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Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America

University of California Press

Fear is inherent in human society. Fear underlies the precarious edifice of the human condition: we fear death, loss, society, the past, the future, pain, and the unknown. Just as death cannot be defeated, the essential battles with fear cannot be won; the conditions that produce it can be ameliorated, though, and the specific circumstances associated with it overcome.

Our subject is not the existential fear that is an integral part of the human psyche but politically determined fear, the fear associated with political regimes. Just as psychology looks at individual fear, the social sciences look at collective fear and the social conditions that produce it and allow it to be overcome. Because all societies and political systems consciously manufacture and then wrestle with fear, they can all be classified by their dominant fears. Although democratic regimes have not entirely dispensed with fear, they do generate mechanisms that discipline and overcome certain types of fear. Here, however, we shall focus on those historically regressive regimes in which the dominant fear is the primary fear of death. It is no coincidence that the positive theme in these systems is that of human rights, a historically and culturally determined extension of the right of life.1

We shall confine ourselves to the problem of fear in a particular type of regime, the military dictatorships that emerged in the Southern Cone during the 1970s. Because we define authoritarianism as a regime, as a type of relation between state and society, and not as a type of society, we

will not be looking for any generic relation between authoritarianism and fear that might cover all social spheres and individual personalities. Rather, because military dictatorships are a historical type of authoritarian regime, we have to look at their distinguishing features and the particular consequences for fear.

For the purposes of this analysis we need to distinguish first between the dominant types of fear and second between the groups that experience them. There are two basic types of fear, which can be described in the context of infantile experiences: the "dark room," and the "dog that bites." The first is fear of the unknown, a sense of insecurity about something bad: we know the threat exists, but we do not know its exact nature. In classical sociological terms this qualifies as fear of an anomic situation; although the blow or harm is seen as imminent, we know neither whence it comes nor how hard it will strike. The second type of fear is stimulated by a known danger: the subject anticipates the harm he or she will suffer, and fear springs from a remembered experience with whose harmful dimensions the subject is completely familiar.

With respect to the subjects of fear, those who are afraid, we must distinguish between the losers' fear and the winners' fear within political regimes; the relations of these subjects are defined as asymmetric and normally conflictual or antagonistic. The losers' fear is pervaded by a sense of defeat, a perception of the overwhelming power of the enemy, a feeling of failure or weakness that cannot be blamed on others, and a sense of having lost the opportunity for personal or collective realization. It combines fear of terror or repression with terror of the future—namely, a new situation that will be fraught with unknown dangers.

The winners' fear stems from the trauma experienced before the victory, from their perception of how their victory has affected the losers, from their suspicion that the repressive mechanism unleashed might become an uncontrollable Frankenstein, from the sense that victory is ephemeral and that the tables might someday be turned on them and the losers will take their revenge.

These fears feed on one another despite the fact that they are independent of each other and have their own separate dynamics. Both fear of known and unknown dangers and the dialectic of the winners' fear and the losers' fear pervade the emergence, development, and end of the military regimes, and have significant bearing on the processes of democratic transition and consolidation. These regimes can be seen as systems that produce fear and that are challenged by processes and struggles to overcome it.

The Military Regimes of the Southern Cone

This chapter will not touch on the debate over the nature of the military regimes that were set up in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. We shall take only a brief look at some of their characteristics, which are described elsewhere in more detail.2 These regimes were at the same time institutional forms, a distinct phase of the development of capitalism in such societies, and the expression of a new type of militarism; they cannot be reduced to either one of these dimensions. These factors played into each other in various ways. First, the military regimes were associated with the denouement of a political crisis, itself a manifestation of the generic problem of hegemony, which has been endemic since the demise of the oligarchic state. This political crisis was characterized by the high degree of polarization between the active and mobilized popular sectors—whose political expressions had participated in power to different degrees—and the dominant sectors—who saw this situation as catastrophic, a zero-sum political crisis in which everything was at stake. The dominant sectors were able to instigate their fears in the middle classes. Second, however, these regimes can be seen as a part of the modernization, professionalization, and ideological homogenization of the armed forces in the context of their dependent position in the U.S.controlled geopolitical system. Third, the military regimes under consideration were committed to restructuring their respective capitalist systems and then reinserting them into the global capitalist system.

The foregoing analysis allows us to understand the double logic, or two-dimensionality, of this historic type of regime. On the one hand, the regimes were reacting against something, be it populist society, the "state of compromise," or state-activated popular mobilization, and on the other they were attempting to construct something entirely new. Catalyzed by the political crisis—perceived by some sectors to be terminal or catastrophic, a clear threat to their social position—the regimes attempted to disarticulate the former society. The touchstone of this reactive logic was repression, whereby the regime relied on a powerful apparatus that employed vast quantities of resources and hitherto unprecedented techniques of brutality. The intensity of the reactive dimension varied by country, according to the nature of the crisis that preceded and provoked the military coup, the concomitant degree of radicalization and polarization of society, the level of activity and organization of the popular sectors or their political expressions, and the homogenization and efficacy of the military/repressive apparatus.

The process in the Southern Cone, however, involved more than...