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Stephanie C. KaneIndiana University

The Art of Torture and the Place of Execution:A Forensic Narrative

In El Calafate, Argentina, a remote global nature tour destination where tourists

lodge en route to experience the spectacular glacial beauty of Patagonia, a 17-year-

old local boy was kidnapped and taken to an otherwise unremarkable waterscape

on the edge of town, where he was tortured and executed. His death, however, was

officially declared a suicide. The malevolence of his assailants and their protectorsmoved outward from the youths body and the crime site into the homes of despairing

and disbelieving family and friends, overflowing into private and public protest, all

to no avail. The crime and its aftermath dramatically altered the lives of the victims

working-class family and friends.

While their faith in the local police and courts has nearly been destroyed, and faith in

relevant human rights law barely ignited, continued communication about this crime

as part of an ongoing community disaster seems to infer an unspecified promise, or

at least, a stubborn desire, to continue seeking justice with words. In this article, I

explore the layered attempts of family and friends to narrate, counter, and untangle

the causes and effects emanating from the youths murder, the official evidence box,

and the spatially situated terror that persists. Mediated through ethnographic writing,

the forensic narration shows how violent crime distorts and divides human perception

of everyday places with ominous and artful precision. [human rights, Latin America,

terror, torture, violence]

IntroductionIn studies of cultural processes underpinning violence, scholars have given much

thought to the physical and social body (e.g., Aldama 2003; Lock 1993; Nelson 1999;

Robben and Suarez-Orozco 2000; Scarry 1985; Scheper-Hughes 1992; Scheper-

Hughes and Bourgois 2004). Place usually enters in as inert background, a stage

for violent performance, its aftermath a segregated arena subject to social control

(Caldeira 2000). Certain natural spaces or environments, however, are especially

susceptible to being chosen for violent action (Peluso and Watts 2001), and when

perpetrators select places to carry out criminal acts, they can imbue those places with

antisocial, antihuman agency. This current case shows how torturers and executionersextend the terroristic effects of extrajudicial acts by choosing a site that lays outside

the parameters of the tourist trade, casting a shadow over the everyday lives of local

residents. The response, in contrast, shows how counternarratives also anchored

PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 35, Number 1, pps. 5376. ISSN1081-6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association.All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2012.01179.x.


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Page 54 PoLAR: Vol. 35, No. 1

Figure 1: Perito Moreno glacier is part of the Andean ice field, one of the worlds

largest fresh water reserves. Note viewing platform in bottom right.

in the chosen site revisit and revise terrorist intentions. In short, the art of narration

and of torture reciprocate by linking word to place.

In his analysis of how artists produce meaning through the creation of art objects,

Alfred Gell (1998) argues that artists actually share social agency with both the art

objects themselves and the places through which art objects circulate to audiences. I

suggest here that torturers produce meaning by creating wounded and dead objects

out of healthy, living bodies. In so doing, they share agency not only with their

creations but with the places, in original and in circulated photographic form, where

their crimes occur. In other words, insofar as place holds and communicates the

meaning and effect of the crime, it sustains a measure of the perpetrators agency.

By manipulating properties in the physical world, artists and, by extension terrorists,

exert agency by reconfiguring physical space as causal milieu in which others can

later recognize their prior presence and intention (Gell 1998:1921).

This aspect of the social production of space (Lefebvre 1991) has been little explored.

Where the perpetrators are allegedly agents of the state, as in the case discussedhere, criminal creativity operates in contradiction to the rational abstractions of

engineers and real estate developers, which tend to dominate urbanized landscapes.

Such contradictions should probably complicate the understanding of Lefebvres

(1991:289) claim that: the space of a [social] order is hidden in the order of space

in significant ways. On the one hand, there is the violence to natural spaces carried

out forhuman beings that Lefebvre discusses. On the other hand, there is violence to


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human beings carried out in natural spaces at urban edges. Increasing co-occurrence

of these two forms of violence can be linked to authoritarian rule (Kane in press).

This is an account of what the family members and their allies believe the perpetrators

allegedly did to 17-year-old Tito when he was kidnapped and murdered one day in

November 15, 2005, in the upland edge of El Calafate. Away from the lakeside

cluster of tourist hotels, restaurants, and gift shops, unknown assailants drove the boy

to a rocky outcrop enclosing a streambed, tortured him, and left him hanging. Their

activities transformed an active youth into a corpse and a place for Sunday outings

into a landscape animated by terror. State officials subsequently covered up the crime,

potentiating its terroristic effects. By exploring aforementioned layered attempts to

come to grips with Titos death and the attendant facts and fears that situate events, I

joined Titos family and friends and, by extension, his community in their attempt to

weaken terrors grasp by taking back the power to control the contents and effects of

Titos life and death. By means of their composite forensic narrative that incorporates

and reinterprets criminal evidence, community members may not be able to settle

or adjudicate cases, but they can pursue questions about violence, justice, and the

meaning of place. In this article, using their words, I animate this pursuit. But what

kind of pursuit is this?

In Keith Bassos (1996) book, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language

Among the Western Apache, he maps a diverse topography densely packed with place-

names that index memorable past events. Interestingly, these descriptions focus asmuch on where the events occurred as on the nature and consequences of the events

themselves (Basso 1996:45). The Western Apache, as explained to Basso by Harry

Hoijer, use these spatially anchored place-names in certain storytelling moments

in order to strategically assert moral authority. By this means, they link the individual

target of a moral lesson to the very geography that itself communicates the lesson. As

a result, people can come to feel that places are stalking them or shooting them

with quite specific moral reminders (Basso 1996:3770). It is an effective, nonviolent

form of social control. Some aspect of this tradition linking narration and place can

surely be said to occur outside the cultural range of Western Apache landscapes.While there may be no similarly coherent tradition of place-naming in Patagonia, the

case in question here suggests that the genre I call forensic narrative can also reassert

moral authority through the landscape of crime.

