Psychological Warfare

What struck me in “Bitter Fruit” was how greatly psychological warfare contributed to the triumph of Operation Success. It started out with the United States Information Agency writing articles and pamphlets on the CIA version of the Guatemalan political situation and distributing them by the thousands throughout Latin America. The CIA then took this “disinformation” campaign even further with a radio station that broadcast propaganda for the Castillo Armas Liberation movement and news bulletins that fabricated, edited, and inflated the truth. Rumours were circulated and gained legitimacy in the international press largely because it was barred from reporting anything else.

The main objective of the radio station was to create the impression that the country was in a state of turmoil. As Schlesinger and Kinzer recount, “Fabricated reports of large troop movements, fearsome battles, major Guatemalan defeats and growing rebel strength frightened an already confused and disheartened populace”(185). Rumours flew in both Guatemala and the United States about the burgeoning army of Castillo Armas, said to be composed of thousands, when in reality he “never had more than 400 men under his command”(185).

What effect did this have on Operation Success? The lie about massive groups of heavily armed rebels advancing through the countryside thoroughly demoralized the Arbenz forces – even the President suspected that this lie was true, having no trustworthy source of information. American attacks were threatening to choke the nation off from foreign markets, the military could not be relied on, the majority of the population, their lives disrupted by fear and uncertainty, felt that it was time for him to go – Arbenz came to realize that the forces against him were unrelenting so he decided to relinquish the presidency. The effect of pervasive psychological warfare in undermining the Arbenz government to the point of its collapse cannot be underestimated.

When Guatemala celebrated the new junta coming into power, hundreds of firecrackers distributed by the CIA festively exploded into the night. Those guys think of everything.

tag: last301

Borrar

Central to the chapter “A Lexicon of Terror” is the insidious use of language during the Dirty War to erase the individual. Feitowitz explores this on a scale that begins at rhetoric directed to the entire nation and ends at psychologically intrusive language which undermined torture victims.

Below is how I observed her narrowing the scope of the chapter from the erasure of the individual within the nation to the erasure of the self within the body.

1) Defining the nation without individuals
As Feitowitz says, references to “el ser nacional” were repeatedly made throughout the regime. This expression implies the dissolving of discrete citizens with personal agendas into a body with an indivisible essence and single purpose. The Process terminated all platforms of independent political activity and the need for “subordination” to authority was constantly reinforced. In the metaphor of nation as body, the junta was the grey matter, and the citizens undifferentiated body cells, except for the tumors of resistance which necessitated quick and efficient destruction. Any person who did not agree with the junta was committing an act of self-mutilation on the collective body – was morally and spiritually sick – insane. Independent thought could be construed as a private war against Argentina.

2) Controlling the identity of the disappeared
Erasure of individuals also occurred when the disappeared were unidentified, slandered, or completely denied existence in public address and the media. As Feitowitz says, the names of “subversives” were almost never given in newspapers. They were commonly portrayed as demons and criminals – it was even suggested that they were selfish sons and daughters who had run off to pursue their own interests at the expense of their families. The official attitude of the junta, especially when confronted with the questions of foreign governments and journalists, was to completely deny the existence of political prisoners.

3) Manipulating public awareness and familial trust
Pervasive doublespeak confused public knowledge about what was happening on a national as well as interpersonal level. “They had so may ways,” as José Bendersky said, “of erasing people, of trying to make you doubt the truth of your own life.” As Feitowitz describes, all mediums of spoken and written word were employed in fabricating a entirely false version of reality, assaulting Argentine eyes and ears on a daily basis. The media planted seeds of doubt and suspicion amongst family members – and tried to shake mothers’ confidence in their ability to raise children.

4) Physical and psychological annihilation of victims
The term “desaparecido” not only negates that individual (we don’t know their location, living or dead, if leaving was their own choice) but also the person who was responsible for this (as if that individual was not kidnapped or killed but vanished through some fault of their own). The physical bodies of victims were nothing but refuse – dumped at sea, burned, and piled into mass graves marked with “no name” – and the torturers tirelessly attempted to erase their sense of self – with hoods for sensory isolation, replacement of names with numbers, and extreme physical pain. Repeated constantly were the words “You don’t exist.”

tag: last301

Gap Between Death and Discourse

An entirely uninteresting conversation:

I raised the topic of Pinochet’s recent house arrest with my boyfriend on Monday evening. Courtesy of the BBC, I told him that although Pinochet has legal immunity, he can be tried on a case-by-case basis. The crimes that warrant his arrest are 36 kidnappings, one murder, and 23 cases of torture. It’s frustrating, I began, that a man known for his policy of brutal repression, responsible for the murder and disappearance of more than 3000 people, can only be found guilty after an infinitely extended process, one at a time. He scoffed at this, well what do you want, that Pinochet be charged on one big account of injustice in general?

And its relevance to the course:

The exacting nature of law and its lengthy processes wasn’t my point. It was about the gap between abuse and death and the discourse that puts it in a rational context. I was thinking about the pain of those who suffer without recompense, waiting for papers to go through and details to be established. When a perpetrator stands in court, the evidence of culpability debated at length, they must think, what stands in the way of his prosecution when what we endured was so clearly under his jurisdiction? Society would go to hell without formalities and procedure, true, but cases like these are still frustrating.

How do you translate the messy human aspects of crime into the agents of legal concepts? It feels obscene and ridiculous to read a detailed account of torture and say yes, the human rights of this person are being abused, to speak in this way about something that negates language. But you need a framework. I guess that’s the point of this course – to study human rights discourse, then witness its abuse in various documents and sometimes visceral accounts, and try to reconcile the two. Pinochet will be going in and out of courts until he deteriorates.

Source:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6100066.stm

tag: last301

Infestation

I’m being dragged under a landslide of work and these blogs just aren’t getting done. A reflection on “The Madwomen at the Plaza de Mayo” – old I know – I hope to get caught up by the end of the week.

A large crowd of grieving mothers was a frighteningly visible statement, from the point of view of the junta, that Argentina was deeply troubled in its domestic spaces, not just in isolated pockets of “subversive” activity. Various examples can be found in the article of how the junta attempted to negate this threat by sweeping the mothers into their metaphor of the nation as a sick body.

The mothers were called “las locas” by the military officials – they were supposedly driven mad by their errant children – in an attempt to deny their legitimacy. Not only were they portrayed as agents of mental illness in society, but were handled by the police in a manner that suggested that they were contagious. A fence was erected around their protest at the Plaza as if to shield the bustle of healthy, normal human traffic that might accidentally brush by or intermingle with their grief and dissent.

They were told that the government was planning to “cleanse the country very thoroughly of disturbing elements before the first tourist sets foot in Argentina” for the World Cup. Words such as “cleanse” made these women out to be grime on the face of an Argentina emerging out of sickness and wanting to make itself presentable to the world again. The authors liken themselves and other mothers to “the horrible worm that has wriggled out of a shining Argentina” – they were aware that as their movement became visible to the public eye so did the rotten foundations of the new Argentina of President Videla.

With the mothers being grouped with other social actors accused of infesting and sickening the body of the nation, it is ironic that their only supporters, at the time the article was written, were doctors.

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