Torturers with a Human Face

Torturers, the saying goes, are kind to their wives and children. For most of us who follow Latin America - who have heard the testimonies of men and women broken in secret prisons or hounded by death squads - the torturers are faceless, shadows of evil symbolized by military boots and mirrored sunglasses.

To understand the violence that saturates much of Latin America, we must look into the faces of the violators as well as the victims. In Children of Cain, journalist Tina Rosenberg drags her reader on an unsparing trip through the maze of violence in six Latin American countries, stopping at places that are - literally and figuratively - generally off-limits to progressive writers.

This book is exhaustively researched, and relevant history is woven into the description of each society. But Rosenberg's genius is in getting people to talk. Not only campesinos and priests, but also members of Salvador's oligarchy, Colombian sicarios(hired killers), disciples of Peru's Shining Path, and naval officers who tortured hundreds in Argentina's "dirty war" share with Rosenberg their version of the truth in Latin America. "I found many of them likable," Rosenberg reflects. "I would have preferred them to be monsters."

The likability of terrorists is one of many paradoxes she explores. Rosenberg, whose characters and description are as compelling as any novelist's, has a talent for highlighting tragicomic absurdities in societies that are breaking down. Teen-age hitmen for Medellin's drug lords pray to the Virgin of Carmen to guide their aim. Officers at an Argentine concentration camp take their favorite female inmates to dinner to discuss Marxist literature. Shining Path guerrillas, claiming to represent Peru's Indians, murder priests who organize campesinos and square dance to Maoist hymns at a fund-raiser.

Rosenberg asks one guerrilla how things are going; he replies, "Great. A million percent inflation, garbage piling up, no jobs...the forces of history are on our side!"

PROBING WHY violence thrives in Latin America, Rosenberg points first to the obvious answer: history. The conquistadors set up relationships of power rather than law, and the reign of the sword continues. She traces the roots of brutality not only to Spain's lust for gold but to the 300-year Spanish Inquisition. Many features of the Inquisition - paranoia, rhetoric about "a worldwide godless conspiracy of evil," and of course torture and murder - are echoed in state terrorism today.

The legacy of colonization crippled each country differently. In Peru and Colombia, the iron fist of the oligarchies weakened the state; today Peru's government is a bureaucratic joke and Colombia's courts are powerless. In Argentina, on the other hand, the state became too powerful. Rosenberg chillingly describes how the Argentine military became so well-trained in efficiency and counterinsurgency that it could not bear having no enemy to attack, and so launched a war against its own citizens.

The example of Chile, Rosenberg claims, shows that history is not all. Chile, with less natural wealth than other countries, was colonized less bloodily. The country had a 150-year tradition of democracy and respect for human rights before Pinochet's 1973 coup. Pinochet was able to rule 16 years through decree, disappearances, and torture because Chileans made a "Faustian bargain," trading their human and civil rights for material comfort and surface tranquility. As long as the economy was booming and no one in their family was imprisoned, Rosenberg explains, most Chileans looked the other way.

This theme of a Faustian bargain with violence crops up throughout the book. Rosenberg reveals the myths many Latin Americans - not just the rich ones - hold that allow them to live with murder. Upper-class Salvadorans firmly believe private enterprise is persecuted by the Left in their country. Medellin reveres its drug lords as Robin Hoods because cocaine is good for the economy.

While she's exposing myths, Rosenberg takes aim at cherished beliefs held by liberal observers of Latin America - such as the idea that all the poor want democracy and care about human rights. Rosenberg reports what she sees: that the right-wing ARENA party is popular with many of the poor in El Salvador; that Chileans ranked "human rights" near last on a list of their concerns; that one worker told her, "It's better to have rich people running things. They know how."

Rosenberg turns an unromantic eye on Nicaragua, tracing the evolution of Sandinista Luis Carrion from Christian revolutionary to hard-line minister of a failing economy. But, because I am more familiar with Nicaragua than with the other countries, I sensed places where Rosenberg oversimplified.

For example, in arguing that the country was perpetual chaos under the Sandinistas, she makes much of the fact that in 1985 the Managua Cathedral remained in ruins and the city had few street signs. She doesn't say that the Sandinistas decided to leave the Cathedral in ruins as a reminder of Somoza's bombing, and that Nicaraguans have functioned for decades without street names.

Mainly, Children of Cain is true to the complexities and horror of six Latin American countries. I also glimpsed frightening similarities between these societies and my own, as in the widening gap between rich and poor under Pinochet (and Bush), or the outlook of a 15-year-old sicario who tells Rosenberg, "I'll die soon, but they'll remember me for having given my mother a nice refrigerator."

This is fascinating, grim reading. If you care about the Americas, read it.

Naomi Thiers was a free-lance writer living in Alexandria, Virginia, and the author of a book of poetry, Only the Raw Hands Are Heaven (Washington Writers Publishing House, P.O. Box 15271, Washington, DC 20003), when this review appeared.

Children of Cain. By Tina Rosenberg. William & Morrow, 1991. $25 (cloth).