Method and Purpose

In the course of an ethnographic fieldwork project on water and social justice issues in

Buenos Aires, I began an email correspondence with Mara Elena Biccio, a member

of the Patagonian environmental NGO, El Calafate Natural. Retired both from vet-erinary medicine and from being rector of the high school that Titos sister attended,

Malena, as everyone calls her, writes and hosts radio shows about local environ-

mental issues, and is raising her children, including a daughter about Titos age.1 In

her email to me, her compendium of emergencies contained these two sentences: A

boy was found in our creek hanging from a cliff with tied hands and feet. Justice

decided it was suicide. She attached her story about the facts, which had been


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chosen in a contest and published, ending her message with: But this is the other

side of this beautiful place where people are stricken by landscape promotion. She

invited me to El Calafate, among other things, to learn and write about Titos case. So,

before ending fieldwork (August 2007), I flew down to Patagonia and spent five days,during which time I held five interviews with Malena and Titos family and friends

about his murder. The serendipitous, intense, and brief relationship with the forensic

narrators challenged my skills at capturing experience in word and image. Situating

myself rhetorically as a vulnerable observer (Behar 1996), I claim that there is more

to my method here than forensic journalism and bearing witness, although these two

genres provide the scaffolding for the articles ethical core (Comaroff 2010:532).

Without access to Titos assailants or legal documentation of motive, I present the

perspective of those who resisted victimization.

As Fortun (2001) has shown through her advocacyethnography with victims of

the Union Carbide chemical disaster (and crime) in Bhopal, India, the meaning

of a disaster cannot be stabilized. Yet, through the writing process, a disaster can

become a prism for drawing a shifting world order into visibility and for giving

support to enunciatory communities that arise out of the particular force fields

and contradictions that disaster creates (Fortun 2001:1011). As writing and reading

witnesses, anthropologists can operate otherwise where there are no institutional

justice systems able, willing, or accessible to record the truth, weigh the evidence,

or reconcile systematic cruelty with everyday life. This practice can be extended to

experiences of a more intimate scope, such as Titos demise. His torture and death,

and the alleged complicity of local state officials, produced a threatening cloud that

enveloped those closest to him, those in his age cohort, and, indeed, according to

Malena, all the high school students who imagine themselves as similar victims.

In addition to drawing on anthropological work on language, landscape, and advocacy,

I turn also to forensics as a way to articulate why the family and friends put their

telling-forms into circulation as they do and how, by this communicative action, they

attempt to fill the gap between the official stance and the familys deep suspicion.

As Crossland (2009:69) explains, forensic anthropologists bring the dead into beingthrough exhumation and analysis. Although bodily remains are not the question

here, a forensic aspect also resides in photographs that, like corpses, Crossland

explains, privilege the ability to make an absent person immediately present to

the senses and, in so doing, to both allow one to act on a person and to feel them

acting on oneself (Crossland 2009:69, 73; see also Cashell 2007). Titos killing

can fit into the broad category of what Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1997), drawing on

Franco Basaglia, calls Peace-Time Crimes, although his societal position and the

consequent societal reaction are different from the street children in Brazil and South

Africa, whose assassinations meet with widespread acceptance (see Scheper-Hughes1992:219226). As a member of a supportive working-class family, Tito enjoyed a

comfortable, if not overly privileged, home life. Although the community clearly

does not accept attacks against their youth, the impunity of the perpetrators in this

case has, nevertheless, been sustained. By whom and why, is not at all clear. What

is clear is the communities refusal to accept victimhood as standard, a refusal that

is being enacted through forensic narration. And now, through the medium of this


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scholarly article, their forensic narrative, along with its patterned sense of danger and

accountability, escapes the perpetrators physical geography.

The next five sections of this article organize the observations and interpretations

of events as told to me by Malena and Titos family and friends. The first section

narrates the discovery of the corpse in the ravine (see the section titled News). The

subsequent sections focus on the situated communication of knowledge and emotion

as it relates to particular kinds of evidentiary objects and places. These include placing

Malena and I at the edge of the criminalized waterscape (A Forensic Narrative

Becomes Part of an Ethnographic Record); discussing the alleged appropriation of an

illicit visual idiom by Titos assailants (A Graffito); examining the personal effects

and forensic evidence with his family (The Evidence Box); analyzing the town

youths unsatisfied quest for justice (Posters in the Wind); and finally, describing the

place-bound (dis)appearance of crimes memory (Clean-Up). Each section shows

how the crime scene penetrates the everyday world. By giving primacy to the meaning

of place in the forensic narrationas both fixed in space (landscape) and mobile

(representations, feelings, memories) I offer a new approach to understanding

the agency of those who perpetrate and those who resist terror in this and other

contexts.

News

Titos mother, father, sister, girlfriend, and a friend of the family reconstructed the

following events for Malena and me at the kitchen table before retrieving the evidence

box:

The family learned what happened late on the 15th of November, 2005. Someone

told a family member that they saw Tito earlier; he had been beaten and was being

pushed into a vehicle. As far as they knew, that persons observation never entered

the official record. Because of his new job, Tito left home at 7 a.m., in order to meet a

truck downtown; and because he attended evening high school, no one expected him

home before nightfall. So, except for a prescient forewarning relayed by a seer whoread Titos sisters cards the night before the family got the news, they lived through

the tragic day completely unaware. The family assigns a great deal of significance

to the delay of official notification. People in El Calafate, like folk in small towns

anywhere, know each other intimately, and not much in a public space goes unnoticed.

This makes the delay of sending the tragic news to the family grievously suspect.

About 3 p.m., American tourists went to the police station to report a body hanging

lifeless from a rock in the ravine where theyd been hiking. (Tourists come to this

small town specifically to visit the Perito Moreno glacier. In hiking through an aquatic

site closer to town, and more appropriate to locals enjoying Sunday barbeques, the

tourists explored behind the usual dramatic glacial scene.) The family was given a

tourists name and passport number, but despite their efforts to follow the lead, they

never located him.

