State Terrorism and Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Support for the Doctrine of National Security has been evident since the '70s in Latin America. This doctrine is the substrate of a hemispheric security pact with an offensive-defensive commitment undertaken by Latin American armies with the United States. The Doctrine of National Security rests on two pillars: the postulation of a social crisis, on the one hand, and, on the other, the affirmation that military power is the only possible restorer of equilibrium. This military action shapes social reality on the basis of efficiency and proposes surgical extirpation of the enemy. Its antecedent is the Hitler decree that later became known under the infamous slogan of and fog, a technique used to make prisoners disappear and the entire system devised by Nazism for this purpose: disappearance in night and fog. The doctrine provides an ideological endorsement that legitimizes physical repression and elimination of the enemy at the same time as it manipulates people by arousing panic and terror through its multiplying effect. At the same time as this doctrine was being applied in Latin America, various systems of state violence were being developed in other regions of the world, such as apartheid in South Africa, the conflict in the Middle East, etc. In each of these regions an authoritarian government has used some methods that were specifically their own and others that we can regard as universal in terms of repression. They enable us to identify, together with our colleagues in other parts of the world, certain common factors and other specific ones, the products of the cultural context in which dictatorship is the reality.