A Miracle, A Universe, by Lawrence Weschler
Cadwell, Christopher
New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Weschler has written several books on modern art and one on Solidarity. His art essays are not so much about art criticism as about some of the weirdos who inhabit...
...And there is plenty of unmentionable sex...
...A MIRACLE, A UNIVERSE: SETTLING ACCOUNTS WITH TORTURERS Lawrence Weschler/Pantheon Books/292 pp...
...How could the generals have been so stupid as to leave all this evidence lying around...
...Here, Weschler limits himself to Brazil and Uruguay to show how torture was executed and expunged under two vastly different sets of circumstances...
...They then began to engage in terrorism on a large scale, and the government answered in kind: Uruguay soon had the highest rate of civilian incarceration of any country where such things were documented...
...The Uruguayan section of the book is twice as long as the one on Brazil, and descriptions of torture techniques are more elaborate...
...A pianist has his fingers chain sawed...
...One of his charms as a writer is that he sticks to a subject like a terrier to a trouser leg, even after he's got a book and several articles out of it...
...While not as accomplished as the Brazilians at physical depredations, the Uruguayan regime added sophisticated psychological ones...
...Wright and Arns established a bogus business-services company in a Brasilia office building and bought three copying machines...
...With the help of the Rev...
...When the government of Jorge Pacheco Areco refused to exchange several Tupa prisoners for the American, the Tupas shot Mitrione to death...
...Brazil's descent into the maelstrom began in April 1964, when a military coup overthrew the government of Joao Goulart...
...Goulart, with his zeal for wage reform and nationalization of industries, endangered Brazil's credit line, and had to go...
...But in 1970, just as the military was reaching peak size and influence, they made a big mistake by kidnapping U.S...
...They do, however, have a tendency toward excessive zeal: one prominent torturer, a navy lieutenant commander from a long line of officers, was christened with the rather unBrazilian name of Hitler de Oliveira Mota...
...AID official Dan Mitrione, whom they accused of teaching torture methods to officers...
...invented cumbia, cockfighting, and caudillismo...
...I n Uruguay, by contrast, the torture state was built on economic collapse, which Weschler traces to "import substitution industrialization" (ISI), a policy that successive postwar Uruguayan governments followed assiduously...
...If Weschler believes in such a club, there's scant doubt who he thinks its founding member was...
...In the late seventies, the military governments of generals Ernesto Geisel and Joao Baptista Figueiredo, for the first time finding their credit linked to their human rights record, tried to liberalize the regime gradually, beginning with a distensao (relaxation) and culminating in an abertura (opening) under the Figueiredo government...
...implies a Latin American inability to form homegrown institutions and policies, and borders on condescension...
...Weschler does not argue that amnesties are necessarily bad, but he has a keen sense of how forgiveness can degenerate into forgetfulness, making future thug states more viable...
...Brazilians can be proud of some of their military "achievements": they are still the world's fourth-largest arms exporter...
...All this took place during the foreign-lending orgy and concomitant economic boom known as the "Brazilian miracle...
...he finds him tied up in a hood...
...This was in the period when Brazil was raking in money handover-fist both through foreign loans and consequent industrialization, which left the country with some of the world's highest skyscrapers and some of the world's highest external debts...
...Philip Potter, a gigantic West Indian who risked his job as head of the World Council of Churches to provide $350,000 in clandestine aid, Wright and Arns created a scam worthy of a Len Deighton thriller...
...he continues to write on Poland and on the perpetual freak-show that is the international art world...
...Prices soared, purchasing power plummeted, and Uruguay found itself saddled with a program about as "temporary" as affirmative action...
...His art essays are not so much about art criticism as about some of the weirdos who inhabit the international art world, like the American painter who paints nothing but pound notes, and then spends them...
...22.95 Christopher Caldwell THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1990 39...
...F or Weschler, the key issue in dis- r mantling a torture state is the amnesty that the torturers are generally in a position to demand for themselves...
