Information in Counterrevolution: State Torture and the Armed Left in Southern South America in the 1970sPaul Katz, Columbia UniversityDissertation Fellowship, 2019 My dissertation examines the use of torture by the specialized urban intelligence operations units that reshaped the increasingly violent clash between two political projects—one revolutionary and evidently outmatched, the other counterrevolutionary and increasingly unconstrained—in southern South America in the 1970s. As the structure through which the bodies of thousands of revolutionary militants, and of many other real and perceived regime opponents, met the violence of the security state, these units proliferated across a region roiled by new forms of urban insurgency, torture-based intelligence operations, and strategies to oppose state violence that reverberated across the world. Across these years, I argue, systematic interrogatory torture functioned as a technology of social and bodily control, a political construct to be condemned, and a window onto the forms of violence advanced by actors on the Right and the Left. While attentive to dynamics that extend across southern South America, the dissertation looks primarily to the principal urban centers of the two largest countries in the region: Buenos Aires, Argentina, and São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It centers on the years between the creation of the region’s first specialized urban intelligence operations unit, São Paulo’s Operação Bandeirante, in 1969, and the destruction of the last-ditch Montonero Counteroffensive by Argentine intelligence operatives a decade later. Across these years, I argue, systematic interrogatory torture functioned as a technology of social and bodily control, a political construct to be condemned, and a window onto the forms of violence advanced by actors on the Right and the Left. Deployed and denounced in the course of an epoch-defining clash between Right and Left, it was above all, one Brazilian guerrilla fighter wrote in a June 1970 essay to his comrades, the Right’s “most efficient weapon to combat us.” Torture was used for purposes that extended far beyond the procurement of information, of course, functioning as a punishment, a deterrent, and an expurgatory fantasy of total control, and its victims reached far outside the armed Left to touch many thousands unconnected to political violence. Yet whatever its other functions, consequences, and interpretations, throughout the 1970s, torture was consistently employed in the context of information analysis and intelligence operations. It functioned as a means to uncover hidden revolutionary networks, to inculcate fear and perform fantasies of domination and control, to bolster socioeconomic hierarchies, and to cause vast psychological and physical damage to those deemed the enemy. At the same time, resisting torture granted the revolutionaries who prepared for it a means to claim a measure of power, and drawing international attention to it could impose something of a cost on its perpetrators. Predominant at the time, these openly political framings of torture have largely fallen out of public and scholarly debate, which is now conducted primarily in terms of accountability, human rights, and individual and collective trauma. My dissertation operates in a distinct register, using historical analysis to return the violence of southern South America’s 1970s to the counterrevolutionary context in which much of it was practiced and condemned. Drawing on dozens of archival collections from ten countries, I reconstruct the now-forgotten meanings of torture that defined this formative juncture, demonstrating the potential of history to reinvigorate a policy debate centered for too long on the question, “Does torture work?” Instead, I ask readers to consider the work that torture and its denunciation have performed at a critical moment in the past in order to generate new strategies to counteract it today.
