Forms of Cruelty

In this book Jean Franco maps out the intersection of cruelty and modernity in Latin America by extending the conversation beyond a "narrow European perspective" (4) that centers on the Holocaust and the German concentration camps. Latin America has had its share of concentration camps, but what distinguishes this region from other parts of the world, according to Franco, is its particular history of conquest and colonialism. Antisemitism has also been present in Latin America—especially in Argentina during the 1970s—but for Franco, the principal victims of Latin American modernity have been women, children, and especially indigenous people. Although modern Latin American cruelty spans more than 500 years, Franco focuses primarily on atrocities from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the slaying of indigenous Peruvians in Uchuraccay, torture under Pinochet in Chile, rape during the Salvadoran civil war, cannibalism practiced by the army in the Guatemalan civil war, and decapitations during the Mexican "drug war."

Cruel Modernity is not light reading. At its best, the book presents an insightful history of the more egregious forms of violence in Latin America. Franco's readings of novels and films, when they are intimately connected to an historical context, produce revelatory information and strong arguments about what literature and film can do today to represent Latin America's troubled history. This insight is clearly on display in Franco's reading of El Infierno, a polemical testimonio by Luz Arce who, after working for Chile's Salvador Allende, and after being tortured by the Pinochet dictatorship, collaborated with the Chilean secret police, DINA. Although El Infierno has been seen as divisive and polemical, Franco avoids either taking Arce to task because of her role as a collaborator or supporting her in her capacity as a victim. Instead, Franco notes that part of the dilemma invoked by Arce emerges from her testimonio's heavy emphasis on the act of torture itself, which diverts the reader from other lacunae in the book, and in particular from "her silence around events that happened after 1989 and were thus not covered by the amnesty granted to the military for their violation of human rights during the Pinochet regime" (173). For Franco, moreover, Arce's focus on torture masks her own involvement in the disappearances and deaths, "for it is clear that her virtuoso narrative of torture acts as a cover for this other story of 'reconciliation,' which is, in reality, capitulation" (185-6). The point is that Arce's dramatic story of torture functions to support a form of reconciliation that served the interests of the Pinochet regime.

Franco's commitment to mapping out a historical framework for understanding violence also organizes her reading of Roberto Bolaño's novels. In discussing Bolaño's generation, Franco signals that what is central is not only the loss of a generation, but also the loss of an ideal: "[w]hat died with this lost generation…was the revolutionary ideal of a more just and generous society that, in his writing, is shared only by small groups of poets, poetry signifying for him an ideal and a lost cause" (233-4). These readings are firmly grounded in a certain historical moment. They also point to the way in which terms such as "victim" and "violence" are not transparent, and require a rigorous examination of specific movements and ideologies. They reveal how the insistence on violence in itself, far from making us aware of the origins of cruelty in Latin America, may in fact keep us from gaining a better understanding of it.

Franco opens the book with a discussion of El Masacre, also known as The Parsley Massacre, a 1937 slaughter of 20,000 Haitians who lived on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In this chapter Franco lays out the major ideas of the book: "the dehumanization of the victims, the attempted suppression of their memory, and the legacy of inexplicable loss belatedly registered in literary texts" (5). Clearly El Masacre is a story of ruthless modernity under the rule of Rafael Trujillo, but what is particularly...