In an interview on Torture

Something that, sadly, wasn’t true for the military involved in your next choice, The Little School by Alicia Partnoy. This book must really resonate with you because she is a fellow Argentinean who was also tortured during the so-called Dirty War.

Yes, that is right. She is a friend of mine also and we have shared a lot of time in exile here in the United States. Now she teaches English and literature out on the West Coast. I am very gratified to know that only recently she presented this book in Buenos Aires. And I thought it was particularly important to point it out, because it is a book about how torture is perceived by women and how women retain their personal dignity even under the most demeaning and distressing situations like Alicia suffered.

What kinds of things happened to her?

In Argentina people were tortured very savagely, and particularly if you were in the circle of disappearances. The Little School was the name given to a secret detention centre where she was held near the city of Bahia Blanca and, like in so many other of these places, it was used by the military as a clandestine detention and torture centre. In those years these places were shielded from any monitoring by courts or anyone else. That allowed the torturers to have no limits whatsoever on what they could do to their prisoners. Many of the prisoners were women and in almost all cases part of their torture was sexual in nature.

And that type of torture is still used in many countries around the world?

Yes, it is. Once a torturer feels free to exercise control over somebody else for the purposes of interrogation or any other purpose then they actually persuade themselves that the victim has no reason to be treated with any kind of dignity. And because the purpose of torture is to destroy personality, sexual abuse of men and of women is almost always part of the experience of torture.