They learned, however, that the police accompanied the tourist back to the crime

scene, photographed and retrieved the clearly bleeding and bruised body, and brought


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Figure 2: All evidence indicates lynching, not suicide (photo in evidence box).

it to the hospital. Significantly, the police did not put tape around or otherwise protect

or secure the crime area. We all agreed that this departure from standard procedure

suggests that the police may have been predisposed to contaminate a crime scene if

not, indeed, to vitiate evidence.

The police finally informed Titos parents around 6 p.m. Even then, the police pre-vented them seeing the body immediately. In the interim, the family went to the

place of execution. Eventually, the police briefly guided Titos parents to a dimly

lit room to identify the body. In the first moments of seeing him, the profusion of

wounds immediately triggered three parental questions: inflicted how, by whom and

why? It would take time to put the pieces of this puzzle together. In the meantime,

the police categorized the death as a suicide and sent the body to a larger town for

autopsy, giving the official reason that their town had no medical forensic expert.

Titos parents frantically sought help, but they met only with closed doors. That

night and the following days, they approached a doctor, judge, journalist, lawyer,and other town officials, all of whom remained silent. The medical examiner sent

official word from the provincial capital, declaring asphyxia as the cause of death.

The corpse was brought back to town at 4 a.m.. That day, November 16th, the coffin

was opened during the vigil and Malena saw the wounds. A second autopsy was

performed 20 days later. As Young (1996:111145) finds in her analysis of the legal

and media discourse surrounding the 1993 murder of 2-year-old James Bulgur by two


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Figure 3: Scene of the crime, man hiking on sunny day.

older boys, and as Apel (2008) finds in her analysis of how art gallery audiences read

lynching photographs, those working to understand trauma operate within a limited

field of vision. As in these cases, the limits of Titos parents vision simultaneously

demanded and prevented interpretation.

As first seen on the body by Titos parents in the dimly lit room, then pondered

as the weeks and months wore on, and as revealed in the evidence box opened the

night I did the kitchen-table interview on August 12, 2007, two major gaps between

authority and plausibility deepened the trauma of Titos death. The first major gapis a preponderance of physical evidence indicating the impossibility of suicide. This

consensus was established in my presence among those looking at the photographs

in the evidence box, and I also judge the consensus valid (discussed below). The

second gap is that the medical examiners diagnosis of asphyxia states the obvious:

the proximate cause of Titos death was lack of oxygen. The diagnosis sidesteps

the question of how and why his airways were choked off; it also leaves aside

bodily wounds, backpack taped over his head, and ropes tying limbs as matters for

legal consideration. The official determination of suicide ignores all ambiguous or

inconsistent evidence suggesting the likelihood that, directly or indirectly, voluntarilyor through coercion, the medical examiner was protecting the assailants and those

who motivated them. It is not just bad characters that vitiated the evidence; the justice

system itself is deeply implicated in tending faulty forensic material. The official

determination provoked a counter-forensic narrative that details many more gaps

between the official account and plausibility (see Tables 1 and 2) while also serving

as a vehicle for expressing fear, anger, and despair.


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Table I. Material Grounds for Suspecting State Cover-Up

Source Suspicious Contradictions Material Evidence

Other people present at the scene

3 Tito was wearing sneakers Photo shows footprint from military

boot; Titos sneakers returned in box

3 Tito liked Gatorade, not Coca-Cola Photos of Coca-Cola bottle at scene

2 Human feces at scene were not Titos (according to

parents)

Human feces at scene

Inconsistent with asphyxia as primary cause of

death

1 Could not be self-inflected Many wounds and bruises on body

3 Could not be self-inflected Photos showed testicles beaten

3 How can someone commit suicide if hands and feet

are tied?

Photos of bound hands, and of wounds

on hands and feet consistent with

rope bindings (see Figure 5)

3 Why/how would someone alone tape his mouth shut

before putting a backpack over his head and

taping it closed?

Photos of wounds on mouth where

taped shut; photo of roll of tape

3 Evidence of battery Photos of blood dripping from various

wounds (see Figure 5)

2 Evidence of battery Blood all over the rock face

2 Evidence of battery Small pieces of bloodied paper at

scene

3 Tito did not like to drink alcohol Autopsy showed alcohol in brain

3 If asphyxia primary cause of death, skin should have

been blue

Skin not blue

Missing evidence or procedure

2 Police did not treat place as possible scene of crime No police tape cordoning off and no

one guarding scene

3 Tito was wearing them in morning Missing pants

3 Tito usually carried about 200 pesos Only about 15 pesos in pockets

3 Should have been key evidence identifying

perpetrator(s)

No fingerprints were collected from

tape used to bind mouth shut

Other irregularities

1 Delay of several hours before parents could see body Room where body lay was dimly lit3 Witness saw beaten Tito put in vehicle (according to

information told to parents)

Missing identification and testimony

of witness

3 Tito liked nice, clean, stylish clothes Muddied clothes

Note: 1 = morgue; 2 = place of execution at dawn the following day; 3 = evidence box.

As Malena explained to me at the ravine interview on August 11, 2007, and the

family circle verified at the kitchen table on August 12, 2007, Tito was neither anangel nor a great student, but he did not take drugs or get drunk. He distanced

himself from the more harmful aspects of his cohorts social life. Indeed, he was

known for being the person who would reliably accompany intoxicated friends home

after dance parties. He got his girlfriend pregnant when they were fifteen, and she

gave birth to their daughter. So that he could pay child support, Tito recently began

driving his fathers rented tank truck, delivering water for public works. The police


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gathered testimony about various incidents: once Tito mocked a police officer, he

had gotten into at least one fistfight, and he stole another boys bread money one day.

In their investigations after the murder, the police elicited these negative testimonies

from townspeople in order to create the profile of a bad kid. But, basically, Titowas an ordinary boy, loved by his family, well liked by schoolmates, and unlikely

to have any special information of interest to torturers with conventional political

motives.

