Nancy Scheper-Hughes "The Ghosts of Montes de Oca: Naked Life, Torture and the Medically Disappeared" April 11, 2007

Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes (at table) speaks to a packed house in the CLAS Conference Room, detailing her research into events at Montes de Oca.

The Terror of the Forgotten: Argentina’s Medically “Disappeared”
By Sarah Schoellkopf

Much of the world knows of Argentina’s 30,000 desaparecidos, those people from all walks of life who were kidnapped, tortured and disappeared during Argentina ’s last military dictatorship (1976–83). The “Dirty War” began on March 24, 1976 when the Armed Forces created a military junta to take over the nation, appointed a president and initiated the National Reorganization Process known as “El Proceso.” Members of the junta couched their murderous activities in terms of a “just and holy war.” They cast themselves as the surgeons cutting out the nation’s cancer, eliminating those who, in General Videla’s words, held ideas “contrary to our Western, Christian civilization.”

Among the dead and missing are the victims of a forgotten “petite dirty war”: people deemed “mentally deficient” by the Argentine state and housed in Colonia Montes de Oca, the national mental asylum. Drawing from a key chapter in her forthcoming book, The Ends of the Body: The Global Traffic in Human Organs, Anthropology professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes described the fate of these forgotten ones who, she maintained, were medically abused and mined for their biological products. Scheper-Hughes argued that the suffering these people underwent should be acknowledged and their names added to the official list of the disappeared.

What happened at Montes de Oca is “a worst case scenario — a bizarre story of malignant neglect, invisible torture and body theft practiced against a vulnerable population of subcitizens in Argentina .” Initiated during the Dirty War, these practices were never acknowledged and thus were allowed to continue after the return to democracy. Flagrant abuses occurred through 1992 and, she argued, continued at least through 2005 when in the four-month period between January and April another 300 patients vanished without explanation.

This “war within a war” was practiced with military sanction and official approval. Scheper-Hughes noted that the junta was following in the footsteps of the Nazis, who had been the first to understand the usefulness of excluded “others” (including the mentally impaired) who could be mined for their blood, tissue, bone, skin and organs.

The superintendent of Montes de Oca, military appointee Dr. Florencio Sánchez, reined over this “invisible population” until 1992. During his tenure, the asylum’s official records document the death under mysterious circumstances of 1,350 patients and the disappearance of another 1,400. In the two official inquests into wrong-doing at the Colonia, held in 1986 and 1992, Sánchez claimed these patients were “missing,” “lost” or “runaways” and should not be labeled with the politically fraught term “disappeared.”

A self-described “modern psychiatrist,” Sánchez allowed patients to “freely wander” the grounds and even to go beyond the gates. According to him, an unfortunate side effect of this “democratic,” “open door policy” was that patients would sometimes become lost. Among the other “human rights” he allowed the inmates were the right to have sexual relations with each other (and with visitors), the right to be pregnant (but not to raise their children) and the right to refuse food, clothing and medications, even when refusal contributed to sickness or death.

The 1992 inquest unearthed financial irregularities which landed Dr. Sánchez in jail. He died there under mysterious circumstances just days before he was to testify.

Over the years, when bodies were discovered on the Colonia’s grounds — in wells, heating tunnels, swamps and unmarked graves — the gruesome discoveries were duly recorded by the local police and newspapers but no arrests were made. Moreover, the deaths were deemed “accidental” or blamed on the “mental incompetence” of the inmates who were quickly buried in a cemetery reserved for patients of the Colonia.

Years later, when some of these bodies were exhumed, it was found that their eyes and heart valves had been removed.

Miguel Bonnaso, a controversial politician and writer who was also a victim of the dictatorship, challenged the human rights community to intervene as recently as 1998. His call fell on deaf ears as the only person missing from the Colonia who was of any concern to the nation was a young psychiatrist, Dr. Cecilia Giubileo, who was kidnapped while on duty there. Her body has never been recovered.

Until Scheper-Hughes arrived in January 2000, there had been many allegations and counter-allegations about Montes de Oca, but no human rights missions, social science research or extended ethnographic studies on the topic. Scheper-Hughes essentially went undercover at the asylum to investigate the disappearances and their links to organs trafficking.

Her finding suggest that Dr. Giubileo was kidnapped because she was about to make public the commerce in blood, cornea and babies occurring at the psychiatric hospital. “During the early 1980s, Montes de Oca was frequently identified as a site of illicit medical experiments, pharmaceutical research, organs trafficking and even baby farming” from the “bioavailable bodies” of the inmates. However, these claims were consistently discounted, denied and explained away by Sánchez and others in the Argentine medical community as well as by officials in the United States Information Service.

Among the most shocking claims is that of baby trafficking. What happened to mental patients at Montes de Oca mirrors the fate of the disappeared whose babies were taken and illegally offered to members of the military and their friends. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a leading Argentine human rights organization dedicated to returning this lost generation to their biological families, has recorded over 500 missing children of the disappeared. According to Scheper-Hughes, the inmates of Montes de Oca also had their offspring taken away, and the babies were then circulated through illegal channels.

“Social indifference and malevolent, or even so-called benign neglect, were more lethal than physical battering and torture,” Scheper-Hughes maintained. The mistreatment, malnourishment and malicious medical and physical neglect of the Colonia’s patients constitute both torture and medical homicide, she argued. “Many forms of torture exist below the radar.” The lost patients of Montes de Oca are truly among the “disappeared”: they had “no account in life, no account of death; they were stripped of their citizenship, their clothing, their blood, their tissues [and] their children.”

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-founder and Director of Organs Watch, a medical human rights project, and has served as an advisor to the World Health Organization on issues related to global transplantation. She spoke at CLAS on April 11, 2007.

Sarah Schoellkopf is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese.

Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes