Forms of Cruelty

 
In this book Jean Franco maps out the intersection of cruelty and modernity in Latin America by extending the conversation beyond a “narrow European perspective” (4) that centers on the Holocaust and the German concentration camps. Latin America has had its share of concentration camps, but what distinguishes this region from other parts of the world, according to Franco, is its particular history of conquest and colonialism. Antisemitism has also been present in Latin America—especially in Argentina during the 1970s—but for Franco, the principal victims of Latin American modernity have been women, children, and especially indigenous people. Although modern Latin American cruelty spans more than 500 years, Franco focuses primarily on atrocities from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the slaying of indigenous Peruvians in Uchuraccay, torture under Pinochet in Chile, rape during the Salvadoran civil war, cannibalism practiced by the army in the Guatemalan civil war, and decapitations during the Mexican “drug war.”
 
Cruel Modernity is not light reading. At its best, the book presents an insightful history of the more egregious forms of violence in Latin America. Franco’s readings of novels and films, when they are intimately connected to an historical context, produce revelatory information and strong arguments about what literature and film can do today to represent Latin America’s troubled history. This insight is clearly on display in Franco’s reading of El Infierno, a polemical testimonio by Luz Arce who, after working for Chile’s Salvador Allende, and after being tortured by the Pinochet dictatorship, collaborated with the Chilean secret police, DINA. Although El Infierno has been seen as divisive and polemical, Franco avoids either taking Arce to task because of her role as a collaborator or supporting her in her capacity as a victim. Instead, Franco notes that part of the dilemma invoked by Arce emerges from her testimonio‘s heavy emphasis on the act of torture itself, which diverts the reader from other lacunae in the book, and in particular from “her silence around events that happened after 1989 and were thus not covered by the amnesty granted to the military for their violation of human rights during the Pinochet regime” (173). For Franco, moreover, Arce’s focus on torture masks her own involvement in the disappearances and deaths, “for it is clear that her virtuoso narrative of torture acts as a cover for this other story of ‘reconciliation,’ which is, in reality, capitulation” (185-6). The point is that Arce’s dramatic story of torture functions to support a form of reconciliation that served the interests of the Pinochet regime.
 
Franco’s commitment to mapping out a historical framework for understanding violence also organizes her reading of Roberto Bolaño’s novels. In discussing Bolaño’s generation, Franco signals that what is central is not only the loss of a generation, but also the loss of an ideal: “[w]hat died with this lost generation…was the revolutionary ideal of a more just and generous society that, in his writing, is shared only by small groups of poets, poetry signifying for him an ideal and a lost cause” (233-4). These readings are firmly grounded in a certain historical moment. They also point to the way in which terms such as “victim” and “violence” are not transparent, and require a rigorous examination of specific movements and ideologies. They reveal how the insistence on violence in itself, far from making us aware of the origins of cruelty in Latin America, may in fact keep us from gaining a better understanding of it.
 
Franco opens the book with a discussion of El Masacre, also known as The Parsley Massacre, a 1937 slaughter of 20,000 Haitians who lived on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In this chapter Franco lays out the major ideas of the book: “the dehumanization of the victims, the attempted suppression of their memory, and the legacy of inexplicable loss belatedly registered in literary texts” (5). Clearly El Masacre is a story of ruthless modernity under the rule of Rafael Trujillo, but what is particularly cruel about it is that there “was no clear distinction” (33) between the Dominicans and Haitians, who share the same skin color, borderland culture, and even language. For this reason, Trujillo ordered a shibboleth on the word “perejil” (parsley), which served to divide not only the two nations, but also those who were “allowed to live and…condemned to die” (44). The event exemplifies Franco’s belief that modernization must involve the killing of innocent victims. For Franco, the six-day massacre “foreshadowed things to come” (44); that is, massacres and violence more generally are envisioned in the book as indiscriminate acts against innocent victims. At the same time, the event showcases the desire of those in power to eradicate the memory of injustices, as the Trujillo regime attempted to do by calling El Masacre a “minor incident” (Franco 26). This effort to eradicate memory was largely successful until the discovery of a buried book, El masacre se pasa a pie (The Massacre Walks By), which rescued El Masacre from oblivion. In this way, according to Franco, writing and literature more broadly serve to remember and resurrect the victims of modernization.
 