In sum, Titos character and life history seems inconsistent with either suicide or his

murder brought on by his own behavior. Family and friends believe that revenge, if

not the sole motive, played a paramount role in his killing. Malena diagrammed the

specific characters of the town who inhabited, and continue to inhabit, the web of

suspicion. Later, she sent me a supplementary list with more details. I refer to the

characters here by pseudonyms to permit readers to follow the plot and to protect the

identity of all concerned.

A few days before Tito was killed, Senor Alvarez was released from prison. Almost

two decades ago, Alvarez had been convicted of the torture and murder of an ex-

policeman who had been working nights as a security guard in a local hotel. The

security guard happened to overhear men talking about the details of a crime they

had committed. These men then executed the security guard. Titos father was a key

witness in Alvarezs trial, in which Alvarez was convicted and sent to prison for

that murder. The co-incidence of Alvarezs release from prison and Titos tortureand murder was not lost on anyone familiar with the circumstances, nor were the

connections between the now-released convicted murderer and his allies in the town.

Alvarez is friends with Senor Gonzalez, who has twice been sent to jail for stealing

and assaulting people, and who is the brother of Senor Guzman who worked in the

mayors office at the time of Titos death. Indeed, Guzman was still working in the

town hall at the time of my visit. Gonzalez had threatened Titos father earlier, soon

after his denunciation of Senor Alvarez at the trial. Now, after Alvarezs release,

he showed up at Titos familys house for a chat. In addition, a message was left

on a family members cell phone: We are going to get your brother. The family

repeatedly called the number back but no one answered. After Titos death, they

realized that they had not taken these threatening communications seriously enough.

The strongest theory is that a criminal network with personal ties to the local govern-

ment is an entrenched threat, suppressing overt challenges to crimes and cover-ups.

Moreover, Malena and the family believe that the larger, more diffuse effects of the

crime against Tito and its cover-up reinforce structural inequalities. In this small-scale

local economy, most local youth face a menial horizon of opportunity as service-

workers for the ultra-upscale global tourist trade that is, as several people told me,controlled by untouchable commercial interests, some of which are tied to Christina

Kirchner, Argentinas current president and then-President Nestor Kirchner, now-

deceased, both of whom established their political careers in the province. Malenas

unanswered questions do not let the singularly unstable meaning of Titos death lan-

guish in his personal oblivion: Is terrorizing youth a mechanism of social control?

If so, why? In anthropological terms: Is the violence against poor and working-class


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Table II. Material evidence in order of handling and processing by family and friends (as photographed

by ethnographer)

Evidence Form Description

1 OfDoc:

Photograph #1

A hand with fingers curled under; abrasions on skin of knuckles

and fingers, which were swollen; the swoop of a Nike insignia

appears on the material underneath the hand; 2 bracelets on wrist

(macrame and metal)

2 OfDoc:

Photograph #2

Bruised arm and chest; necklace dangling

3 OfDoc:

Photograph #3

Like photo in row 1, but with greater contrast: hand wounds more

defined

4 OfDoc:

Photograph #4

Underside of hand with fingers curled under; on the bottom edge of

the photographic paper: official state seals, typed names and

positions of officials with ornately abstract signatures

5/6 PerEF: Pullover Half-dark color and half-white with designer logo, similar in style

to the one worn in Titos wall portrait; second view focuses on

white portion of sleeve (wrist end) with large spot of dried blood

7/8 PerEF: Backpack Inside-out backpack of cobalt blue, inside plastic smeared with

dried blood; outside design of a big sky blue flowers and an

abstract Hip-Hop style patch; the name Negri vivo [Negri live]

in white magic marker: the design smeared with blood

9 PerEF: Sneakers (See Figure 5 for photo of pullover, backpack and sneakers.)

10 PerEF: Belt Loop of grey canvas army belt with metal clasp

11 Other: Rope Rope with two carabineers on top of large pile of photographs

12 OfDoc:

Photograph #5

Death portrait, in profile, eyes open and luminous, looking

downward, as if died with tears in his eyes; top lip straining

upward in a grimace, as if in pain; a savage wound where the

rope broke his neck; he wears necklaces; the states official

stamp on the border

13 OfDoc:

Photograph #6

Death portrait, front of face posed towards camera shows broken

front tooth (in contrast to the perfect smile on the wall portrait)

14 OfDoc: Composite

photograph #1

Three artifacts in three separate photos arranged on page: glass

bottle of Coca-Cola; a small cardboard box of Baggio juice; a

roll of brown adhesive tape. Typed label typed identifies the

images as panoramic photographs; the composite is stampedwith the state seal, in which flourishing signatures appear

15 OfDoc: Text In my photograph, the sisters hands are shown feeling and reading

a typed paragraph in a document from the evidence box that

delineates the official version of events

16 OfDoc: Composite

photograph #2

Two photos, each with a label that they are part of a series collected

at scene related to case # X. Top: shows close-up of body, the

head inside the flowered backpack tied off with rope at the neck;

blood ran in dried streams down chest. Bottom: shows the rope,

official state seals stamped in border

17 OfDoc:

Photograph #7

Same as top image in Composite Photograph in row 16 with

different perspectives on body and backpack18 OfDoc:

Photograph #8

Shows front view of the body hanging from rocky cliff outcrop, the

image is consistent with the genre of U.S. lynching photographs.

The official seal appears in the border [see Figure 2]

(Continued)


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Table II. Continued

Evidence Form Description

19 OfDoc:Photograph #9

Back view of image in row 17, also with official seal.

20 OfDoc: Map Map of place of execution drawn by an apparently careful,

competent hand. A curving section of the stream and an adjacent

rocky calcium carbonate (limestone?) wall are drawn and

labeled. A large dot within an enclosing squiggle interrupts the

rock face, indicating the bodys more precise location. Capital

letters A through H are scattered next to small dots, presumably

indicating location of documented objects. The border contains

the official state seal, a signature, and a compass direction

indicating east.

21 OfDoc:

Photograph #10

Difficult to decipher, except for clear image of backpack. It seems

as if the photographer was looking down on the hanging body

from above.

Note: OfDoc = Official Document; PerEF = Personal Effects; Oth = Other.

adolescents functionally related to the unique political and economic character of the

town?

