Reflections on the IRCT conference on forensic evidence in the fight against torture

This week I had the privilege of attending an international conference in Washington DC of forensic experts on the documentation and prosecution of torture cases. The days were intense and I am sure I will ruminate on the issues, debates and experiences for a long time to come. While it is fresh, and before the relentless pace of my regular life resumes again, I want to offer some reflections.

First – it was genuinely moving for me to enter a room like this, for the first time in my career, filled with people who have worked on this issue for the past two decades. Many were names I know from the literature that has been an important part of my formation as a therapist and human rights advocate. I recognized that I am part of a lineage of health professionals and activists who have developed an influential and interdisciplinary perspective around torture.  Some of the outcomes of these decades of passionate commitment has been to clearly articulate the profound medical and psychological effects of torture, to develop systematic methods of evaluation for these effects, to develop methodologies of treatment and support for survivors and their families, and to build many creative organizations that – even in their enormous global diversity – share a common vision and a common resolve.

The second striking thing that was commented on by several speakers is the obvious fact that torture continues to happen.  In reality, while we were sitting together over the past two days, thousands of people were being tortured around the world. The overwhelming majority will never receive attention from our community of experts, and those few whose cases are taken up for prosecution might receive a decision in the next decade, of those only a handful will be compensated or feel that justice was done. Obviously our movement – though remarkable – is not enough. Perpetrators at all levels continue to commit their crimes with total impunity.

Therapists and physicians know the immense, life altering impact torture has on individuals. We don’t fool ourselves that we have the power to erase the violence that was inflicted against our clients. Lawyers know the time and resources needed for the meticulous task of compiling evidence against perpetrators. They understand how unfair it is to have to ask victims to defend their credibility. But, it continues to be critical for us to work together to integrate our differing disciplinary perspectives. Together we are like the fabled hummingbird dropping endless tiny beaks-full of water on a raging forest fire, persistently doing what we can.

But that said, many colleagues expressed the urgency to do more to influence the social and political discourse around torture in our own societies. They understand that a public attitude that justifies torture as the lesser of evils – an unfortunate imperative of security in a dangerous world – is what ultimately supports a climate of impunity.

I think in order to address this question of public discourse we must think deeply about the meaning and strategic intent of torture.  In my experience, the best people to consult for a contextual analysis of torture are survivors themselves. As a fiercely articulate survivor reminded me today, “you have not been in the torture chamber, but I have.” And he went on to explain that whether they were/are political activists or “simply” poor, marginal and criminalized, survivors have a vision of their political context which is generally free of illusions about the repressive nature of power. As he and many other colleagues asserted today, maintaining genuinely collaborative relationships with survivors can help prevent us from taking missteps in our struggle against torture – steps which might lead us to waste our time and resources, mistake our own needs for the needs of survivors, or unintentionally collude with the power structures that are working for opposite ends. Furthermore, in listening to survivors, we may hear about dreams of justice that have little to do with judicial processes and more with the defense of identity, reconstitution of community and desire for freedom.  As we listen and collaborate more deeply, we may become even more creative in our common pursuit of this dream, and in the process learn to contribute our skills and passion in new ways that may help us all feel more whole and alive.

Wislawa Szymborska 1923-2012

Tortures

Nothing has changed.
The body is a reservoir of pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures, all of this is considered.

Nothing has changed.
The body still trembles as it trembled
before Rome was founded and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away.

Nothing has changed.
Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones–
real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent.
But the cry with which the body answers for them
was, is, and will be a cry of innocence
in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.

Nothing has changed.
Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances.
The gesture of the hands shielding the head
has nonetheless remained the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tugs,
falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees,
bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.

Nothing has changed.
Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.
The little soul roams among these landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.

Translation: Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
© Wislawa Szymborska, Stanislaw Baranczak, Clare Cavanagh

Frances MacQueen (April 2, 1947- November 26, 2011)

Gracias a la vida, que me ha dado tanto…

I remember sitting on particularly hard day in my office at VAST, with a participant who I had known and worked with by then for a few years and who was really struggling to adapt to life as a political exile.  The door to my office was open, as it usually was, and when at a particularly intense moment the two of us heard Mercedes Sosa sing the lyrics to this song, tears of gratitude and relief welled up in us both.  Frances had a particular flare for the poetic gesture.

