Doctors Who Torture [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Weekend Edition April 26-28, 2013

Pain and Punishment

Doctors Who Torture

by Dr. CESAR CHELALA
Buenos Aires

Last July at the Libertad (Freedom) prison in Uruguay was unusual. Miguel Angel Estrella, an Argentine pianist (and now Argentina’s Ambassador to UNESCO), was giving a concert in the same prison where he had been imprisoned and tortured 32 years earlier.

He dedicated the concert to the 50 inmates currently imprisoned. After he was liberated, Estrella had testified against Dolcey Britos, a psychologist who had masterminded the psychological torture of prisoners at Libertad.

Estrella was liberated thanks to an unprecedented international campaign on his behalf. A friend since my youth, he told me in New York about the ordeal he went through while he was a prisoner in Uruguay. A professional pianist, he was subjected to a most unusual and frightening punishment. He was beaten repeatedly on his hands and threatened with amputation, a spiritual death for a pianist.

He told me: “They (the torturers) concentrated on my hands like sadists. They applied electricity under my nails, without stopping and later they hung me from my arms. After two days of torture I hurt all over, and didn’t have any sensation left in my hands. I touched things and didn’t feel anything.

“The last time I was tortured they threatened to cut off my hands with an electric saw, saying, ‘We are going to chop off your hands, finger by finger, and then we are going to kill you, as the Chileans killed Víctor Jara (a famous Chilean folk singer and guitar player who was killed after being tortured, his hands repeatedly smashed before his death)‘.”

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/04/26/doctors-who-torture/