Cautiva

Last night I watched “Cautiva”, a film by Argentinean Director Gaston Biraben. It is a fictionalized re-telling (based on actual events) of the story of a teenage girl who discovers that the adults who have raised her for fifteen years are not actually her parents.
Her real parents, she discovers, were just a couple of young architects who spoke out against the US-backed military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. They were kidnapped and imprisoned in a “clandestine prison” know as “The Cave”, where they were tortured and later killed. Her mother was pregnant at the time, and the military brought her into a hospital one night blindfolded and near death – to give birth. She was born on that incredible day in 1978 when Argentina won the World Cup. All the world’s eyes were fixed on Argentina – but they saw nothing but soccer. The child was then given away to a politically-connected Chief of Police, who raised her as his daughter.

Her real parents were never seen or heard from again.

The girl must then slowly work through her confusion, grief and rage at what she has lost – not only her “real” parents, who have joined the ranks of “The Disappeared” forever, but also the only parents she has ever known - who, for all their sins – raised her and loved her as their own. You can link to a review here:
http://www.boston.com/movies/display?display=movie&id=5095

This film would have struck a chord in me under any circumstances, but all of this has hit me in a chain of coincidence, and the cumulative effect is a strong one.

Last week, driving home from work, I was listening to NPR and heard the woman (grown up now) who is obviously the source of Cautiva (I did not know this until I saw the movie) being interviewed. She works for the archives of the disappeared now – trying to help families of the 30,000+ Disappeared find out what became of their loved ones. She also helps other families track down the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of children who were forcibly taken away from their families in the secret prisons and given to military and political families friendly to the regime who wanted babies of their own. Almost all of the torturers and kidnappers were later given blanket amnesty for their crimes – and can never be brought to justice.

But just TWO weeks before that I had seen another film, “Machuca”, by Andres Wood, which also deals with this period of Argentinean history. Machuca is a truly brilliant (and heartbreaking) film about two boys coming of age at the same time as the military dictatorship seized power. I cannot recommend this one highly enough, but it is not for the weak of heart – very hard to watch at times. You can read a review here: http://movies.nytimes.com/2005/01/19/movies/19mach.html

So for weeks now I have been coincidentally reflecting on this particular kind of inhumanity: The Disappeared, routine torture, baby-stealing, and clandestine prisons. Of course I cannot help but draw parallels between Argentina’s darkest days and the days our country in enduring today.

Do we not have our own clandestine prisons? How many people have entered US custody never to be heard from again? How many families, how many children will have to live the rest of their lives never knowing what happened to Father, Uncle, Brother?

And then there is torture. Whatever that is.

Definitions of torture slip and slide, grinning in the shadows like a drooling beast. This is nothing new – this is a kind of inhumanity that can only live under cover of darkness and deceit. Many of our politicians will not even tell us what “Torture” is – as that would compromise National security. Instead they just say, over and over again – that the United States does not engage in torture. Never mind that they changed the definition of the word so they could do as they please.

Even when asked directly about specific forms of “enhanced interrogation”, Michael Mukasey, the new head of the Justice Department, refused to say whether or not Waterboarding constitutes torture. This has become a common refrain.

But novelist Stephen King recently came up with an excellent (if horrific) litmus test for torture – would you subject yourself to it? Your family? His point is that we cannot definitively know whether or not Waterboarding constitutes torture because we have not personally experienced it. Only one official in the Justice Department has subjected himself to Waterboarding – and although he had initially been in favor of it, he revered himself, declaring that - based on his personal experience – it was torture. He was later fired for refusing to lie to the press and to Congress about his experience.

So here’s what Stephen King suggested in a recent interview with Time Magazine:

If the Bush administration didn’t think it was torture, they ought to do some personal investigation. Someone in the Bush family should actually be waterboarded so they could report on it to George. I said, I didn’t think he would do it, but I suggested Jenna be waterboarded and then she could talk about whether or not she thought it was torture.

You can read it in context here: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/28/ashcroft-takes-waterboarding-bait-to-no-avail/index.html?ex=1353992400&en=332ebc2db936114d&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss?

Certainly King’s suggestion sounds horrific – but is it really? The idea of subjecting an “innocent” person to Waterboarding just to determine whether or not it constitutes torture sounds awful. But remember, by all accounts, MANY of the human beings currently held in secret prisons by the United States have not been charged with any crime – are they not also innocent until proven guilty?

It sounds ridiculous to think of Waterboarding a “person”, someone we know or can see ourselves in. But what about faceless people? What about people we have come to see as less than human? As animals or monsters? “Terrorists”, “Jews”, “Blacks”, “Gays” – all of these words have been (and still are) used to strip away the humanity of living breathing human beings so that other living breathing human beings can do horrible things to them.

To torture, to kidnap, to steal children, to carpet bomb – the only way we can do ANY of these things is by refusing to acknowledge the humanity of the people we are destroying. This, to me, is the terrible danger we invite when we confine our national debate to the abstract world of ideas, concepts and data. Without stories, without the voices of real people – including all the voices of The Disappeared – we are doomed to continue to replay our darkest legacies over and over again – Nazi Germany, Argentina, Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan and the United States of America.

For more information about the effects of torture, check out the Rocky Mountain Survivors Center. They are the only organization in Colorado devoted to treating victims of torture. Here is a link to their website: http://www.rmscdenver.org/