We got the news this week that she died in El Salvador.  And I am happy to think she had some reprieve from her illness, a time to re-engage with the work that she loved, and that she died as she lived.

I offer my gratitude to life for this immensely important teacher.

I imagine her drinking a big glass of red wine and telling stories and laughing, right now, with some of the greatest shit disturbers the world has ever seen.  They are in good company.

http://francesmacqueen.org/

A Manual of Community Based Human Rights Documentation

From 2009-20011, Consejo Indígena Popular de Oaxaca “Ricardo Flores Magón” (CIPO-RFM), Partners in Rights and Recovery (PRR) and a variety of community allies in Oaxaca City came together to think about political violence, healing and resistance. We talked and ate and laughed and listened and cried and sang and snored together, and eventually we came up with our own unique methodology of human rights documentation.

As one outcome of this process, we produced a manual for community-based human rights workers. This manual includes an introduction to community-based human rights documentation from a psychosocial perspective, information on understanding the effects human rights violations on individuals, families and communities, suggestions for offering support and psychological first aid, and guidelines for self-care and developing a culture of care within organizations. There is also a list of references and resources for further study.

To download a copy of the manual, go to the “Publications” tab at the top of the page and click on the link provided.

If you find this document useful or if you have any questions, comments or suggestions we would really like to hear from you. Contact us at partnersinrights@gmail.com

The Face of the Moon

“Los árboles sudan nubes, preñan intemperies.” – Raul Gatica

Like the old ones who followed the moon to Nuyoo, I went to Plan de Zaragoza to see her face and whisper my secrets to her.

In Plan, time transformed and expanded  – we hardly slept, and the long, hot days were so full and so empty, that there was space for an extraordinary amount of work, rest, play, communication, reflection, connection and solitude.

We left Oaxaca around 4 am, and made it to Tlaxiaco in time to have a hearty breakfast in what is surely the best market in the region.  People come down from the hills and mountains around to sell their honey, textiles, fruit and meat, and to fill their baskets with provisions to take home.

We then piled our things into a little van and started the dusty ascent to Plan de Zaragoza.  It is mango season, and the trees along the road are abundant with heavy green fruit.  Clouds and haze from the many small fires burning the fields obscured the high mountain ranges from full view, but the countless switch-backs in the road gave us glimpses into narrow valleys and deep ravines.

We reached Plan by mid-day, and were welcomed by friends at Don Felix and Dona Mary’s house.  It had been almost a year since we last saw Pedro and Pancho.  Both were looking thin; Pancho from good work carrying honey and walking up and down the mountain from his little house near the river to the village center high above, but Pedro’s face seems gaunt with worry.  He holds a position of authority in the community to protect the territory, and he feels a growing menace from business interests encroaching into the valley.

In the late afternoon we met the group of workshop participants and began another round of dialogue on political violence.  This community has not suffered the overt violence of direct military or paramilitary attacks, so their discussion ranged through more quotidian forms of politically induced suffering: poverty, neglect, marginalization, intimidation, discrimination… They are alone and forgotten in these hills until the election machinery rolls through with its promises and shoddy bribes, or until the price of minerals or wood makes the journey from the city worth-while.

A striking difference between this workshop and the work we have done with people from the city, was that here people use stories to illustrate their points.  So for example, in a discussion about agrarian conflict and the scarcity of land, we heard about a grandfather in the Mexican Revolution and the experience of crossing the US border over two weeks on foot.

People here survive by holding on to their traditional knowledge and depending on strong community relationships.  When these are damaged, with the ingress of modern ‘solutions’, dependencies are created and loyalties divided.  People talked in some depth about the fear that they live with daily, and their courageous attempts to overcome this fear by strengthening their unity and their organization.  But we know that political violence – of the overt and bloody kind – has damaged the people’s will to organize here and so this workshop gave people an opportunity to come together, to name this fear, and to think seriously about how to regain their confidence.  I was deeply moved when, near the end of our time together a woman exclaimed, “we have the solutions in our hands!”  Because, while I know that no one is sitting around waiting for us to show up and solve their problems, I am also beginning to feel confident that these conversations don’t happen easily or even at all without the facilitation of an outsider.  We can be sure that no solutions magically appeared in two days of talks, but I do think a seed was planted – or rather, an older struggling plant has been revived.

