The Inferno: A Story of Terror and Survival in Chile (review)

On November 28, 2004, the government of Chile released the Informe Valech. This report included the testimonies of 28,000 Chileans who had been tortured by the military dictatorship that ruled Chile from 1973 to 2000. Taken as a whole, their collective stories unflinchingly reveal the scope of the barbarity that the Pinochet regime inflicted on the Chilean people. The Inferno also tells the story of torture, only it focuses on the experiences of one woman, Luz Arce. Her story is a unique one. Unlike most other victims of torture in Chile, she collaborated with the DINA, the secret police force of Pinochet's Chile, and worked for them for several years. This book recounts in horrifying detail the torture to which she was subjected, her decision to collaborate with the DINA, her work with and observations of the DINA, her personal relationships with members of the DINA and the Chilean military, how and why she broke with the DINA, and her testimony against those members of the Chilean military who had tortured her and so many other Chileans. In many ways, this book reflects Luz Arce's efforts to regain her identity which her involvement with the DINA stripped her of, to redeem herself in her own eyes and in the eyes of those she betrayed, and to reestablish herself as an integral human being, not solely as either a victim or collaborator of the DINA.

Before the 1973 coup, Luz Arce had been a member of the Socialist Party of Chile and of the GAP, President Salvador Allende's personal bodyguards. Following the overthrow of Allende, she joined the clandestine movement against the dictatorship. In 1974 the DINA apprehended her and for months subjected her to brutal physical and mental torture. Arce graphically conveys the extreme physical abuse, sexual torture, and emotional degradation that she, and many other Chilean leftists, suffered at the hands of the DINA and other branches of military intelligence. Weakened physically and spiritually, hoping to save her brother from further torture (the DINA had also captured him), Arce began her lengthy collaboration with the DINA. She drew on her political training to supply military officers with information about the Left; she analyzed leftist ideology and thinking for her captors; she even identified other leftists.

Her betrayal of her friends and comrades and of what she believed in and her collusion with the forces of repression, shattered her. Her memory and public retelling of what went on in the dungeons and torture centers of the DINA, of naming names, of saying who did what to whom, was central to her physical and mental recuperation. It also provides much insight into how these nefarious forces operated, how they thought about the work they engaged in, and how they understood and employed ideas of gender to torture prisoners and in their interactions with each other.

Luz Arce's story clearly exposes the gendered nature of the torture to which political prisoners were exposed, as well as the gendered identities of those who did the torturing. Gang rape of women prisoners, both as an expression of conquest and as a means to break down the women was common. The military personnel "justified" the rapes by labeling leftist women as whores, immoral women whose bodies existed for the pleasure and domination of the armed forces. One of the key issues this book raises is to what extent is Luz Arce a victim of the dictatorship, which is how she and others on the Left now see her, and to what extent is she a traitor, which is how some on the Left see her. However one chooses to answer this question, it is clear that this book is a searing indictment of the military dictatorship that ruled Chile.