...Democracy is only a precondition...
...Unions radicalized...
...And South America's most prosperous nation, the "Great Democratic Exception," found itself the newest of Third World countries...
...Wright (whose brother was "disappeared" in 1973 for leading Christian student activists in political protests...
...Like the Nazis," one Brazilian tells Weschler, "they imagined that they were laying the groundwork for a civilization that would last a thousand years —that, far from having to justify themselves for occasional lapses, they would be celebrated by all posterity for the breadth of their achievement...
...The new ultra-left government of Luis Lacalle in Uruguay and the center-right Collor de Mello government in Brazil, both democratically elected, have failed to resuscitate their ravaged economies...
...But the military weren't taking any chances: lawyers were hired to defend the embroiled officers, and allowed overnight access to the government's torture files...
...Throughout the sixties and seventies, the Brazilian military would take any measure—including torture—to protect the country's prosperity...
...few people run marathons the day after quitting smoking...
...One wishes they weren't...
...The Passion of Poland is less about the Solidarity movement than about the atavism and romantic insanity that led a small workers' movement to triumph over the most heavily armed empire in the history of the world...
...Weschler's account of the period centers on the Brasil Nunca Mais (Never Again) project, the brainchild of Sao Paulo's Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns and Brazilian missionary Jaime Christopher Caldwell is a writer living in Washington, D.C...
...Weschler is at home with people whom one might reasonably ask, "Why in God's name are you doing this...
...With the help of sympathetic lawyers, they set to work copying and cross-referencing every case of torture on government record...
...The idea was so stupid that the army had to be called in to enforce it...
...As such, torturers—and those who stand up to them with nothing but their convictions—have found their chronicler...
...Weschler admires the Tupamaro guerrillas, left-wing university students who about this time organized around charismatic law-school dropout Raul Sendic, and it's hard not to share his enthusiasm for these "antic insurrectionists," this "marriage of Chaplin ) and Che...
...High tariffs created ridiculous profit windows for industrialists, who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo...
...Basically, ISI is a temporary ("until our infrastructure is developed") protectionism backed up by Third World rhetoric...
...Some prisoners claim to have been tortured by men with Argentine accents during that country'sguerra sucia, or "dirty war," making it plausible that there was something resembling an international torture club operating in the southern cone over the past two decades...
...according to his reading, Washington inflicted its phobia of Communist infiltration on various Latin American governments in the decades following the Second World War, leading to internal repression and the tortures of the sixties, seventies, and eighties...
...Because of the risk of leaks, many of the lower-level staff were not even told what they were working on, and most didn't figure it out until Bras& Nunca Mais was whittled down from a million pages of documents and published in book form...
...Had he waited a bit longer, Weschler could have examined torture in Panama or Chile, but it's hard to find fault with his choice of countries...
...One almost expects Weschler to add that the U.S...
...The "doctrine of national security" is a hobbyhorse that Weschler rides at a gallop...
...This is where it gets interesting...
...Another survives on a diet of urine...
...Another prisoner lives at the bottom of a well for weeks...
...He's a liberal of a recognizable stripe, with little good to say about American policy in Latin America and few North American heroes, save Jimmy Carter and the late Penny Lernoux...
...A four-year-old is forced to walk around a torture complex alone in search of his father...
...In neither country has anyone been punished for torture, which is precisely Weschler's point: torture is not a policy but a symptom of societal sickness, and it can take societies as long to recover from these guerras sucias as it can the individual victims...
...Students went crazy...
...Under the terms of an edict handed down during Figueiredo's abertura, an amnesty would be offered to both "political criminals" and human rights violators...
...Even if there was such a doctrine (and a policy is not a "doctrine"), to blame the U.S...
...One hopes to read more from him on the subject of torture, particularly if he's able to treat the collapse of left-wing torture states like Rumania and—who knows when?—Cuba with the same acuity and outrage he brings to these two right-wing baddies...
Vol. 23 • July 1990 • No. 7
