Montes de Oca

I had several fantastic social studies and history teachers when I was in high school in suburban Chicago, and one of them arranged a fieldtrip into the city one day to hear from teens displaced from war-torn countries. Because of this I read The Little School by Alicia Partnoy when it came out in 1986. It's about the disappeared of Argentina in the late 1970s, those kidnapped and tortured by the violent military regime, most of them never to be heard from again.

Until a notice of this upcoming event at UC Berkeley, I was unaware that the mentally disabled were special targets of this government violence too. Here's the info for the event:

The Ghosts of Montes de Oca: Naked Life, Torture and the Medically Disappeared

Lecture on April 2, 2007 at 4-5:30 p.m.
Doe (Main) Library, Morrison Library

Speaker/Performer: Nancy Scheper-Hughes, UC Berkeley
Sponsor: Latin American Studies, Center for

Between 1976 and 1991, 1400 patients at Montes de Oca, Argentina’s national mental asylum for the profoundly “mentally deficient,” disappeared. Another 1350 died, many inexplicably. Cecilia Giubileo, a young psychiatrist who planned to expose the institutional abuses related to the disappearances and deaths, was among the disappeared. Nancy Scheper-Hughes will discuss the asylum’s recent history and address the question of how medical personnel entrusted with the care of the most vulnerable patients could justify a regime of malignant abuse in one of the most psychiatrically sophisticated countries in the world.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is best known for her award-winning books Saints, Scholars and Schizophrenics: Mental Illness in Rural Ireland and Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil.