear within the society as a whole.

The losers experience a primary, existential fear: theirs is the terror of death and loss of physical integrity; they fear disappearance, torture, and destruction of the web of intellectual and affective meaning; they fear being uprooted, having to live in a darkened world. Fear of the known ("the dog that bites") combines with fear of the unknown ("the dark room"). Personal experience or the words of friends and acquaintances are the source of their knowledge. They have seen repression in the street, the torture cells, and the concentration camps. Sometimes, as part of the "war," the military even makes public and official threats. Moreover, there is rumor, uncertainty, surprise, and ignorance of all the variations of pain and suffering. The military tends to exaggerate this uncertainty and fear both by keeping the definition of the enemy or possible victims and the forms of punishment deliberately vague, and by insinuating that, as long as the enemy is still alive and active, excesses of repression will be inevitable.

When the state is omnipresent and the society is underground or submerged (when society actually is an "underground"), the struggle against fear tends to be individual and atomized, and people seek refuge in the most intimate nucleus, the primary group.5 In some countries, institutions such as the Church play a double role in the process of overcoming fear. They provide a space to reestablish links and regroup, and they gather and diffuse information about what is happening in order to lower the levels of uncertainty.

The winners' fear is the residue of former fears experienced during the period of crisis that culminated in the coup; it reflects a sense of having survived a trauma or a perceived threat to their security. The relief that follows the coup transforms fear of the past into tacit or explicit complicity and, in some cases, acts of concrete vengeance. This fear tends to disappear as the new regime is consolidated; once the winners start to

sense that "something is going on," that people have been executed, for instance, or that relatives have been victims of the repression, fear of what might have happened in the past becomes a hidden fear of what might happen in the present, fear of the Frankenstein they helped to create and that is now out of control. During the foundational phase this relatively secret fear will be sublimated in dreams of grandeur.

Impotence and Sublimation

The purpose of the transformational, or foundational, phase of the regime, which retains its repressive character, is to reconstitute society and usher in a new social order that matches the projected brand of authoritarian capitalism. This is the era of grand plans. It is when the military attempts to institutionalize various aspects of social life and implement policies that turn back the clock on the gains of former social actors, especially those in the popular sectors. It is a time of idealizations, "miracles," and "economic booms," superimposed plebiscites, and triumphalist aperturas (op enings) that seek to incorporate the crushed sectors, albeit subordinated, in the creation of the "great power" or future "new democracy." During this phase, the hegemonic military/civilian nucleus that is to supply the guidelines and the substance of the project of capitalist reinsertion and recomposition is constructed within the dominant bloc. The governing nucleus, aside from its ambition to open up the market and modernize some social spheres, is driven by a Utopian vision of a society wherein politics has ceased to be either relevant or necessary. The imposition of a military regime is touted as the indispensable historic condition for the creation of such a society.

The program of the opposition tends to be social and cultural at this point in that the political structures, the parties, not yet having repaired the damage of the disarticulation, are attempting to reconnect with the social movement. Artistic and literary expressions that confine themselves to human-rights issues begin to appear; these depict and criticize the new reality on the one hand and express resistance to the transformations undermining the historic progress of the social movement on the other. Similarly, there is renewed activity in the trade-union and women's movements, and other sectors affected by the socioeconomic changes imposed by the regime begin to mobilize. To these movements is added the disenchantment of sectors that initially supported the dictatorship: they begin to react to its longevity and excesses or express general

unhappiness with the social and economic changes. Thus the opposition's task is both to reconstitute the relation between the political and social and to pit itself not only against the dictatorial nature of the regime but against the measures and policies it implements. Moreover, it must do so in a situation of fragmentation; it is more correct to speak of multiple oppositions than a single opposition because no such sociopolitical entity has yet been constituted.

What fears dominate society during this phase? To the extent that nothing has significantly changed in the repression, the losers' fear is, in part, an extension of the fear of physical repression experienced during the first phase. The transformation of society, which affects the losers most directly, brings with it also fear of the unknown, which results from the "transformed" material and cultural conditions under which the losers must live. Although this type of everyday fear can be partially mastered in the expanded spaces for meeting and communication that are available in the transformational phase, it cannot be completely overcome as long as society remains cloaked in illusion and triumphalism. This fear born of uncertainty, the "dark-room" type of fear, is also born of impotence vis-à-vis the all-powerful state, change, and a present and future that are beyond one's control. During this phase, the winners' fear is sublimated in an orgy of consumerism, in the illusion of a future that will preclude the possibility of returning to the past, in the recognition chat, if there has been a price, "we're OK today, and tomorrow we'll be better." If the state and the underground society were the dominant factors in the previous phase, this is the era of the schizophrenic society: the miracle and euphoria, the underground and the fear.

