tortured justice...

in my "generation and communication of knowledge" class on monday, we started talking about - or around - torture.  last week, brasil's supreme court issued a new ruling on 1979's general amnesty law, which allowed political exiles back in the country at the same time as it protected everyone in the hierarchy of official state torture.  according to the supreme court, the torturers are still untouchable.  this included everyone from the guys doing the actual shocking, beating, cutting, and killing to the higher-ups who invented new forms of keeping people in intense pain.  maybe most of all, it covers the ones who gave the orders, and who determined that torture would be an official state policy.  the ruling's not much of a surprise.  based on a lot of what's happened since the official end of the dictatorship in 1985, the laws enacted during the dictatorship are still valid, even though they were created by a political class that was ruling illegally.

the ruling made some headlines the day after it came out, but it doesn't seem to have attracted too much attention or protest.  this is what we were trying to decode in class.  inevitably, someone brought up argentina, where the memory of the dictatorship is a lot more vivid, and where citizens and (to a lesser extent) the state have done a lot more to keep it visible.

las madres de la plaza de mayo - a protest group made up of the mothers of disappeared children - in june, 2007.

                                       painted design on the sidewalk of the plaza de mayo.



it's a fascinating and necessary comparison, though in a lot of settings in brasil, it's colored by a persistent inferiority complex that sees argentina as more sophisticated, cultured, intellectual, and "advanced" (in other words, more white and "european").  and the student who brought up argentina bought into that stereotype completely, positing that argentina is a more developed (re: better) country, and that brasil still wasn't advanced or sophisticated or first world enough to confront its past.

(no mention, of course, of argentina's genocide of its black population in the 19th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afro_Argentine

but i digress).

so of course, i had to go ahead and point out that i come from an "advanced," "sophisticated," "first world" country that for at least the past 8 years has maintained torture as an official state policy.  no one here had heard of the fahad hashmi case, which the us media seems to finally have noticed now that it's too late.  i don't know much about the specifics of the case, though my friend brian pickett has been the main force behind keeping protests and vigils outside the manhattan correctional center for almost a year.  more info here, via nimm:

http://blogs.aljazeera.net/americas/2010/04/28/hashmi-symbol-0?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/27/syed-hashmi-american-stud_n_554211.html

it's hard to imagine anyone who, after 3 years in solitary confinement wouldn't plead guilty to trumped-up charges, especially if doing so meant avoiding a lifetime spent in similar conditions. it's one of the ways the brasilian dictatorship broke the resistance, using torture to break their opponents and get them to name names.  it's sad to see a present-day example of how well this strategy works, and sad to know that - across decades and continents - the torturers are still untouchable.