I

The tortured inhabit a world of pain that separates them from the normal experience of life. Torture victims are subject to such extreme conditions that it difficult for us to identify with this experience, let alone contemplate it. Contemplate torture? Many would regard this as morbid, even as schadenfreude. This charge is generally absurd. It is derived from insensitivity toward the victims or the guilt of non-involvement. What is more pertinent—and serious—are the millions of people who shut themselves off from the politically tortured, let alone from social prisoners.

Our era has seen many disappear into the extrajudicial maze of tyrannical political regimes. We occasionally read or hear about these disappearances, then go about our business, secure in our faith that we won't be like Kafka's Joseph K., arrested one fine morning or one dark night. Yet these terrifying abductions have happened frequently to those who believed just that.
    
Part of the terror of illegal arrest (often by the state's soldiers, paramilitary or police) is that one cannot identify one's place of captivity. Frequently captors are unidentifiable too. Who sent them? By what law or right do they impugn one's privacy like this? As the accused or condemned frequently cannot answer such questions, they become terrorized. Realizing that one is “detained” plunges us into psychological chaos. Few things are more frightening than being at the mercy of arbitrary, merciless and exceedingly immoral forces. The reason this plight is so terrible is obvious: anything can happen to you. What would our minds and bodies make of a situation of immeasurable moral cruelty in which our captors inform us that we are being imprisoned unconditionally, that we are swine or vermin, that the source of the screams emanating from the room next door are our parents, siblings, or children?
    
Even today, these horrors occur daily. It is important for us to consider their scope: approximately two-thirds of the world's governments practice illegal detention, incarceration and torture, and at least one—Israel—practices it "legally."

 II

Through military training schools such as the former (and renamed) School of the Americas, the United States has promoted state practice of torture amongst its military client states in the Third World. Father Roy Bourgeois, a former Marine and a militant opponent of the SOA who leads a demonstration against the school almost yearly, puts the blood bond between the United States and its Latin-American client states pithily when he states  that "this is where the killing starts."

According to Frederick H. Gareau, the SOA "is the most famous of more than 150 facilities in the United States and abroad to train foreign soldiers. The school has trained upward of 59,000 Latin American military personnel, policemen and civilians. Ten of the graduates became the president/dictators off their countries, 23 became ministers of defense, and 15 ministers of other departments." For example, one SOA graduate, former Bolivian dictator, General Hugo Benzer Suarez, from 1971 to 1978 murdered 468 Bolivians, detained or imprisoned 4318 for their political actions, deported 663 and tortured at least 100, as well as arranged massacres, mainly of peasants and labor unionists.

The purpose of the American military’s instruction of torture has been to terrorize large, disadvantaged classes of people into accepting the political authority of governments tasked with protecting American economic and military interests. American opposition to Communist influence—and today “terrorists”—was so ferocious that any form of resistance to the Latin American class representing American interests was automatically stigmatized as Communist and deserving of savage treatment. Torture was thus regarded during the Cold War as the most efficient mode of social control in Latin American nations with a history of class oppression. The fact that many Latin Americans were not Communists was not a factor; the United States had a history of brutalizing Latin American countries to achieve economic control, so if torture administered by the Latin-American state was effective, it was acceptable.

III

What can be done about state torture? One could certainly join or support organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or the San Francisco-based Survivor's International (S. I. helps in the healing of torture victims and in restoring them to stable social-economic conditions). Or one could even go further, as Helen Bamber's Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture does, and try to put pressure on governments practicing state torture. This is obviously more of a comprehensive approach than dealing simply with the effects of torture, which is itself a formidable enterprise.

The more immediate need, however, is to create a “revolution in sensibility” that affects the average person’s perception regarding the frequency with which torture is employed. It is an almost intolerable thought that our own government has supported brutally repressive governments around the world, and thus has sizably contributed to the substantial misery as well as murder of millions of people in the past half-century.

 Americans concerned with global political torture should refuse to elect politicians that support oppressive regimes, or, better yet, run for office themselves. If a state takes refuge in secrecy to support an inhumane foreign policy, all possible pressure should be brought to bear on the government's leaders by NGOs, grass-roots groups, and activists.

State torture should arouse instinctual opposition, whether it is perpetrated by our own government or by a foreign regime. Torture transforms societies into vast madhouses of suspicion, fear, guilt and hatred. Yet combating torture is possible. Organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch provide one framework for ethical protest against the formidable terrorism of state torture. These organizations have done invaluable work in liberating victims of tyrannical states.  Obviously, Helen Bamber's Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, in urging that the state itself be confronted, and that the social and institutional sources of torture should be probed, attempts a far more ambitious critique of diabolic governments. The question remains, however, of how to actually confront the root causes of torture. Bamber claims that it is important “to place torture in a proper context. Otherwise, you are not actually honoring the people who have suffered; you are merely looking at a body that has been assaulted or mutilated....torture isn't only about sadistic impulses. It's about power, about privilege, about poverty, and the distribution of resources; it's about something which is most preventable....the legal instruments are there to prevent torture."
    
To deal with state torture, the average person needs to come alive to the reality of torture, and to the crucial realization that the state is a terrorist institution of major proportions. We need to realize that all state-sanctioned torture or terrorism is a political act, and that in any society that calls itself democratic or free, responsibility ultimately rests in the citizenry to do something about it.

Donald Gutierrez is Professor Emeritus of English from Western New Mexico University. He has published numerous books of literary criticism and scholarship.