Word: brutalized
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...this one are chilling. In the final days of the empire, military catastrophe drained the national morale and the public treasury. Inflation grew rampant; unemployment burgeoned and citizens complained about inequities in the imperial tax structure. Complained Salvian, a 5th century presbyter at Marseille: "Taxation, however harsh and brutal, would be less severe if all shared equally in the common lot. But the situation is made more shameful and disastrous by the fact that we all do not bear the burden together...
Unfortunately, the list of countries continues to stretch across the globe. There have been several well-documented cases of torture and even death during interrogation in South Korea. According to Amnesty International, there have been numerous charges of brutal, disfiguring tortures in Iraq, especially in Baghdad's Kasr-al-Nihaya Prison. In many black African countries, few torture victims survive to tell their stories. In such one-man dictatorships as Francisco Macias Nguema's Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin's Uganda, Jean Bedel Bokassa's Central African Republic and Ahmed Sekou Toure's Republic of Guinea...
...lives in exile in New York City, recognized in torturers like Azudi the "typical thick-necked Iranian jahel [ignoramus], fat and tall and dirty and, at the same time, shrewd, irrevocable, irresistibly virile and strong." Azudi insisted that prisoners address him with the honorific title "doctor," as do equally brutal thugs who run torture centers in Brazil and did so formerly in Greece. The title, apparently, confers on the torturer a kind of legitimacy vis-a-vis his victim...
...want their victims to know their real identities. Often the nicknames derive from a physical feature, such as "the Tall One," or "the Mustachioed One." In South America, such aliases as El Aleman (the German), Cara de Culebra (Snake Face) and El Carnicero (the Butcher) are common. One particularly brutal torturer at Chile's Tejas Verdes camp near San Antonio used to tell prisoners his name was Pata en la Raja, meaning Kick...
...torture subculture has its own rules and rituals, which sometimes parody the daily routine of infinitely less brutal professions. "It was just sort of a job to them," says former Methodist Missionary Fred Morris, who was tortured for 17 days in Recife, Brazil, in 1974. "These people had 9-to-5 jobs, except that their business was to torture for a living." There are often specific times of the night or day when victims are picked up by their torturer-interrogators. The prisoner is usually hooded or blindfolded. Sessions often begin quietly; physical torture starts only after the interrogator...