This web of suspicion and worry informed the depressing atmosphere that dominated

the weeks and months following Titos murder, during which his family and many

friends in his age cohort (15 to 18 year olds) tried without success to bring attention

to the obvious and extreme injustice in the way the case was handled. By the time

Malena had recruited me, almost two years had passed.

A Forensic Narrative Becomes Part of an Ethnographic Record

On the second full day in El Calafate, August 10, 2007, we drove to the waterscape

where Tito was hanged. It looks like a Wild West landscape from an old sepia-tone

movie. The river meanders, enclosed by rocky hills that are brown and grey in the

wintry mist. Seemingly pinned to a random overlook, we huddled against the cold.

Jason, my partner and project videographer, films Malena telling me of known events

and questions surrounding the crime. In situ, her narration spins out into the space

envelope (Lefebvre 1991) that in-forms and defines our relation to the space of Titos

death. In contrast to Taussigs (1987:336) conceptualization of torture and terror as

ritualized art forms that create a generalized space of death, this account emphasizes

a specific space of death emanating a quite specific, albeit mysterious, threat. The

precise outcrop remains beyond a bend or two from where we stand. Even the next

day, when the snow stopped and we returned and got closer to the exact spot, it

seemed fetishistic to pursue.

This marginal waterscape seems susceptible to appropriation for good or evil. The

waterscape nestles in the uplands some distance from the buildings in the town center,

which cluster on lower ground beside a lake.


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Figure 4: Town and lake from uplands.

As the town grows, it stretches out and upward; though still sustained by the places

topography, the sense of distance from the towns bustling social life diminishes. 0ut

of sight from ravine-side, except for the windblown plastic wrappings of construction

materials that rise from their midst, new little suburban houses, built on the other side

of the road, run along the ridge.

Marginality can be a good thing for a waterscape, imparting not just a spatial separa-

tion but a healthy change in atmosphere. Liminal and edgy, the streams meandering

through the hills invites people to take active pleasures and to engage each other

and nature symbolically with ritual attention, like having a family barbeque or a

romantic get-away on a sunny day. But for those drawn into the shared victim-circle

of Titos death, the torturers art charges the waterscape with menace. It has become

a haunted death chamber, its soul-destroying conditions and intentions as alive as the

photographs of Abu Ghraib (Brown 2005). The calculated criminal ensemble of that

murderous nightespecially for Titos family and classmates at schoolwill forever

tint the lens through which the community interprets the meaning of the riverbank,

even if the humanwaterscape relation heals. For those distant from or ignorant of

the terror of this place, it remains a fine place for a stroll. For those in the know, the

feeling-tone (Williams 1977) of everyday life shifted off-center.

Graffito

The art of torture, like the art of war, entails systematic ensembles of controlled

violence and effective site decisions (Sun Tzu 1971). Combining this insight with


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Gells approach to artistic agency, I argue that torturers reproduce an aesthetic of

violence that draws on the situated power of place to catapult their acts into the

cultural atmosphere.

The next afternoon, on August 11, 2007, after a trip to the overtaxed sewage treatment

plant beside the lagoon, where vigilant hawks were standing on the fence line, Malena

took me to talk to Titos childhood friend. His family lives in a small cozy house in the

same working-class neighborhood as Titos. Malena and the boys girlfriend stayed

in the kitchen; the boy and I sat on the couch in the living room. The interview lasted

only a few minutes. Tense and withdrawn, he showed me a photo of himself and Tito

as small boys riding bikes in open racing ground, the poles of the finish behind them.

Someone had pasted a cartoon bubble coming out of Titos head, Y este de d onde

sali o? [And this one, where did he come from?]. Then, in a barely audible voice,

he told me that someone had spray-painted a graffito on a rock face at the murder

scene. In the style ofchicos de la calle (street kids), the painted words had something

to do with illegal drugs. He wanted me to know that kids certainly did not paint it,

and by inference, he believed that the killers painted it. He also expressed concern

about a bloody handkerchief, although he did not elaborate regarding who had the

handkerchief or its relevance to the murder. The boy clearly wanted to help solve the

mystery, but as I could observe from his demeanor, fear clearly held him tightly in

its grip. While the solitary, edgy nature of his claim gives pause, his willingness to

divulge his concern showed courage in the face of vulnerability. I put great weight

on his testimony, even as I realize that further research among peers might reveal a

range of interpretations regarding the graffitos import or lack thereof.

Assuming then, for the purpose of this analysis and consistent with my trust in the

adult consensus, that what the boy revealed is true, the falsified graffito points to

an important key to unlocking our understanding of how the placement of objects

and images ensconce themselves in the causal milieu of terrorism.2 Insofar as the

youth recalls the graffito, or imagines it, the graffito or its image transmuted and

became part of the torturers art, a prop that supplemented Titos corpse as an object

communicating the perpetrators distributed agency. (When we filmed at the stream,Malena also told me about the graffito and indicated its placement on the rock wall.)

The graffito linked the battered corpse and the rocky outcrop, above the stream from

which the corpse hung, to networks of global struggle involving states, drug and arms

dealers, the young, minority, and the poor.3 The graffito addressed a specific local

audience by appropriating the visual idiom of global youth (graffiti) and twisting the

spirit of resistance, fun, and anger characteristic of youth who practice it. Although

unproved, the plausibility of Titos friends graffito-inspired fear leads me to speculate

about the tactic used: by injecting the graffito with content from the global war on

drugs, the alleged assailant-graffito artist attempted to conflate the memory of Titowith acts officially considered deviant, thereby appropriating nature as a stage set for

assassination not only of person, but of character.

