Word: picana
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When Dictator Juan Peron was in power, the Cardosos were notorious for winning "confessions" from the regime's prisoners. Their prize persuader was the picana electrica, an "electric needle" that delivered a 12,000-volt jolt. Applied to the lips, soles of the feet or genitals, the picana made the victim convulse with shrieking pain, while leaving no marks. "With the picana" Juan Cardoso once boasted, "you can extract in one session confessions that would have taken four days of sissified questioning...
...Under the pressure, the government announced almost shamefacedly that Ingalinella had "died of a heart attack during an interrogation in which violence was used." To Argentines familiar with the methods of Perón's police, this suggested that the Rosario cops had tortured him with the picana, an electric goad applied to sensitive parts of the body. The seven cops involved, said the government, were awaiting trial. Some wondered: was it merely a searching for scapegoats, or something more significant, when a police state be gins calling policemen to account...
...Picana. By such jostling and jailing, Perón has so far avoided setting up concentration camps. But at least 97 prisoners were held in three Buenos Aires political detention centers last week, imprisoned without charge or hearing for eight months or more. From such Argentines, suspected of having important conspiratorial knowledge, Political Order extracts information with the aid of a simple device called la picana, a hot electric wire applied to the blindfolded victim...
| 1 |