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Abstract
This essay addresses the central role human rights literature has played in Latin American literary and political culture. My particular focus is on Mario Benedetti's 1979 play Pedro y el Capitán. Latin American literary criticism has usually considered Benedetti's play a foundational text of the human rights discourse, but this essay argues that this ‘humanitarian’ reading comes at the expense of the ideological project that is at the play's center. To this end, this essay will first consider the work of several leading critics who make the question of torture paramount to Benedetti's play while pushing aside the text's commitment to the primacy of the conflict between competing ideologies: namely, the conflict between socialism and liberalism. Second, it will take up the ways in which the emergence of human rights discourse in Uruguay and the various forms of literary criticism associated with this discourse have themselves been part of the conceptual framework through which the Left has become increasingly disarticulated from the commitment to economic equality.
Notes
1 Badiou Citation2000: 3. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Spanish to English are mine.
2 Marx, The Communist Manifesto.
3 For an introduction to the ‘torture debate,’ especially in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, see Sanford Levinson Torture (2004) and Thomas Hilde's On Torture (2008). The PLMA issue on ‘Human Rights in Latin America’ (2006, 121: 5) and the recent special issues Human Rights and Latin American Cultural Studies take up the issue from the position of Latin American scholars.
4 Following the 1973 coup, Benedetti fled into exile and soon after began writing the novel El Cepo, which would eventually become the play Pedro y el Capitán. Published and staged in Mexico in 1979 by El Galpón, a famous theater group from Uruguay also in exile, the play would go on to garner critical acclaim and enjoy a very successful run. The Galpón would also stage the play in Uruguay immediately following the return to democracy in 1985.
5 In the chapter ‘From Plato to Pinochet’ in his book The Letter of Violence, Avelar's claim centers on an analysis of Roman Polanski's adaptation of Ariel Dorfman's play Death and the Maiden. Although his criticism of Benedetti's play is limited to a scant footnote, he maintains that both texts share the same ‘naïve’ representation of torture: ‘For a depiction of torture less odious but just as naïve as Dorfman's, see Mario Benedetti's play Pedro y el Capitán’ (2004: 164 n.6). For an interesting reading of Dorfman's play and insightful response to Avelar's criticism, see CitationRandall Williams's chapter on Death and the Maiden in his book The Divided World (2010). For Avelar, who addresses the film adaptation of Death and the Maiden and it's ‘pseudo-feminism,’ Paulina's hysteria is excessive and ends up reinscribing the figure of the hysteric mad woman, rather than validating the experience of the tortured woman. Williams, who is concerned with the ways in which the lens of human rights limits of our understanding of violence in the period of Transition, sees Paulina's excessive hysteria instead as a ‘sign of the persistent specter’ of a violence that goes beyond the ‘demands of transition, reconciliation, and consensus’ (80). For Williams, the figure of the hysteric, in other words, reveals not the ‘modern epistemic structure’ of torture and sexism of ‘Western Civilization’ as Avelar would have it, but the historical limits of a certain form of transitional justice in Chile. Nevertheless, while Williams's reading addresses the limits of human rights, my claims about Benedetti's text center on why human rights criticism converts a text that is primarily uninterested in the act of torture into an exemplary text of why torture is ‘useless.’
6 It is true that Avelar localizes torture within a larger ‘modern epistemic structure,’ which reveals, among other things, that ‘civilization,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘truth’ are not the ‘opposite of torture,’ but rather that torture is already constitutive of these forms. While Avelar's contribution to a ‘genealogy’ of torture and its relationship to Western Civilization is appreciated, my concern is that this ‘modern epistemic structure’ can neither account for – nor does it desire to engage with – the question of liberal democracy beyond these ‘modern’ limits. Despite his wish to address ‘shifts’ in the discourse of torture, including the question of torture in the Southern Cone, Avelar's critique can only situate this discourse within a monolithic trajectory of Western liberal democracy and its barbarism (i.e. torture, dictatorships, human rights abuses, sexism, etc.). Following Avelar's logic, then, Benedetti's text and Pedro's confessional ‘truth,’ at its most radical, is only further evidence of the Janus-like quality of liberal democracy that constantly ‘lies to us’ (41) about this barbaric essence. In other words, and to return to Williams's point in the footnote above, Avelar cannot imagine a form of social equality that goes beyond the very limits of liberal democracy and torture. For a more sustained engagement with human rights and torture see Avelar's essay ‘Unpacking the “Human” in “Human Rights”’ (Avelar Citation2009).