The boys testimony about the graffito contains that descriptive specificity that Basso

(1996:47) finds distinctively characteristic of Western Apache place-names. As de-

scribed above, spatial anchors serve as situating devices for storytellers who, by


14/24


means of their performance, create an active moral link between a past event, the

storytellers target, and a place. If an event in question involves an intentionally

harmful deed that alters the meaning of a specific place, that is, a crime scene, the

storyteller appropriates that altered meaning and turns it toward others.4 The spatialanchors, then, can continue shooting the targets of tales over time, while more broadly

reproducing traditional ways of relating culture to place. In Titos case, the forensic

narrative that emerges shares this dynamic potential, although for multiple reasons,

targets remain publicly unspecified.

How place-based storytelling works once it enters mass mediated channels is an open

question. In addition to the graffito, the family told me that they believed that the

counsel for the defense, who was provided by the mayor, used the radio to disseminate

the unsubstantiated information that Tito had been searching a suicide website, in

order to make it appear as if the police were actually investigating his death, at the

same time spreading a rumor intended both to allay public concern and to support the

official view of the case. In effect then, those who knew Tito well enough to decipher

the false rumor understood the use of graffito and public misinformation as part of

another vital layer by the purveyors of fear. By understanding this layer, a crucial clue

emerges as an answer to Allen Feldmans (1996:52) question, How do the assailants

materialize and channel their violence to create the sensory ecology of terror?

[L]ittle has been said about the performative infrastructure of acts of

violence and of the political iconography they project, even though it isthis actual enactment of violence upon the bodies and spaces of others

that constitutes the material substrate and the material culture of the

conflict. [Feldman 1996:52]

Only a sector of the audience would feel victimized by the use of telecommunication

infrastructure to mediate public opinion regarding Titos death: his family, friends,

and, more generally, the town youth. For those who resist victimhood, the forensic

narrative form provides a vehicle of expression that counters the effects of the crime,

the cover-up, and its dissemination in popular media. For scholars, analysis of the

forensic narrative can illuminate dynamics of relationships between place, affect,

technology, and violence.

To return to Titos friends testimony: I take its limitations as a form of precision, not

weakness. The graffito interpretation supports the contentiongrounded in Malenas

observations of the effects of events on youth and on my analysis that the assailants

purloined the visual language of global youth as an alibi that had the secondary

function of terrorizing this towns youth. Because those who knew him, or of him,

knew Tito as a good, ordinary kid, the message from the assailants to the towns

youth cultivated the fear that any kid could be abducted and destroyed with impunity.Depending on the power of deviant labels, the graffito that linked the untimely death

to the drug scene might lull those who did notknow Tito into complacency in regard

to the untimely death, as if such forms of deviance were sufficient to allow people to

shrug off the specter of injustice. Titos friend was setting the record straight when

he talked to me (it was not youth who spray-painted the message), but he was also

conveying the active import of the graffito as a continuing threat to local youth. The


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May 2012 Page 67

day after my interview with the boy, his mother told Malena that our brief conversation

was the first time, as far as she knew, that he had ever spoken about Titos murder.

The bodies of young men and women, boys and girls, continue to be abducted,

tortured, raped, and executed in Latin America (Bejarano 2003:407; Linger 2003;

Scheper-Hughes 1992:219226, 2003). Their tortured corpses are commonly dis-

posed of after dark in marginal areas of towns and cities, such as roadside ditches

and marshlands.5 Often, their personal identities are obscured by damaging their

fingertips, by burning, or crushing faces and skulls. Many have been disappeared

completely. The emotional effect of the corpses on the uncomprehending living is

bound to the painful knowledge that they were tortured until death. These painful emo-

tions are distributed in communities and reside in places later marked (sometimes

only ephemerally) with altars, flowers, memorial plaques, songs, and testimonials

(Isbell 1998; Jelin 2003; Nelson 2009; Taylor 2003).

Titos case fits securely in these general phenomena. At the same time, the degree

to which the features of his identification remained visible and with the arrangement

at the crime scene enhanced, everything settled into the macabre. Indeed, they

sent a political message: first, through the blatant and arrogant crudeness with which

the perpetrators faked a cover-up and alibi, and second, through the readiness with

which local state officials allegedly accepted or were otherwise implicated in the

cover-up, closing all paths to official acknowledgement that any crime had been

committed at all. The terror arose out of contradiction, the impossibility of A and notA simultaneously. The declaration of criminal impunity by the institution, purportedly

striving for criminal justice, was crystal clear and present. Local and regional officials

made clear to communicate to the circle of people who cared about Tito and the

towns youth that they were trapped, vulnerable, and without protection. Under

the circumstances, we should understand that the torture, execution, and graffito

at the scene all convey to Titos contemporaries that they were in the same pool of

potential victimhood.6

Evidence Box

In response to public disbelief and outcry in the outcome of the first autopsy, officials

agreed to perform a second autopsy with an identical result: death by asphyxia. Still

disbelieving, family and friends were then told that without new evidence, the case

would not be reopened. Oddly, the police followed standard procedure in recently

making the evidence box available to the family.

As first discussed above, on Sunday, August 12, my fourth full day in the town,

Malena and I met with Titos parents, one of his five siblings, and a family friend.We sat down to talk at the big, round kitchen table covered with a tablecloth of

dark blue under white lace. I was facing Titos photograph, blown-up to fit the wall

that connected the open entrance area to the kitchen. Para mis viejos y hermanos

[For my old ones and siblings] is scrolled along the bottom in Spanish. It showed

a handsome visage with a big smile, bright eyes, hair curling down into a long,

heart-shaped face and edging fuzzily along a chin jutting out over the turtle-neck of


16/24


Figure 5: Blood dripping, hands tied (photo of corpse in evidence box).

a dapper blue and white athletic jacket. On the wall above, someone had painted a

small heart. A set of trophies sat on the bookshelf alongside. He had been the eldest

child.

After introductory conversation, the family began the narrative by talking about the

ravine, where they went on November 15th, while waiting to see the body, and then

again at dawn the next day. The narrative shifted back and forth from the place of

execution to the specious actions of officials (see Table 1 for details).