Franco chronicles numerous narratives of atrocity in the book; what follows is an attempt to discuss her larger project. We might begin by noting the tension invoked by the title Cruel Modernity. For a scholar who is interested in historicizing violence, the term cruelty offers a unique challenge, for it is a highly evocative and emotive term specific neither to one country nor singular period. It is also a term that marks a sort of transgression, an act that exceeds the limits of rationalization. The term modernity, on the other hand, is meant to rein in this excessiveness—to demystify it—showing that cruelty, for the purposes of Franco’s book, is deeply connected to the logic of modernization. Borrowing from Enrique Dussel’s theory of modernity, Franco argues that what distinguishes Latin American from European modernity is Spanish conquest and colonialism. Although the identities of the victims are different—predominantly indigenous peoples and women—the overall logic of modernity is the same: “since the barbarian is opposed to the civilizing process, modern praxis must in the end use violence if necessary to destroy the obstacles to modernization” (Franco 52). Therefore the term “modernity” aptly allows Franco to move through centuries and across Latin American geographies to discuss cruelty, but it also runs the risk of conflating different political movements, and therefore of making it harder for her to understand “the social vacuum that allows cruel acts” (22). Indeed, as the emphasis on cruelty itself signals, the book is less committed to discerning the reasons behind such cruelty than it is to producing a catalogue of the various forms cruelty takes. At the same time, this approach does permit Franco to bring much-needed awareness to some of Latin America’s lesser-known atrocities.
 
The tension between cruelty and modernity also allows Franco to argue that violence primarily occurs against identitarian groups. Franco contends that modernization comes at the expense of diverse victims, in particular countless indigenous people. The challenge here is to avoid reducing modernity to a question of identity or presenting modernity as a monolithic event that remains consistent regardless of period, geography, or actor. Nevertheless, there are several places where Franco’s text does exactly this. For example, in discussing the recent civil wars in Peru and Guatemala, two areas with large indigenous populations, she wonders whether the killings of indigenous people are a “reenactment of the conquest itself” (Franco 79). In psychologizing contemporary violence as a colonial “reenactment,” Franco describes violence against indigenous peoples as an originary trauma incessantly replayed throughout history. What her point misses is that these are no longer Spanish conquistadores killing in Latin America. In many instances indigenous and mestizo peoples are not only involved in, but also actively plan, these massacres. This is not to say that histories of conquest and colonization do not play a hand in some of the violence that takes place today, but the fact that the actors are different suggests, at the very least, that Latin America’s more recent history is also at play. Taking events like the recent dictatorships in the Southern Cone into account shows that cruelty and modernity concern not necessarily identity, but rather ideology, regardless of identity. From this position, the insistence on identity in some of Franco’s examples obscures the reasons the violence erupted in the first place.
 
Cruel Modernity represents a certain culmination not only of Franco’s own research, but also of a type of human rights work that began nearly four decades ago in Latin America and elsewhere. In The Last Utopia, Samuel Moyn argues that human rights discourse emerged in the 1970s as a utopian project, and that two characteristics of human rights discourse are its reflection of a clear crisis of the state and its insistence that resistance comes from outside the state. These two characteristics are also central to Franco’s approach to understanding violence. She imagines that violent acts reflect an “end of state-operated justice” (Franco 119) and suggests that we readers, who are outside of the state, must help victims by never “forgetting” these acts of cruelty. This vision also requires us to see violence through the “indiscriminate” lens of human rights; in other words, all victims are the same, whether they are indigenous peoples or Marxist revolutionaries. Somewhat anticipating the problem with this framework (for both indigenous peoples and revolutionaries), Franco notes that some “rightly criticize the blanket representation of the tortured, the executed, and the disappeared as victims, a term that places party members, militants, and those active in civil rights organizations under the same rubric without distinction. But in massacres, there are no distinctions; the aim is to banish the memory of the victims from the earth” (20). At this point, we come closest to understanding why Franco chooses to write about massacres, and this choice may also be the most flawed aspect of her book. Undoubtedly, massacres indiscriminately kill people, and their victims may be remembered or forgotten. Nevertheless, whatever the injustice may be, it does not erase the particular politics that drive massacres. It is as if, for Franco, massacres and a broad definition of modernity provide enough reason to endorse not only blanket representations of children and revolutionaries, but also—and more dangerously—a depoliticized account of violence. In other words, unlike the more insightful sections of her text, here cruelty and modernity serve to “banish the memory” (Franco 20) not only of the victims but also of the politics that underlie such violence and the response to it.
 
Despite these potential shortcomings in the argument, Franco’s book should be commended for its strong attempt to produce a history of cruelty in Latin America, and her text should be an indispensable work for those unfamiliar with this history. Cruel Modernity also offers compelling reading for undergraduates who seek a better understanding of violence in contexts situated outside of the United States and Europe. At the same time, the solution to the political question of violence in Latin America must involve not only a greater awareness of atrocities, but also an examination of the underlying politics that go beyond cruelty and modernity.