Did I mention that this lightening-fast trip to Plan de Zaragoza gave us plenty of time for fun?

First, there was this goat…

And then we went for a long walk down to the river for a swim…

We finished the evening by watching documentary films together under the stars… only to be woken up at 2 am (!!) to jump in a van and make the long journey home to Oaxaca.

For these intense and wonderful days, we send out our deepest gratitude and appreciation to Raul, Lola, Miguel, Gil, Pedro, Alfonso, Don Felix, and Dona Mary.  Thank you for your hospitality and for laying the ground for us.

Photos for a sleeplessness night

Together under the starry sky

We hit the ground running early this week with a roster of meetings with various officials to demand justice in a number of cases close to the heart of our partner organization.   It is easy to see how the time, energy and resources of the organization get wittled away fighting bizantine legal battles.  Dylan and I play the role of the foreign human rights observer, in which we play our ugly race cards in full awareness of the place we occupy in the discriminatory hierarchy.  I cringed as the secretary welcomed me with obsequious smiles into the judges office, and hissed ‘rapido, rapido’ at my indigenous companera, but embraced my role nevertheless to tell the judge that he must respect the rights of an innocent man who has languished in prison on trumped up charges for over 9 months, while his wife and children survive without any other source of livelihood.

And then on to another meeting with the Governor’s secretary, where we supported our companeros as they presented their list of social demands.  The secretary spent a lot of time initially, trying to separate a small representative group from the crowd who had arrived with us to meet him.  And for awhile I wondered, why were our partners so reluctant to send just a few capable folks?  The room was so crowded, and there were kids and people from communities who didn’t seem comfortable there.  But I know from long enough experience that the people here do things very intentionally, and so I tried to understand what was the purpose of dragging this big crew into the governor’s office.  Then I remembered a story a friend told me, about how his mother had been elected to a position on the local assembly, but as she was illiterate, he had to go with her to all the meetings to do all the reading and writing.  Years later,  he had the confidence to confront the government on its turf, in part because he understood its mechanisms through this early exposure.  And so I understood that this was a kind of gentle exposure that could help people overcome their natural intimidation in the houses of power, and also, a way to ensure that everyone in the organization has direct access to information and decision-making processes.

This morning we were gently awoken at 3 am to hop into the back of a pick-up for a long, dusty ride under a clear starry sky, down the sierra from Cacalotepec to Oaxaca.  Our first community workshop left me feeling both immense admiration and open-hearted sorrow and I was so grateful for a silent journey, nestling next to a crate of tomatoes and a little old woman we picked up along the way, alone and together under the wheeling universe.

We had a few days of group discussions, meeting each evening for a few hours in the little house of a community member.  We met after the day’s work in the field and the hills was done, the late-afternoon meal eaten and tidied, and all the animals had been fed.  We carried chairs and make-shift benches from everywhere, into the tiny house of a community member (displacing the teenagers and their loud ranchero music, much to their obvious displeasure!)  with all the kids and the pigs, the roosters and the donkeys cavorting away outside.  We talked together about the effects of political violence, and of course once people understood this ‘abstract concept’ they had no trouble locating it in their personal and communal lives.  In our group was the wife and son of a man badly injured by paramilitaries, the wife of a political prisoner framed for murder, and others with less spectacular but pervasive histories of exploitation and neglect.  I was moved by the way people described the entire range of symptoms that we recognize as being trauma-induced in such a poignant, local idiom of pain.  The whole way down the road all I could do was marvel at the great dignity with which people survive such suffering, and how hard they work to maintain their families and communities.  Our work here grows and develops so slowly, sometimes it is easy to feel discouraged and wonder what difference any of it makes.  But I am learning patience, to respect the rhythm here, and to trust my relationships – knowing that I will be invited to make a contribution only when people believe I can be useful.  I know that the biggest mistake is to rush in, experimenting with ‘magic’ solutions to problems that are layered over generations.  But I will not make the other mistake, which is, it seems to me, to give up and become cynical, deciding that psychology is only a luxury for the privileged.

We leave again tomorrow for another little town, where we have friends to meet and another round of discussion to engage in. Miguel just let me know that I should pack up and be ready to leave again at 4 am as our destination is 11 hours away into the mountains and we need to be ready to work as soon as we reach in the afternoon.   Vamanos!