Barcelona, dissabte 23 de maig de 2015
Els fantasmes de Montes de Oca
«At the entrance of Pavilion 7 we observed a patient (No. 8849) with a diagnosis of profound mental retardation who was lying on the ground, naked except for a bedsheet pulled over his head, totally still.
We asked the staff what was the matter and they said he was sleeping. We saw that he had large fibrous scars on his abdomen (suggesting nephrectomy, kidney removal).
When questioned, the nurse in charge said she had no idea where the scars came from, but that they were probably self-inflicted, and gave no importance to them.»
en: Liliana Magrini y Mario Ganora: "Informe sobre violaciones graves de los derechos humanos (tratos y penas crueles, inhumanas y degradantes) a presos y minusválidos psíquicos en los establecimientos psiquiátricos Colonia Nacional Montes de Oca y Hospital Neuropsiquiátrico Domingo Cabred"
THE GHOSTS OF MONTES DE OCA:
buried subtext of Argentina's Dirty War
«No rhetorical flourishes: this work-in-progress is intended to provoke a longoverdue public dialogue on an ugly topic that refuses to stay disappeared. It treats a hidden battleground of Argentina's Dirty War (1976-83), a "petite war", a war within the war, directed by a military-appointed doctor against the mentally deficient inmates concentrated at the national psychiatric hospital, the Colonia Nacional Dr. Manuel Montes de Oca, and its sister institution, the Colonia Psiquiátrica Domingo Cabred, both in Buenos Aires province.
Buried in the historical, statistical, legal, and archival records, along with the key informant interviews, ethnographic observations, and photos is shattering evidence of medical human rights abuses committed under the necropolitics of the Dirty War against an abandoned population of mental "defectives" who were condemned to gratuitous suffering and early deaths at the psychiatric colony. In the worst instances, the abuses were crimes against humanity.
More immediate than a "militant" or "barefoot" anthropology, this is anthropology-by-the-seat-of-the pants, with much research conducted undercover: quick, episodic, heretical, and acutely disturbing. More graphic than ethnographic, my forthcoming book, from which this article is excerpted, is in part a psychiatric detective story.
However, it is foremost a medical human rights investigation. If I am wrong, I should be sued for libel. But if I am right, the Argentine Ministry of Health should be called on to establish a commission to investigate the unexplained deaths, the missing and the unidentified, the NN patients (from the latin: non nominates, those with no name), the unregistered pregnancies and births, and the removals and informal placements of infants born in the Colonia Nacional Montes de Oca, especially under the directorship of Florencio Sánchez, who became director there in 1978.
The ghastly reality of Montes de Oca is one that I have for some time treated with uncharacteristic reserve, because I found myself, as I studied it, immersed in a long-standing Argentine national nightmare, hallucinatory in quality, about the disappearance of a beautiful young psychiatrist, Cecilia Giubileo, from the Colonia grounds in 1986. Her body has never been found.
The questions that brought me to Colonia Montes de Oca in January 2000 for the first of four brief anthropological expeditions in 2000, 2001, 2008, and 2011 had nothing to do with the famous missing doctor, the last registered politically disappeared person in Argentina. In fact, her disappearance occurred two years after the Dirty War was over.
Rather, my mission, as director of Organs Watch and in the company of Hernán Reyes, medical director of the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC), was to investigate an article published in the British Medical Journal in 1992. (Vivek Chaudhary. Argentina uncovers mental patients killed for organs. British Medical Journal, international edition, 304: 6834, 25/04/1992, p. 1073-4)
The article reported the arrest of the director of the Colonia, Dr. Florencio Sánchez, and 11 members of his staff, charged with embezzlement of federal funds, dereliction of custodial duties, patient abuse, and tissue and blood trafficking.
They were also called on to account for the missing inmates and unexplained deaths at the mental colony. The charges included evidence that Sánchez and the Colonia staff had used mentally deficient inmates as guinea pigs in experimental research, and that some were allegedly injected with blood tainted with the vector of Chagas disease. At Montes de Oca, it appeared, confiscations of blood, tissues, cornea, and infants were normalized, routine practices.
(...)
The superintendent of Montes de Oca, military appointee Florencio Sánchez, had complete authority over some 1.300 to 1.500 inmates between 1978 and 1992. The asylum's official censuses for those years document the deaths under questionable circumstances of 1.350 patients and the escape, loss, or other disappearance of another 1.400.
However, during two official inquests (1986 and 1992) spurred by reports of irregularities at the Colonia, the judges were most positively impressed by Dr. Florencio Sánchez.
A self-described modern psychiatrist, Sánchez allowed patients to freely wander the grounds (an open door policy) and even to go beyond the gates and to enjoy many "human rights". The decision to wear clothing, for example, was left to personal "choice". Patients often came to the dining room tables naked.
As Sánchez himself noted, an unfortunate side effect of this open-door policy was that patients would sometimes get "lost". Sánchez allowed the inmates what he called a "controlled freedom".
It included sexual relations with each other (and with visitors), the right to become pregnant (but not to raise their children), and the right to refuse food, clothing, and medications, even when they were unable to feed themselves or to protect themselves from sexual exploitation. These rights were to be exercised, even when doing so resulted in the patient's death.
The history of the medically disappeared at Colonia Montes de Oca, and its sister institution, Colonia Cabred has been relegated to the realm of urban legend, rumor, and moral panic.
Kidnappings were a signal aspect of the Dirty War, but here no kidnappings were necessary. The condemned persons had already been handed over to their untrained, socially isolated executioners, recruited over four generations from the same village that depended almost exclusively on the Colonia for employment.
There was no "torture". The physical restraints and isolation cells and the confiscations of food, yerba mate, even water and clothing were described as therapy. Of course, there were no interrogations of the inmates, who "had no brains to wash", as Florencio Sánchez wrote in his prison diary while awaiting his own trial. (...)»
en: Nancy Scheper-Hughes. The Ghosts of Montes de Oca. The Americas: a quarterly review of Latin American history, 2015.
Caged inmates on view in dining hall at Pavilion 7, Colonia Montes de Oca, 2000.
Meals at Montes de Oca: clothing not required, 2003.
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