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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Indelibly Inked: Bodies, Tattoos, and Violence during Guatemala’s Civil War

by Ilan Palacios Avineri

Sitting in a humble home in Huehuetenango, Manuel Alvarez told me the story of his near execution at the hands of the Guatemalan military. It was 1982 when the soldiers, under the direction of a Pentecostal dictator, first shoved his helpless body to the pavement and then placed an ice-cold muzzle against his back. “They told me that I better believe in Jesus,” he said softly, “because only Dios could save me from their bullets.” While Alvarez miraculously survived this encounter, he returned home that night deeply disturbed by the soldiers’ threats. He knew that his country’s military frequently killed, mutilated, and disappeared civilians. Yet he never before experienced how swiftly his body could be seized without repercussions or retribution. If he were to die on that pavement, he imagined, his family was unlikely to identify him and they would be forever haunted by not knowing what happened. In the wake of this terror, Alvarez called his brother Felipe to his bedroom and asked him to tattoo both his arms, to identify his body if need be.

As Alvarez rolled up his tee-shirt sleeves, his brother cautioned him that marking his arms was “not going to be good.” Nobody carried tattoos during those days and Felipe worried that his older brother would be judged harshly at church that Sunday. Despite this warning, Alvarez pressed his younger sibling to gather a pen, black ink, and a needle from the kitchen. Felipe listened, returned, and hesitantly began to sketch a blurry outline of a bear on his brother’s left arm. At that moment, Alvarez did not care what the tattoo was of, he simply implored his brother to “just do something here.” After the first tattoo was finished, Alvarez thought about what other indelible ink could identify him in the event of his death. He considered his childhood nickname, “canche,” which his friends lovingly called him because of his unusually light hair. He remembered the American missionaries he befriended in the 1970s who called him “blondy,” canche’s English variant. Following the soldiers’ threats to his body, it was this name that Alvarez felt could best distinguish him if he were discovered dead on the streets of Huehuetenango.

Manuel Alvarez Tattoo by Jana Wallace. March 22nd, 2020. Los Angeles, CA

After this haunting evening, Alvarez’s brother also went on to tattoo a small circle on one of his own bare knuckles. His best friend Alberto, who was similarly menaced by the Guatemalan military, came over later to ask Felipe to brand his body. The young man requested an image of a wolf, or lobo in Spanish, which was his nickname throughout the town. During a time of ever-present violence in Guatemala’s western highlands, all three Huehuetecos decided to tattoo their own bodies.

In voicing this history, Alvarez prompts us not only to reassess our understanding of Guatemala’s bloody Civil War, but authoritarianism writ large. For one, his story lays bare the immense corporeal costs of the Guatemalan military’s counterinsurgency strategy. In deploying terror tactics to pacify the population, the ejercito (army) not only murdered thousands of civilians but prompted men like Alvarez to mark their own bodies. In this way, one may interpret Alvarez’s tattoo as participation in his own discipline, as the physical embodiment of the fear the government sought to instill. Alvarez even suggests this at the end of his testimony when he states that, looking back, “it was not really my choice because I just did it out of fear.”

Manuel Alvarez Tattoo by Jana Wallace. March 22nd, 2020. Los Angeles, CA

However, if we understand Alvarez’s decision to tattoo as a direct response to the soldiers’ threats, his story elucidates the limits of state power. Where death squads in Guatemala repeatedly executed civilians and deprived their families of closure, Alvarez’s tattoo might have thwarted such efforts had he died. If the army killed him, or Felipe, or Alberto, their markings might have rendered them more recognizable to their families regardless of the military’s brutality. Their mothers and fathers could then recite the Lord’s Prayer and give them a proper burial. In this sense, Alvarez’s tattoo embodies rebellion against the Guatemalan government’s authority to deprive families of the ability to grieve. His indelible ink, even in death, may have prevented the state from terrorizing his people and denying them this right. By sharing his story, Alvarez not only reveals these bodily costs of war, but illuminates the power of a few, defiant marks.

