ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the period following the military coups in Chile (1973), Uruguay (1973), and Argentina (1976) is examined, with a focus on the psychosocial dynamics of state terrorist regimes with their pathological impact on their populations. Through the personal experiences of the book’s psychoanalytic protagonists, she explicates the objectives of the military dictatorships throughout the Southern Cone countries to preserve the hegemony of the elite classes and their U.S. allies through the imposition of neoliberal economic policies and a political agenda of disappearing, torturing, and murdering tens of thousands considered to be enemies of “Western Christian civilization.” An analysis of the strategy of torture, including the psychology and motivation of those who design it as well as those who implement it, sheds light on its function to preserve a fundamentally unpopular social order that must be imposed through terror. Our protagonists are deeply affected by these conditions as they attempt in some ways to continue life as usual, even while they are forced to adapt to increasing threats to themselves and their families as they strive to provide psychological services to those in need.