An hour or so into the telling, Titos mother left the house, coming back shortly

thereafter with the box of evidence they had received and stored at someone elses

home. I believe that the family decided that, as long as they strayed into this painful

territory for the interview, they might as well confront the contents of the box. Forme, the emotional confrontation with the evidence radically shifted my role on the

continuum from observer to participant; from this point on, I co-produced the forensic

narrative. The case number of the box was labeled in big block computer-generated

letters and stamped with the official state seal. They took out each item one-by-one,

handled it, talked about what it meant, and empathized with what Tito probably felt

when he was in the hands of his assailants. Titos sister picked the objects out of the


17/24

May 2012 Page 69

Figure 6: Pullover, backpack, sneakers from evidence box, handled, discussed,

folded.

box, holding and turning each carefully for all to see and discuss, before refolding

and reorganizing them.

I photographed the items, took notes, and participated in the conversation. Although

incomplete, the list and its description suggests the tensions between the excruciating

emotions entailed in the familys processing of the box and the purportedly neutral

documentary ordering conventions of officialdom (see details in Table 2).

Even at the height of the dictatorships in the southern cone in the 1970s and 1980s,when military assailants kidnapped and tortured thousands before, for example,

dumping them naked and drugged into the Plate River, they felt compelled to destroy

official evidence of their crimes.7 One of the oddest things about Titos case was that

the police sent a box that contained not only Titos personal effects (clothes, sneakers,

jewelry) but also overwhelming evidence confirming the familys conviction that his

death could not have been a suicide. Why provide the family with forensic evidence

at all, much less forensic evidence that verifies an official cover-up? One possibility:

individuals existed within the police force who wished to undermine the cover-up and

give strength to the family, should they wish to pursue justice along some unknownfuture path. Another, contradictory, possibility: the very usefulness of the evidence

against the perpetrators and their collaborators contained in the box only emphasized

and exacerbated the futility of the pain it caused, and the continuing threat inherent in

official indifference. So, while the evidence contains objects and images that signify

in powerful and specific ways the manner of their sons torture and execution, by

whom the box was composed and sent and why remain undecidable questions. And


18/24


yet, Derrida inspires this insight: Undecidability is always a determinate oscillation

between possibilities . . . . These possibilities are themselves highly determined in

strictly defined situations (Wirth 2003:38). In practical terms then, the forensic nar-

rative in question reflects both the specific possibilities regarding what happened andwho might be responsible; at the same time, it is trapped in a narrative of fundamental

undecidability.

Sitting with them, I felt as if the soul of the cozy family circle got sucked out

through the box and into the dark cold night of the secuestro (kidnapping). As our

concentration fixated on the contents emerging from the box, the haunted riverbank

invaded the domestic scene. We seemed held in suspension between Titos bigger-

than-life smiling portrait on the wall and his grimacing death portrait, between the

brownish-red blood drippings on the blue and white designs of the backpack and the

grey tones of the black and white photos. The downcast eyes of the death portrait

appear luminous, showing the family, they said, that he died crying and asking for help.

Titos personhood was stolen and redistributed in these official shadows: the ruined

clothes and sneakers folded in with textbooks, labels, seals and photos of the mur-

derers empty drink containers. I watched them trace the over-zealous signature lines

of officials who overwrote the authority of state seals stamped atop the photo of the

boys drained face. But it was not just Titos personhood that was stolen. The family

read their own resemblance in the shape of his dead face. With confused dismay,

his sister held the backpack that the killers had forced over his head, her backpack,which he had borrowed: visual and tactile connections bound them to the box, the

place of execution, and the perpetrators. Captivated by the box, the circle around the

kitchen table traced the assailants acts of torture on Titos body. It forced us to guess

the precise technical steps that led to his fatal wounding and asphyxiation, and by

whose hand. A mapping of the forensic process was also at work: an on-scene pho-

tographer and cartographer; a person to arrange and transport the corpse; a morgue

photographer composing portraits of face and hands; a typist of labels. Demoralized,

we registered our relative powerlessness as recipients of the work of artist-torturers

and their documenting minions. We were trapped by this box, which embodied theagency of assailants whom we could not know, whose intentions we could not deci-

pher. We could more or less figure out what they did in a technical sense to effect

the transformation of smiling boy into grimacing corpse, but we could not see or

understand the critical path from the brutal crime, to the box of evidence, to the

complete absence of justice (cf. Gell 1998:7172).

This ethnographic account of the opening and handling of the evidence box narrates

the familys perspective; organizes thoughts; reorders layers of meaning; and grounds

suspicions, giving them the last word. The forensic narrative that we have co-produced

begins to unwind the boxs binding spell, as noted by Riles (Briggs 2007:318).

Posters in the Wind

The injustice emanating from the place of execution and the halls of officialdom in-

voked outrage in the public and in domestic space. Spearheaded by Titos age cohort,


19/24

May 2012 Page 71

the townspeople marched in the center of town demanding justice. But momentum

dissipated after the first series of protests did not lead to any hope of serious reconsid-

eration of the crime and the cover-up. The final protest was paradigmatic of the social

tear in the small towns heart. The high schools student coreMalenas studentshad, by this time, been abandoned by their elders, as she described. Her concern for

them, for the assault on their faith in democratic action, drove our collaboration. The

dwindled group of marchers carried posters with images of the living boy and the text

Justice for Tito. The winds were unusually strong that day. She watched with dis-

may as the youthful figures strained against natures force, desperately gripping the

wood posts and bending paper the material expression of their democratic ideals.

There was no outside world to watch them, as had occurred when the Grandmothers

and Mothers of Buenos Aires and Santiago marched and chained themselves to the

plazas and iron fences of government dictators, their hands holding similar placardswith images of disappeared children (Bejarano 2003; Taussig 1992:3752; Taylor

2003:161189). In this town, except for the shocked tourists who found Titos body,

the outside world sees only the enchanted veil of natures glacial spectacle. After that

windy day, Titos family asked the youth to desist from further public protest because

the events stoked their pain without ever eliciting answers to their questions.8

Clean-Up

Standing above the snowy streambed the afternoon that Malena narrated Titos story,

we commented on the rustic beauty of the setting. She told me that it looks as good as

it does because her environmental group, El Calafate Natural, organized a community

clean-up here on the previous Earth Day. People customarily throw their garbage in

the river that, together with the plastic debris from house construction blowing in

from over the ridge, made this placelike so many other places on urban margins

look more like a wasteland than a natural haven. On a deeper level, she explained to

me that the environmental action also suggested a way to alter its history as a place of

execution, a way to reverse the art of torture that wound its savagery into the psyches

of local inhabitants.