Hope and Uncertainty

The phase of recurring crisis, which is not necessarily one step away from a terminal crisis and a transition process, can drag on for a long time. Either the military regime fails to implement its foundational project, or the project falls apart. The regime is now concerned only with survival; having nothing left to offer the society, it has lost its ability to bring it together, however limited this ability might have been in the past.

Indicators of the crisis of the transformational or foundational project are, among others, disintegration of the hegemonic nucleus, isolation of the military from society, promulgation by the regime of erratic policies (many of which reverse the policies of the transformational phase), and

incoherent official projects. Similarly, there is buildup of pressure in the corporate sectors that are fed up with the regime, and the popular mobilizations, which have been called "the resurrection of civil society," begin.6 The intensified repression that is a response to these mobilizations and the occasional forced concessions designed to coopt destabilizing sectors are also features of the crisis phase. The opposition must now tackle the problem of how to transform the dissatisfaction and mobilization into a unified and balanced political force capable of converting the recurring crisis into a terminal crisis. This task involves unifying the sectors that are fed up with the regime and making a credible and consensual proposal for termination.

The widespread perception that the regime is weak, the massive mobilizations, the generalized criticism, and the forced opening of political spaces to channel this mobilization serve to lessen the losers' fear. The mobilizations and generalized criticism erode the barriers of atomization that have fed the fear. The presence of others reinforces one's personal security; private, everyday fear is transcended through collective action and becomes courage and heroism. The hope that things might change alleviates part of the ever-present fear. In that the results are uncertain and the source of trauma is still in place and might at any time unleash the repression, the alleviation is only partial. In other words, uncertainty is still present and, at times, is increased: it is often the case that after the first explosions of discontent, official rhetoric again feeds fears of the coup era, invoking memories of the "chaos." And this rekindled fear touches certain sectors that had begun to mobilize against the regime; once the initial euphoria dissipates they tend to withdraw in the face of uncertainty and threat. The fear of the winners, also a fear born of uncertainty and stimulated by the official propaganda warning of the "return to chaos," is rekindled during this phase.

The main issue for the opposition is how to reduce the level of uncertainty regarding the regime: faced with a shattered regime lacking a project, the opposition is seen as lacking concrete proposals for termination. Although there is no allegiance to the regime, there is fear of change.

Regressions, Residues, and Exorcisms

The central problem of the terminal phase is devising the forms and mechanisms of exit—how the armed forces are to step down. The prob-

lem of the transition phase, which can coincide with the terminal phase, is to establish a replacement regime—in this case, a democratic regime. Essentially this political process combines regime decay, social mobilizations with political/institutional ends, negotiations between those in power and the opposition (as long as during these transitions there is no military defeat or insurrection), and mediation between the regime and the opposition by actors or agents not identified with any of the adversaries.7 The nucleus in power and the dominant sectors in the regime seek to preserve the integrity and institutional immunity of the armed forces and as many established privileges and gains as possible. The opposition seeks to ensure rapid progress toward democratic elections and constitutional rule. Many opposition sectors will try to use the transition to promote social changes that reflect accumulated demands. This attempt at "deepening" the process is likely, however, to remain pending until the consolidation period, after the democracy has been inaugurated.

The winners' fear is dominant during these phases; they become the losers during the transition phase. There is growing recognition within society of the crimes they have committed, and demands for justice and punishment become widespread. They fear that the tables will be turned; they are aware that evil has been done. This fear drives the repressive apparatus to play its last cards: some try a preventative coup, others proclaim their innocence, others negotiate immunity so that there may be a fresh start.

Does the termination of the military regime and the transition to political democracy mean that the former losers and the victims will no longer be afraid and that a new society without fear is about to be inaugurated? The terminal and transition phases can be seen as periods when fear is exorcised. The triumphant mobilizations reinforce personal security and the individual's sense of being protected: the repressive apparatus is obviously collapsing; there is some assurance that crimes will not go unpunished. Objectively there is increased freedom, and the imminent demise of yesterday's winners occasions a sigh of personal and collective relief. Likewise, widespread knowledge of what happened and massive denunciation of the crimes provoke a catharsis and generate an antidote for the future (that it will never happen again). It is also the case, however, that many people do not undergo any such exorcism and that the survivors retain indelible scars. This legacy will affect not only their individual behavior and private lives but also their way of adapting to society, their confidence in others and in institutions, and their accep-

tance or rejection of politics. This point demands further research and reflection.

