Browsing by Subject "Military regime"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Drawing the line : human rights, state terror, and political culture in Uruguay(2009-08) Woodruff, Christopher Alan; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia, 1957-; Dulitzky, Ariel E.The purpose of this thesis is to examine the role that "political culture" played in differentiating Uruguay's human rights record under its military dictatorship (1973 to 1985), from the records of its Southern Cone neighbors, Argentina and Chile, during their periods of military rule in the 1970s and 1980s. Statistical data clearly shows that although the Uruguayan military regime tortured and imprisoned an extremely high percentage of its population, the country suffered a relatively tiny number of fatalities, per capita, compared to the toll of deaths associated with the actions of the armed forces in Argentina and Chile. To explain this distinction in repressive policies and tactics, I find that each of the three countries under comparison developed distinct cultural assumptions due to their differing historical and political trajectories, which heavily influenced their respective political behaviors. Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile share many structural factors in common, which are all important for explaining the successive plunge of Southern Cone nations into brutal dictatorships and bloody "dirty wars." However, in order to understand why one regime's tactics differed in lethality from the others, I assert that it is necessary to employ political culture as the definitive explanatory variable. Through the analysis of historical trends and statements made by government leaders, I find that Uruguay distinguished itself from Argentina and Chile in three principal areas during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: democratic stability, political inclusion, and human rights promotion. Taken together, I conclude that Uruguay developed a democratic political culture, which assumed that legitimate governance included, among other ingredients, respect for the electoral process and rejection of lethal violence as a political instrument. Ultimately, these two assumptions played a pivotal role in constraining the policy alternatives available for consideration by the Uruguayan dictators, such that the prevalent use of extra-judicial executions and forced disappearances, as seen in Argentina and Chile, was not an option in Uruguay.Item The other perpetrators : doctors in the service of torture during the Brazilian military regime(2013-05) Weinberg, Eyal; Garfield, Seth, 1967-This report explores the role medical professionals played in state-sponsored torture during the Brazilian military rule. Between 1964 and 1985, counterinsurgency agencies imprisoned an estimated 50,000 people, many of them without a trial, and tortured at least 20,000 suspected of ‘subversive conduct’. Scholars often describe the implementation of torture as the exclusive work of ‘infamous interrogators’ belonging to repressive agencies of the security forces. They were not, however, the sole perpetrators of human rights violations. A large body of medical experts played a significant role in administering and justifying the regime’s mechanism of oppression. While the evidence pointing to these collaborations exists in diverse sources, scholarship dealing with this aspect of regime’s repression is scarce. The report unveils the particular roles of doctors in the torture mechanism, and places their history within two larger historiographical frameworks. Engaging with literature on Latin America’s Cold War, the study traces the history of the National Security Doctrine and examines the final form it took in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s. It then utilizes the scholarship on torture to contextualize and illuminate the regime’s practice of inflicting pain. Finally, the report turns to studies from other disciplines to offer theoretical and conceptual frameworks elucidating professionals’ complicity in torture.