Tales From Dark Side of Human Nature

Anna comes into a small room in the Los Angeles office of the Program for Torture Victims and settles into a chair directly across from mine, dark scars visible on her ankles.

At first she looks away, unable to make eye contact. But as she begins to tell her story, she seems to appreciate having a witness. She removes her false front teeth, holding them aloft for me to see.

“They hit me here with the butt of a rifle,” says the 42-year-old preschool teacher from Cameroon, opening her mouth wide to show where her teeth were broken off at the gums.

Anna’s assailants were gendarmes in Cameroon, where she was jailed and beaten in 1997 and again in 2001. Her crime was speaking up for economic and social justice.

Like hundreds of other torture victims from around the world, Anna found her way to Los Angeles to seek political asylum with the help of the Program for Torture Victims. I also met a Colombian who years ago -- as punishment for being an artist and activist -- was hooded, dunked into a water tank and had an electrical wire attached to his testicles.

“Right now, we’re getting a lot of people from eastern African nations,” says Dr. Jose Quiroga, a former Chilean who founded the Program for Torture Victims along with psychologist Ana Deutsch, a native Argentinian. They started the program 25 years ago in Los Angeles after fleeing nightmares in their home countries.

Quiroga, a personal physician to the late Chilean President Salvador Allende, was beaten on the day of the 1973 coup that led to the rise of U.S.-backed Gen. Augusto Pinochet, a man responsible for the torture and “disappearance” of thousands. Working for Amnesty International in Los Angeles, Quiroga met Deutsch, who managed to escape Argentina’s own campaign of “disappearance.”

“The most frequent form of torture is beating,” says Quiroga, who treats patients every Friday at the Venice Family Clinic and helps administer the program from its headquarters south of downtown L.A. “There’s also electric torture, hanging and burning.”

In his office, Quiroga shows me photographs of patients who come here from all over the world. More than 130 countries are known to practice torture, and cigarette burns are particularly popular. Quiroga keeps the photos in neatly arranged envelopes, so he can help his patients make their case for political asylum.

Down the hall, Anna from Cameroon lifts the ruffle of her skirt just past her knee to show me dozens of scars up and down both legs. They beat her over and over with sticks, she says, until she couldn’t stand. And then they beat the soles of her feet. She slips off her shoes and raises her feet for me to see a maze of scars the size of kidney beans.

Packed into an overcrowded cell with no toilet, Anna and other prisoners would be dragged into the hallway, interrogated and beaten. The gendarmes asked her to denounce her criticism of the government, but she refused.

“I told the truth,” she says. “You fight for your people and your country, and they treat you like beasts.”

Once, she saw a corpse in the hallway. Another time, she was raped and knocked unconscious.

Enraged and terrified, she managed to escape into the bush, where an elderly woman took her in until Anna could flee the country a year ago.

The natural instinct is to reel in horror at the inhumanity perpetrated by other nations of the world. But we’ve got our own barbarians on the government payroll. Even the FBI was horrified at what has happened to U.S. captives in Iraq and Cuba, where prisoners have been beaten, stripped naked, forced to commit sex acts and had burning cigarettes stuck in their ears.

The litany of abuse will be aired again this week at Senate confirmation hearings for Alberto Gonzales, the torture apologist tapped by President Bush to make the jump from White House legal lackey to U.S. attorney general. Gonzales has argued that Geneva Convention protections don’t apply to terrorism suspects.

In other words, among the many privileges of a free and democratic society is the right to stick burning cigarettes into the ears of prisoners, as well as suspects rounded up and held indefinitely without charges against them.

How do you make a moral distinction between abuse by Americans and the abuse by Cameroon police who jammed a rifle through Anna’s front teeth?

The torture victims come to the United States not just for economic opportunity, but because we live in a civil society. It’s all the more reason, one could argue, to consistently behave like one.

Deutsch, recently honored for her work at the Governor’s Conference on Women and Families, says 25 years of treating torture victims has made her more pessimistic about the dark side of human nature, but more inspired by the spirit of survival.

“When they get here, they don’t believe in human beings,” she says of the torture victims. “We try to make a connection so they can build a new life, and when you see them begin to do it, that’s your reward.”

Anna now lives with a host family in Los Angeles and is looking for work. She jumps when she sees a police car, and the wounds feel fresh again. But she’s making progress.

“They gave me life,” she says of the Program for Torture Victims and of Deutsch. “They gave me life, but I still have nightmares. They’re coming for me with the sticks.”