Producing and Overcoming Fear

The Southern Cone military regimes, more than other dictatorships, were institutionalized systems that deliberately produced and spread fear. The system depended on the use of heretofore unknown structures of repression and propaganda. The generalized fear in the society was intentionally provoked in the losers by the military coup through diverse forms of repression and propaganda. Fear was aroused indirectly in the winners because they could never entirely eliminate the awareness of their crimes and complicity. And it was instilled both directly and indirectly in society as a whole through the combined effect of repressive policies, the absence of institutional protection, and the superimposed model of social transformation. All these features varied by degree and by country.

This system of fear combined fear of the known ("the dog that bites") with fear of the unknown ("the dark room"). Fear of the known was instilled through actual physical repression, threats, control of the society, propaganda, and the omnipresent power of the state. Fear of the unknown was instilled primarily through omission: disinformation, the absence of the denned rules for the "war," and the absence of spaces where people could meet and acknowledge the presence of one another. Likewise, the regime exaggerated irrationality and adopted an arbitrary and autocratic style of imposing change.

Although fear could never be eliminated, the struggle to overcome it constantly permeated the system of fear-mongering. The sublimation of the winners' fear in the consumerist euphoria and in the quickly dispelled illusions of "national grandeur" were inauthentic ways of overcoming fear. The losers and the victims, in contrast, and the institutions and the social, religious, and political organizations with which they identified, found authentic ways to overcome their fear. The struggle to gain civil liberties, to marshal resources for self-defense in a situation where the judiciary was essentially nonfunctional, to denounce crimes, and to mobilize against torture, disappearances, and the repressive apparatus in general, in an attempt to impose limits on state power, was nothing less than an effort to overcome or confront the known fear of danger or threat. The struggles for freedom of information, for the recognition of organized groups, for participation, and for the freedom and strengthen-

ing of such social and political organizations as could counteract the atomization of society were nothing less than efforts to shrink the frontiers of uncertainty and impotence, and thereby overcome the fear they produced.

What is the legacy of this experience of fear once the military regime is terminated? One possibility is that the processes of regime termination and democratic transition have prevented definitive exorcism of fear and that additional time is needed to absorb the process and overcome the fear. Notwithstanding, history seems to reveal that fear scares individuals and affects their behavior but that societies have a great capacity to absorb traumatic experiences and to look ahead to the future without making direct reference to memory. There is a dimension of the society that cannot be understood apart from its history, but there is also a creative potential that cannot be reduced to that history. Thus we are faced with an unknown. We do not know how much of the fear created by the military regimes will haunt individuals and stain collective memory.

Fear, as we said at the beginning, cannot be entirely eliminated. But if the new democratic societies are to free themselves from the traumas and ghosts that will inevitably manifest themselves, they must come to grips with the legacy of fear. The catharsis and exorcism of the transition period must be accompanied by a two-tiered process. First, the organization that produced the fear—the armed forces—must be subjected to strict controls by society and the political regime. The military must be cut back both in quality and in quantity, and training must be free from such ideologies as the doctrine of national security, which isolated the military from society and gave it the dominant role. The second tier involves strengthening institutions such as the judiciary in order to resolve the pending problem of exorcising fear. This process may be limited to exposing and publishing the truth about the crimes that were committed if there is no possibility of obtaining appropriate punishments and reparations. Effort must also be directed toward creating and strengthening institutions that confront the two types of fear produced by military dictatorships. To reduce fear of known threats, such institutions promote and ensure individual and corporate freedom, reform the judiciary, guarantee resources for individual and collective protection, and limit the power available to different agencies. Institutions that promote participation, different levels of social organization, and freedom of information and knowledge reduce fear of the unknown.

The challenge, given the ongoing threat presented by the existence of

fear-producing organizations and the precariousness of inherited institutions, consists in constituting a political force with the power to create and sustain a consensus on the development of institutions that will structure not a society without fear but one able at least to bury past fears.

Continues...

Excerpted from Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin Americaby Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, editors Copyright © 1992 by Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, editors. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520077040
• ISBN 13: 9780520077041
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 308