7 Clara Aldrighi states that ‘The Civil war in Uruguay took the form of a bellicose conflict between the State and the guerrillas, within the same political community, nation […]’ (Aldrighi Citation2001: 143). In the postdictatorship, some individuals and groups – in particular, the Tupamaros – reject the claim that is was in fact a ‘civil war.’ But a quick glance at historical documents in this period proves that both the Tupamaros and Uruguayan state defined the conflict in these terms.
8 In his excellent chapter on the Tupamaros and the ‘aestheticization’ of their armed ‘operations’ (51), CitationLuis Camnitzer rightly notes that the Tupamaros were different from other urban guerilla movements since they developed strategies of ‘armed propaganda’ that ‘avoided alienating the public but would also make instantly them attractive and persuasive in the eyes of the people’ (46). Nevertheless, it is important also to note that class warfare was always central to their campaign and that this more ‘theatrical’ element was less present in their later attacks. Furthermore, it is necessary to stress what made them different from the traditional leftist political parties. Wilson Ferreira Aldunate famously synthesized the distinction between the legal left and the Tupamaros as the difference between ‘Los tupamaros y los tapamuros’ (Campodónico Citation2000: 179). Los Tapamuros – a play on the name of the revolutionary group – literally means ‘wall coverers,’ referring to the Communist Party's inclination to cover the city walls with propaganda and little else. This tendency, as Miguel Ángel Campodónico correctly declares, was completely contrary to the Tupamaros's idea of political action.
9 Markarian's Citation2005 The Left in Transformation provides an excellent analysis on the transition in Uruguay from revolution to human rights.
10 Indeed, in the 1970s Human Rights networks ‘focused [their] efforts on a range of rights narrower than that included in the human rights documents of the UN – especially on the so-called rights of the person, including the freedom from execution, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment’ (Sikkink Citation1996: 63).
11 For discussion about the centrality of the body in order to create ‘humanitarian narratives’ in eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, see Lynn Hunt's Inventing Human Rights (2005) and Thomas Laqueur's 1989 essay ‘Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.’
12 I have written about a politics of the body and human rights elsewhere. See my chapter, ‘Remembering Pain in Uruguay: What Memories Mean in Carlos Liscano's Truck of Fools’ in Human Rights, Suffering and Aesthetics in Political Prison Literature. Lenham, MD: Lexington Press, 2011.
13 This quote is taken from Ivan Morris's – chairman of Amnesty International USA – 1976 ‘Letter to the Editor’ in The New York Review of Books. Morris urges readers to write ‘letters or postcards’ to the Uruguayan President Bordaberry ‘to end torture,’ while stressing that AI is ‘impartial, non-political, humanitarian organization’ (Letter NYRB). Amnesty International, in other words, understood itself as nonpartisan and Morris's ‘non-political’ message makes it clear that their mission was not partial to the concerns of one political group or movement. Morris explains, ‘Political prisoners in Uruguay represent all political parties’ and it was AI's mission to defend the rights of not only ‘Communist,’ but also the ‘right-of-centre Blanco (White Party, and include workers, students, doctors, former parliamentarians, lawyers, teachers, and trade unionists’ (Letter NYRB). Morris's point here, of course, is to highlight that the organization not only considered itself as nonpartisan, but also that political prisoners' beliefs were inconsequential to the organization's defense of his or her rights; that is, political prisoners merited equal human treatment regardless of the political beliefs that they held (i.e. humanitarian). In recent years, AI's ‘humanitarian’ mission has come under attack by some critics who argue that AI holds a bias, since the organization investigates governments and not ‘terrorist acts.’ In response to these concerns, in 1991 AI extended its definition of a ‘non-political, impartial, humanitarian organization’ by approving a mandate that permits the organization to ‘condemn human rights violations perpetrated by insurgents as well as by governments in the context of armed conflict’ (Sikkink Citation1996: 71). In similar fashion, in June of 2008 El Centro de Estudios de Derechos Humanos [The Center of Human Rights' Studies] brought charges against the leaders of the MLN-Tupamaros for the ‘execution and disappearance’ of the ex-Tupamaro Daniel Arocha in 1971. The president of the Center, Hugo Ferrari, stated in a June 25, 2008 interview that ‘One only hears about State terrorism and not about Tupamaro terrorism that began in 1963, much earlier than when the de facto government was installed’
(El País, http://www.elpais.com.uy/08/06/25/pnacio_354078.asp). My point here is neither to suggest that the Tupamaros were a terrorist group nor to claim that the Right has hijacked human rights, but rather to question what this commitment to human rights entails for both Benedetti's text and the Left more generally in post-dictatorship Uruguay.
14 It may be true that the text marks an important transition from Benedetti's revolutionary commitment to a humanitarian one, a commitment that certainly becomes apparent in his 1982 novel Primavera con una esquina rota. CitationStephen Gregory's book Intellectuals and Left Politics in Uruguay, 1958–2006 presents not only an insightful analysis of Benedetti's trajectory as an intellectual in Uruguay since the 1970s, but also a genealogy of the figure of the Uruguayan intellectual more broadly since the late 50s.
