Trauma and Performance: Lessons from Latin America

Abstract

Human Rights violations traumatize more than the immediate victims of “barbarous acts.” they wound families, communities, and entire societies sometimes for years, even generations. While the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights locates rights primarily in the individual (“Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law”), it is clear that “the human family” invoked in the opening sentence both sustains claims to inalienable rights and suffers from their transgression. Nonetheless, most responses to violations focus on individual victims almost to the exclusion of family and the broader community. Several countries sponsor “torture clinics” to reintegrate victims into society or find them asylum elsewhere. Survivors are diagnosed, and therapists help them work through their trauma in different ways, usually involving individual, group, and family therapy. These important programs medicalize trauma as individual pathology and attempt to reduce symptoms and empower survivors. However, even when particular programs are successful, problems and contradictions abound. Not all communities have access to mental health care. Not all governments are willing to sponsor programs that recognize the traumatic effects of their political actions. The wider impact of criminal politics on society as a whole remains unexplored. The question of whether society is the site of the so-called normal rather than a highly repressive or toxic environment is left unexamined. The individual becomes both the exclusive site of traumatic injury and the subject to be healed.