A Miracle, A Universe

...Most of the Brazilian and Uruguayan victims of state-sponsored torture in A Miracle, A Universe ("If you destroy one soul, you destroy a universe" is the paraphrase of a Talmudic commentary) were sent to their ordeal simply for trying to breathe in a political vacuum...

...Here, as in the section on Brazil, Weschler pointedly traces the way in which this political war on society was preceded by an economic war of sorts on the communal fabric of society...

...Yet the therapeutic value, in both individual and social terms, of the dramatic attempt to overturn it was inestimable...

...one will ever know...

...From 1964 to 1979, following a coup that put the generals in charge until democratically held elections in 1985, thousands of people were imprisoned in the military's campaign against increasing calls for land, labor, and educational reforms...

...In Brazil and Uruguay, as in Argentina and Chile, the military quietly made an unconditional amnesty for its crimes either the principal condition for the transition to civilian rule or, after allowing power to change hands, the sine qua non for democracy's continuation...

...The government's justification for all this was that it w as trying to ferret out the Tupamaros, a si nail Marxist faction that had begun by staging clownish acts of protest and had gradually descended into an inexorable cycle of violence...

...Lawrence Weschler A Miracle, A Universe try, once known as the "paradise of fat cows," had been several times more ferocious...

...This happened, Weschler reports, in about 25 percent of the cases that made it to trial, and in each instance the court fastidiously summarized the proceedings, incorporating the prisoner's often graphic description of his or her torture, and shipped the entire record of the case, transcripts and all, off to the archives of the Supreme Military Court in Brasilia...

...Eventually, the fragile new government in all four countries acceded to the generals' demands...

...People were also being suspended from the ceiling and beaten, shocked with electrodes, submerged in water until nearly drowned, and driven mad by more subtle psychological techniques in the central jail, perversely named Libertad...

...After a time, some prisoners were brought to trial before a kangaroo military tribunal, where occasionally they or their lawyers bravely denounced the confession on the ground of coercion...

...For them, justice means the official acknowledgment of the source of their private pain...

...The struggle for justice in Uruguay was more politically ambitious, perhaps because the repression in that small coun"This was one of the most notorious torture, centers," my guide said, turning my attention to a gorgeous villa of brick, stone, and grillework...

...Yet, as he ruefully notes, it may never happen...

...During the last five years of military rule, Arns and Wright and their team secretly photocopied the whole archive-more than a million pages-and then copied it onto microfilm...

...What happened after the military's abdication in 1985 leaves no doubt that, for better and for worse, history is without end...

...In the end, 53 percent of those who voted chose to uphold the law...

...In Brazil, the collective agony lasted a long time before the regime's loosening grip aroused a remarkable will to truth...

...A pair of trusted journalists compressed the massive material into a book-sized manuscript, which was then conveyed to Vozes, the largest Catholic publishing house in Brazil...

...and one out of every five hundred had been jailed on political charges...

...They were willing to put that future in jeopardy to be certain that a genuinely A MIRACLE, A UNIVERSE Settling Accounts with Torturers Lawrence Weschler Pantheon, $22.95, 293 pp...

...A Miracle, A Universe is a moving and profound account of those efforts, as well as a deeply disturbing picture of the government-sanctioned depravity that brought such a yearning for justice into the world...

...The victims of that power in Brazil and Uruguay-or currently under malevolent governments, left and right, throughout the world-had their bodies broken into, their identities stolen and hidden from them behind the omnipresent gaze of the regime...

...The victims were, of course, hooded, so they couldn't enjoy the view...

...The car in the driveway bore military plates...

...Once powerless, they want the "power to forgive," and that could indeed pose a danger to them and to their societies, for it also implies the power to punish, and creates the possibility of another hell...

...Apparently, the Brazilian dictatorship thought it had had the last word by preserving the irretrievability of its victims' lives as a permanent artifact in that locked room...

...the healing of their shattered lives-insofar as it is possible-is bound up with their need to call the torturers to account and publicly tell the truth about the not-so-distant past...

...Finally, on July 15,1985, the "miracle" occurred: Brasil: Nunca Mais, listing torturers' names, the types of torture, and the places where it was done, appeared and went on to become the biggest nonfiction bestseller in the country's history...

...But in 1979 Cardinal Paulo Evaristo Arns, the archbishop of Sao Paulo, and Jaimie Wright, a Presbyterian minister, resolved to have the regime's own words bear witness against it...

...one out of every fifty Uruguayans who stayed had at some time been detained and interrogated...

...the enemy is within-were tortured in the early days of their detention into making false confessions...

...Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer for the New Yorker (where much of this book first appeared) and the author of award-winning reportage on Solidarity and martial law in Poland, also believes in the redemptive importance of such a reckoning...

...Mostly former torture victims themselves, they regarded the terror of the past and the for-getfulness about it that was being enforced in the present as a single iron epoch's sound and echo, beyond which the future lay muffled...

...Thus even after the amnesty laws were passed, an attempt was made in Brazil to reveal the historical truth unofficially, and in Uruguay to confront the security forces face to face...

...What they still seek is to violate the torture chambers, drag out the secret crimes, and in so doing recover the force of their individual wills...

...An English translation, titled Torture in Brazil, was brought out in the U.S...

...By the end of the twelve-year-long military revolution, between 300,000 and 400,000 people out of a population of just under 3 million had fled the country...

...Tt is a sadly undeniable fact that in the case of Uruguay, like Chile, the abstract economic experiments of "Chicago boys" like Milton Friedman, together with American economic interests, helped inspire the generals to impose a domestic policy that was creating great wealth for a relative few Uruguayans, but throwing the majority of the people into poverty-or, as Eduardo Galeano, the prominent Uruguayan writer acidly quips to the author, "In Uruguay people were in prison so that prices could be free...

...Indeed, many I ruguayans still blame the guerrillas for I he country's nightmare, yet Weschler argues that at the time of the coup in 1973, llie Tupas had been almost completely destroyed, and had constituted less a threat lo Uruguay's stability than a convenient political opportunity...

...But the torturers could, and I imagine they took many delicious breaks, lounging up there, sunning themselves on the balcony...

...A petition was signed and a referendum eventually held in April 1989, while along the way the military did everything it could to prevent first one and then the other from materializing...

...Now the villa has been decommissioned, and bought by a private party...

...by Random House in 1986...

...But not everyone accepted the compromise...

...Nevertheless, taking such a risk, as Weschler eloquently concludes, seems to be the only answer to torturers whose single article of faith is their assurance to the victim that "No one will ever know...

...As Weschler skillfully tells the story, their risky and elaborate ruse involved about thirty people, including lawyers who checked out files from the archives for the twenty-four-hour limit on the pretext of working on a case...

...Many such victims of the "doctrine of national security"-i.e...

...Lee Siegel humane one existed, and to make sure that the democratic institutions in the process of revival were rooted in honesty, not illusion and deceit...

...In February 1987 a fairly broad-based coalition of citizens' groups courageously started a campaign to repeal the general amnesty law, which the civilian government had extended the previous December to include the security forces...

...While the politicians hoped for a new beginning, the advocates of a full accounting were less optimistic...

...A power that had once made society tremble had been loudly and, most important of all, unforgettably defied...

...The regime became so swept by lunacy that, at one point, it forbade a concert pianist to perform Ravel's "Piano Concerto for the Left Hand...