Citations And Further Readings:

  1. Interview with Manuel Alvarez, December 28th, 2019, Huehuetenango
  2. Manuel Alvarez Tattoo, Photos by Jana Wallace. March 22nd, 2020. Los Angeles, CA
  3. Garrard, Virginia. Terror in the Land of the Holy Spirit: Guatemala Under General Efraín Ríos Montt, 1982-1983. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2011.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

By Charles Stewart

Discipline and Punish, subtitled The Birth of the Prison, is Michel Foucault’s reading of the shift in penal technologies from torture to imprisonment that took place in Europe beginning in the eighteenth century. Foucault dramatizes this transformation by opening the book with two penal schemes separated by 80 years. The first, in 1757, is the grisly public execution of Damiens, convicted of attempting to kill Louis XV— he was tortured, drawn, quartered, and finally burned. The second is little more than a time-table regulating the daily life of young prisoners in Paris. For Foucault, this change signals not “a quantitative phenomenon: less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity,’” but “a displacement in the very object of the punitive operation” from the body to the soul. More than anything, Foucault is interested in how external structures (like institutions of power) produce subjects. It is in this way that we can characterize Foucault as a post-humanist. He investigates the “conditions of possibility” for thought in any given period or domain of knowledge. That is, what can be thought at all in a given context and how did it come to be that way? The measure is not man, but discourse.

Foucault in his library. Courtesy of the Foucault Society.

Foucault offers a genealogy of the development of the modern regime of social control; that is, how power controls bodies. The nineteenth century brings about a seemingly “gentler” sort of punishment, rhetorically aimed at the correction of the soul, which is nevertheless a highly structured regulation of the body that produces docility. Foucault calls this new system “discipline,” and his careful archeology of the discourse around punishment as the modern prison emerges leads him to conclude that the move away from torture was “not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body.” Discipline, Foucault argues, shifts the emphasis away from results, wherein Damiens is brutally punished for his attempted regicide, and onto processes of regulating the body not as a whole but in its parts, rendering the body docile, a prison for the soul. This process has pervaded modern society beyond the prison, and, for Foucault, we presently live in a carceral world.

The Panopticon design of Jeremy Bentham, drawn by Willey Reveley in 1791. Via Wikipedia

Three technologies enable the production of docile bodies: hierarchical observation, normalizing judgment, and examination. The first is represented in the classic example of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, a circular prison where all of the cells can be monitored by a single watchtower in the center into which the prisoners cannot see. What is essential to this scheme is that the possibility of being watched, the uncertainty of whether or not a watchman is in in the tower, is enough to control the prisoners. The second technology, normalizing judgment, is compulsive and pervasive ranking and rating: the notion, for example, not that children need to learn to read, but that each child’s skill at reading must be compared to children of the same age in a quantifiable manner. The final technology, examination, combines the first two into a “normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish….in it are combined the ceremony of power and the form of the experiment, the deployment of force and the establishment of truth.” For Foucault, the formation of knowledge and the exercise of power are one and the same. , Nevertheless, there is no single nexus of power; we are all variously constructed as subjects by dispersed loci of power. A sort of useful, pedestrian example of this power of knowledge is the proverbial “permanent record,” that mysterious instrument schools use to record your faults that threatens to permanently marginalize you if you do not behave properly. Its normalizing force is enacted invisibly—has anyone ever seen a permanent record?—by making you visible as a written “case.” This decentralized and invisible technology of knowledge resembles a prison-like, one-sided power-knowledge relation, a relation that for Foucault is deeply coercive.

Presidio Modelo prison in Cuba, an example of a Panopticon penitentiary.

Presidio Modelo prison in Cuba, an example of a Panopticon penitentiary.

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You may also like these articles in our Social Theory series:

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

 

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Megan Seaholm’s review of Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (1976), by Linda Gordon.

 

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