December 1978: Uruguayan Torturers Commemorate Human Rights Month

Researching torture and counterinsurgency produces plenty of through-the-looking-glass moments, but this morning has yielded one striking enough to warrant a quick report. In the 1970s, during Uruguay’s civil-military dictatorship, the country’s authorities found themselves inundated with requests for information concerning the thousands of detainees being held by the executive under the arbitrary authority granted by the country’s ongoing “state of internal war.” To streamline its responses to these requests, the state created a pair of offices named in Newspeak: the Oficina de Información de Personas (haven’t yet figured out how to render reasonably in English, but you get the idea), and the Comisión de Respeto de los Derechos Individuales, or Commission for the Respect of Individual Rights.  The latter of these two released periodic reports containing information about particular detainees, in a demonstration of the regime’s commitment to the vigorous protection of their “individual rights.” “How remarkably discordant,” you might be saying to yourself — but wait! Check out the header on this report, issued in December 1978*:

That’s right — it’s December 1978, time for the propaganda arm of a regime responsible for the torture of thousands to commemorate the Month of the 30th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights! If 1968 was the International Year for Human Rights, it seems, then 1978 was the International Year for the Appropriation of Human Rights in Defense of Violent Dictatorship. (C.f. Argentina’s “Los argentinos somos derechos y humanos” campaign of that same year.)

While efforts like these may seem absurd to the point of parody, to my mind they offer two striking reminders of the ambiguity of “human rights” as the concept moved forcefully onto the global stage. First, international human rights advocacy was undoubtedly changing the rules of the game for state repression, prompting behavioral modifications by violent dictatorships like those of Uruguay and Argentina. But these changes were not always for the better, as illustrated by ramped-up information control in both countries, and by Argentina’s newfound preference for extermination over detention. Second, in the late 1970s, it was still far from clear what the emergent global human rights regime would look like. Anti-communist dictatorships like Uruguay’s genuinely believed themselves to be the true defenders of fundamental individual rights against the murderous totalitarianism of the left, and they made every effort to wrest the human rights mantle from their enemies.

The rise of international human rights, at least in South America’s Southern Cone, doesn’t reflect a new alternative to political struggle. Instead, it demands a nuanced look at the retrospectively strange, even mind-boggling, forms that political violence, and its justification, came to assume in the era of counterinsurgency and human rights.

[*The report is taken from the Universidad de la República’s remarkable 2008 Investigación histórica sobre la dictadura y el terrorismo de estado en el Uruguay, available here.]