Cruel Modernity JEAN FRANCO - Duke University Press

2 | cruel modernity
adapted to the cinema. The young women murdered in Ciudad Juárez
were scarcely cold in their graves before a feature film, Border Town,
was released, with its sickening vulgarization of the murders. Holocaust
films such as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Pianist, and The Reader
bring together enemies — the Nazi and the Jew, the German officer who
loves music and the Jewish musician, a former camp policewoman and
an adolescent boy — in a manufactured reconciliation. Neither cruelty
nor the exploitation of cruelty is new, but the lifting of the taboo, the acceptance
and justification of cruelty and the rationale for cruel acts, have
become a feature of modernity.
Although Cruel Modernity focuses on Latin America, I do not intend to
suggest that cruelty is uniquely exercised there; rather, I examine under
what conditions it became the instrument of armies, governments, and
rogue groups and how such conditions might be different in these cases
than in the often-discussed European cases. Why, in Latin America, did
the pressures of modernization and the lure of modernity lead states
to kill? The anxiety over modernity defined and represented by North
America and Europe all too often set governments on the fast track that
bypassed the arduous paths of democratic decision making while marginalizing
indigenous and black peoples. States of exception and states of
siege not only justified the suppression of groups deemed subversive or
alien to modernity but also created an environment in which cruelty was
enabled in the name of state security. Although democratization has recently
tempered some formerly authoritarian states, the flourishing drug
trade has created zones where all manner of cruelty can be exercised with
impunity. Writing of the murder of hundreds of women in Ciudad Juárez,
Rita Laura Segato argues that here, as with the Holocaust, “the historical
conditions that transform us into monsters or accomplices of monsters
lie in wait for us all [nos acechan a todos].”1 To this must be added another
factor in Latin America, where the “war on communism” brought
US advisers who remained aloof from the atrocities on the ground yet
provided the justification, the weapons, and the training.
It took the atrocious death of millions during the First World War
and the Holocaust to raise the problem of evil in relation to particular
events. In 1915, confronting the fact that the Great War was as bloody as
and more destructive than previous wars because weaponry had become