Terror leaves traces of earlier acts and emerges anew in unexpected places: It is in

the nature of signs to repeat themselves, continuing to stretch their meaning into the

future, but never exactly in the same way (though compare to Derrida in Wirth 2003).

In the center of town, on a freshly white-painted corner wall, a set of colorfully

rendered logos of the towns best hotels greets passersby. Among them, Malena

points out, is the logo of the hotel where the security guard overheard something that

resulted in his torture and murder by Alvarez. As an artistic sign of commerce, visitors

from distant lands who come to see natures dramatic spectacle would see no morethan a hotels colorful logo; but for local people in the know, the logo may encode

the sites extrajudicial execution. All towns have such disjunctures of perception

and history, reminders of unsettled misdeeds arising along daily pathways. All have

distorted patterns of silence and voice (Pereira 2008). Without justice, the emotion

and motion of threat renews itself. Short of justice, or even certainty, I have entered

and endeavored to untangle the web of torture, execution, and struggle for justice


20/24


through the composite narrative of Malena and Titos family and friends.9 Thus, the

narration finds its way beyond the semi-discrete circles of a small town, outside the

reach of the terror-filled ravine.

Postscript

In 2010, five years after Titos death, his younger brother, now 19 years old, officially

denounced the local police for grabbing him as he came out of a central nightspot,

throwing him into a white van, beating him, and abandoning him in an upland sector

of town. The media and a judge are making a clear connection between the attack on

this boy and Titos murder, calling the case Lopez II.10 A new provincial Secretary of

Human Rights, a native of El Calafate, has expressed his concern with the quantity of

denunciations [against the police] that must be resolved. In a recent radio interview,Titos father identified revenge as the cause of the attacks on both his sons. He

attributed the quashing of local justice in Titos case to the fact that El Calafate is

a pueblo poltico [political town]. If the judicial process fails again to produce a

positive outcome in Lopez II, he threatened to organize roadblocks and marches.

While these events continue to unfold, revealing the potential and limits of local

justice in 21st century Argentina, awed travelers continue to come from afar to listen

to the craggy ice-blue hunks of Perito Moreno crack off and splash into the melting

flow below.

Notes

Thanks to all the people of El Calafate, especially Mara Elena Biccio and Titos

family. Thanks to editors Elizabeth Mertz and John Conley and anonymous reviewers

for their insights, questions, and editing. Thanks to Judge Steve Russell, Michelle

Brown and Simeon Sungi for critical reading and information on international human

rights law. Special thanks to C. Jason Dotson, project videographer, for accompanying

me throughout the journey from field to publication. Research and writing were made

possible through funding by Fulbright Hays and a sabbatical from Indiana University.

1. Except for Malena, all persons names are pseudonyms. Except for Malena, who

is bilingual in English and Spanish, all communication took place in Spanish

(my translations).

2. See Kane 2009 for application to Gells theory of artistic agency to graffiti.

3. Drug networks and global youth crises have penetrated this small town in more

than symbolic ways. In her introductory email, Malena wrote (I paraphrase):

Some teachers and psychologists surveyed pupils from 12 to 20 years old about

drugs and alcohol. The results cried for immediate answers from authorities, butthey looked aside. Some young people tried or committed suicide. This year,

the national department for drugs warning . . . published their own research: [our

provinces] percentages are on top. (She bases this statement in part on Villegas

et al. 2005.) That said, no one with whom I spoke took seriously the notion that

Tito was remotely inclined toward suicidal behavior. In any case, the evidence

made serious consideration of this possibility moot.


21/24

May 2012 Page 73

4. In Bassos work, the targets were not in any way related to the participants

in the crime, but it seems like that possibility would not be precluded. Spatial

anchoring, then, could be useful as a restorative justice technique.

5. Other examples include Lingers (2004:114) Brazilian informant who was takento wasteland and tortured after he participated in a street demonstration. Murder

victims bodies may also be dumped in places otherwise used for pleasure. For

example, quoting Joan Didion, Scheper Hughes (1992:219) visualizes corpses

strewn across the landscape of wartime Salvador, even in a place called Puerto

del Diablo, a well-known tourist site. [emphasis added] But dumping bodies

of murder victims in edge areas is by no means unique to Latin America. For

example, Imette St. Guillen, 24, a John Jay College graduate student murdered in

2006, was dumped in a wetland area between Brooklyn and Queens, New York

(Fernandez 2010). Sixteen months later, eight bodies were found along the LongIsland shoreline (Goldstein 2011).

6. See Rozema (2011) and Calveiro (2006:78. 154) for discussion of similar con-

tradiction surrounding the secrecy of forced disappearances.

7. Taylor (2003:161190) writes about activist family members who later used

DNA and alternative means to construct evidence against the military because

other documentary evidence was destroyed.

8. Argentina is a signatory to International Human Rights Conventions that legally

supersede the local malfeasance pertinent to this case, e.g. The Convention on

the Rights of a Child and The Convention against Torture and Other Cruel,Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (United Nations Office of the

High Commissioner for Human Rights 2009). When I asked about the possibility

of contacting national human rights groups, the family said, This doesnt interest

them. Malena told me that, as far as she knew, these groups were focused almost

exclusively on prosecuting crimes related to the dictatorships of the 1970s and

1980s (for context, see Messer 1995 and Godoy 2005). However, in 2008, a

number of families of tortured and executed loved ones gathered together and

journeyed to the regional town to present their situation to a priest.

9. On this kind of endeavor, see also Felman and Laub (1992) and Das (2006).10. Lopez is also a pseudonym.

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