Luis Patti, deputy police chief of Pilar, an affluent town near Buenos Aires, has become a celebrity in Argentina. Indeed, some journalists and political leaders are calling him a hero, more than a thousand citizens of Pilar have demonstrated to support him and even President Carlos Saul Menem has praised Patti as someone who “does everything well.”
What did Patti do to deserve such acclaim? He tortured prisoners by applying an electric cattle prod to their genitals. For this a magistrate jailed him. Now the magistrate, Raul Borrino, is being vilified while Patti is lionized.
I learned about the Patti case when I returned to New York at the end of October from a visit to India to examine conditions in prisons and police lockups, although I knew something in advance about the Indian police. I ‘was startled to discover how commonly they torture detainees, After all, like Argentina today, India is a free country the world’s largest democracy, as it is frequently described. Abuses of authority are investigated and exposed by the press, denounced by civil liberties groups and regularly condemned by the staunchly independent judiciary. It is not difficult in India to find out about torture, and those who publicly deplore such abuses are themselves institutionally protected against reprisals. Yet sunlight, which advocates of human rights like to think of as the best disinfectant (in Justice Brandeis’s words), is not doing the job.
One of the small organizations in India that promote human rights, the People’s Union for Democratic Rights, recently published a study of deaths in police custody in New Delhi. The group investigated forty eight deaths, most of persons under the age of 30. The deaths had come to light because they were reported in the press. “Most of these people died due to. Torture,” the P.U.D.R. found. “Practically every person taken to a Police station in connection with some or the other offense in our country is ‘subjected to severe beating and torture. It is this process of torture, regular and systematic, whose end product is sometimes death, as in the case of these unfortunate 48 people in Delhi.”
Part of the explanation for the prevalence of torture despite the exposes that India’s open political system permits lies in the weakness of the country’s human rights movement. The antecedents of the present day movement go back to colonial times, when Jawaharlal Nehru was the founder and leader of the Indian Civil Liberties Union. With independence and Nehru’s emergence as Prime Minister, the Civil Liberties Union expired, at his urging. It was no longer needed, he reportedly told his colleagues. Presumably he assumed not only that his government would respect civil liberties but also that the sum and substance of the civil liberties struggle in India consisted in protecting the rights of those advocating independence.
The human rights movement in India was reborn in the mid1970s when Nehru’s daughter, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, declared an emergency and jailed thousands of her political opponents. As in colonial times, the movement sprang from the same social milieu as did those being jailed. The organizations that operate today, among them the People’s Union for Democratic Rights and the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, are outgrowths of that period, though there has been no repetition of the imprisonment of large numbers of mainstream peaceful dissenters. Accordingly, the groups now draw support only from those educated middleclass Indians who concern themselves with abuses against crime suspects from the lower classes (the latter account for virtually all the victims of police torture), and with abuses against those suspected of supporting separatist struggles in the Punjab, Kashmir and Assam, where noncombatants are being slaughtered and their communities destroyed. This movement does fine work but it lacks the mass public support needed for effective campaigns to curb abuses,
In Argentina and in other Latin American countries, such as Brazil where torture in police custody is a ‘commonplace as in India it seems as if it were only yesterday that the era of political repression came to an end. ‘That era lasted much longer than Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency in India, it cut a wider swath through middleclass society and it was marked by more physical violence than in India, where the class background of those imprisoned protected them from the treatment that Indian authorities dealt to the lower classes. Yet the middle class public in Latin American countries that had made concern for human rights an important factor in ousting the military regimes that dominated the region until the mid-1980s has demonstrated little interest in police torture and summary executions of poor people suspected of crime.
In the United States, torture in police custody has largely been eliminated over the past two decades out so. One reason is that the civil liberties movement here, which grew out of concern for the rights of political dissenters during World War and during the red scare that followed the war, has been periodically reinvigorated by its defense of other political dissenters, as during the McCarthy era and during the Vietnam War years, and also by its adoption of such causes as reproductive freedom. In blending efforts on behalf of those with whom the middle class can identify with efforts to defend the rights of those as unpopular as Suspects in common crime cases, and in arguing more or less persuasively that the rights of all are connected, an organization such as the American Civil Liberties Union continues to attract enough public support to be effective in protecting the rights of people who might otherwise arouse little sympathy from the organization’s own constituency.
Internationally, the human rights movement focuses of abuses in dictatorships and in those countries, such as Guatemala, where the military wields most power despite the advent of some forms of democratic government. A decade ago Jeane Kirkpatrick provoked a debate over whether human rights abuses under totalitarian regimes were more intractable than those committed by authoritarian governments. Yet, as the example of India suggests, abuses such as torture areas entrenched in some democracies as under either variety of political repression.
The Nation
Article extracted from this publication >> December 21, 1990
