An Argentine naval officer remorsefully admits that he killed
thirty people during Argentina's Dirty War. A member of General
Augusto Pinochet's intelligence service reveals on a television
show that he took sadistic pleasure in the sexual torture of women
in clandestine prisons. A Brazilian military officer draws on his
own experiences to write a novel describing the military's
involvement in a massacre during the 1970s. The head of a police
death squad refuses to become the scapegoat for apartheid-era
violence in South Africa; he begins to name names and provide
details of past atrocities to the Truth Commission. Focusing on
these and other confessions to acts of authoritarian state
violence, Leigh A. Payne asks what happens when perpetrators
publicly admit or discuss their actions. While mechanisms such as
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission are touted as
means of settling accounts with the past, Payne contends that
public confessions do not settle the past. They are unsettling by
nature. Rather than reconcile past violence, they catalyze
contentious debate. She argues that this debate--and the public
confessions that trigger it--are healthy for democratic processes
of political participation, freedom of expression, and the
contestation of political ideas.
Payne draws on interviews, unedited television film, newspaper
archives, and books written by perpetrators to analyze confessions
of state violence in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa.
Each of these four countries addressed its past through a different
institutional form--from blanket amnesty, to conditional amnesty
based on confessions, to judicial trials. Payne considers
perpetrators' confessions as performance, examining what they say
and what they communicate nonverbally; the timing, setting, and
reception of their confessions; and the different ways that they
portray their pasts, whether in terms of remorse, heroism, denial,
or sadism, or through lies or betrayal.
General
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