15 We also find in Benedetti's text a stress to define these two men as ‘human beings.’ Benedetti wants to emphasize that the two men are, in fact, equal. This is not to negate that there is a difference of power between the two men, but rather to demonstrate that in order to be committed to the power of persuasion, one must be committed to imagining a level (cognitive) playing field. If the field is not level, the power of persuasion is rendered useless, since the argument is nothing more than a farce of power. In other words, one must be convinced that the argument cannot only be understood, but that it is sound enough to convince other humans. Of course, in the case of Pedro y el Capitán this point is essential since the play has everything to do with convincing the other that his ideology is wrong. In his essay on Pedro y el Capitán, Stephen Gregory arrives at a different conclusion. For Gregory, the power of persuasion has nothing to do with political ideology, but rather with Benedetti's deep investment in a ‘humanist faith,’ ‘the play justifies this confidence in the powers of persuasion to such a degree that it is precisely the speaker of this statement who suffers the full impact of its implications. To reveal and discover, to comprehend, to convince and therefore to change – it is Benedetti's humanist faith in miraculous power of words which Pedro y el Capitán articulates’ (Gregory 1991: 24). Gregory's point is to show that the difference between Pedro and the Captain is not ideological; instead, he understands that what divides them is the difference between an ‘analyst’ and an ‘analysand,’ where it is Pedro's job to ‘help’ the Capitán become a ‘human subject.’ My reading of the play, of course, is diametrically opposed to Gregory's reading; however, it is certainly true that there is a psychological component to the play, but my point is that one's commitment to revealing, comprehending and convincing another human does not negate your ideological argument, but rather functions as the starting point for an (ideological) argument in Benedetti's text.
16 ‘Whereas previously the movement had focused on documenting and denouncing abuses by military governments, it now called on emerging democratic regimes to hold accountable the perpetrators of past human rights abuses’ (Sikkink Citation1996: 66).
17 For an interesting analysis of the Tupamaros in this period see CitationAdolfo Garcé's Donde hubo fuego (2006).
19 This has centered primarily on the radical figure of the ex-Tupamaro Jorge Zabalza and most recently in his 2007 book Cero a la izquierda: una biografía de Jorge Zabalza. In Argentina this conversation began in the mid 1990s with the David Blaustein's Cazadores de utopias, Miguel Bonasso's El presidente que no fue and Eduardo Anguita and Martín Caparrós's La voluntad and extends to the present day with debates surrounding the publication of Hector Jouvé's testimonio in Intemperie. I welcome these debates as a break with conventional human rights discourse, nevertheless I wonder if they serve more as a platform to discuss issues such as ethics of political violence, heroism and ‘immolation for the common cause’ or the guerillero arrepentido than as a proper critique of class politics. For example, as María Sondéguer points out, the very title of Beatriz Sarlo's 1996 article ‘Cuando la política era joven’ seems to suggest that Sarlo reduces guerrilla action and violence to nothing more than an error of youth. We can see something similar in the emergence of an overvalued and highly romanticized vision of violence and armed struggle that defines itself in opposition to what has been described as Sarlo's ‘posture of disillusion’ (Beverley Citation2009: 48). I believe that CitationPilar Calveiro is exactly right when she argues that ‘The recovery of militant politics for “imitation,” the exaltation of “heroic” lives that are not subject to a critique accomplishes subtraction: it impedes analysis, the valuation of what is right and wrong, and with them, the possibility of revising practice and, by extension, acting. In sum, it's another form of political subtraction’ (13). For a more recent example of this tendency to romanticize political violence and armed struggle, see Olivier Assayas's Carlos (2010). For a more in depth conversation on the Intemperie debate, see the collections of essays in No matar: sobre la responsibilidad. A selection of these was published in English by the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (2007, 16:2).
20 In an interview regarding the motivation for publishing his biography, Zabalza states that: ‘What is most important to me in this moment is to think ahead, toward the future. To say: we who survived these conditions, who survived the genocide in Latin America […] what do we think about the future. Do we still need to change the base of society, to achieve a society without exploitation, without the oppressed? Do we still think about this? I do, so I would like to have a debate considering these terms […]’ (Cotelo Citation2007).
21 The quote is taken from the Aron's ‘Book Announcement’ of a new translation of Pedro y el Capitán, but this logic can be found throughout her introduction to the new English translation of the text. Indeed, in the introduction she frames the text within a global context of torture where the ‘The globalization of torture makes time and place irrelevant’ (iii).