Watch the interview with Hector on YouTube

Interview by Scilla Wahrhaftig, American Friends Service committee Pittsburgh

On October 31′08 our Olive Tree Circus Puppettistas were attacked with other Internationals while participating in a non-violent demonstration in Bili’n.

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Internationals in Palestina

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Dear Friends,
To read about the circus visit Deema Dabis, Our amazing fire
dancer.writer, blog. She knows how to capture a moment and she does an
amazing job taking you through her words on the journey with us to
Palestine. Her blog can be accessed from our website under News or
through the link below.

Deema Dabis blog

Sometimes I forget not everyone’s been to prison. So if you want to come along with me to visit my friend Duc Ta, first you’ll need to get a visiting form approved-a process that may take months. Then you’ll need a new wardrobe. A visitor can’t wear denim or dark green or a t-shirt with writing on it or footwear without back straps or an underwire bra or a shirt that exposes any skin if you reach your arms way above your head and stretch real hard. You can carry a purse or pocketbook made of clear plastic or, if you don’t want to invest in one, a Ziplock bag will do. In it, you place $30 in singles or change to buy lunch from the vending machines, your picture ID, your car key (no clicker), and an unopened packet of tissues in a see-through wrapper. You can’t carry a gift, newspaper, paper, pencil, and if you’re going to need tampax, bring quarters for the vending machine inside and hope it’s not broken or empty. You’ll also need to learn a new vocabulary. OK, let’s go.

A lot of you probably already know about Duc’s case, as he was featured in Juvies, Leslie Neale’s eye-opening documentary about the juvenile in/justice system that tries minors as adults. (Check it out at www.juvies.net)

A quick refresher: In 1999, when he was sixteen, Duc drove the wrong kids home from school-gang members who lived in his neighborhood. A gun was fired out the window. No one was hit. No one injured. Duc was arrested, tried as an adult, represented by an indifferent public defender, and sentenced 35 years-life.

I thought an “enhancement” made something more attractive, but in Duc’s case it meant the mandatory imposition of additional years for his presumed gang membership. Though he’d grown up in poverty and in a gang-infested neighborhood, Duc had always resisted and refused to join any gang. He got another “enhancement” - more years because of the presence of the gun. What I later learned when I got to know him better, the court heard he used to ditch school but didn’t hear he spent that time not getting in trouble in the streets but rather wandering the galleries at LACMA and the Norton Simon. The court heard from a “gang expert” who knew him, but didn’t hear she had met him not as a banger but as a child who’d suffered severe abuse from his father.

Nine years have passed since the trial. Duc has never seen the documentary. His life within the prison system didn’t end when the camera stopped rolling.

The first time I went to Corcoran State Prison to see him, I got up before dawn for the 180-mile drive up 99, the gulag highway, where almost every town has a prison. So I drove three hours-grateful that I own a car–hoping I would not arrive to find everyone on lockdown and visiting privileges canceled. The guard at the gate told me I was in the wrong place. “You want the Substance Abuse Treatment Facility.” Strange. Duc doesn’t drink or uses drugs but it turned out the “Substance Abuse Treatment Facility” is actually a “level 4-180 yard,”-maximum-security prison for California’s most violent felons. That made even less sense than Duc being in for substance abuse. The inmates there are “cell-fed,” because it’s too dangerous to let them in the same room for meals. To prevent prisoners from signaling one another, all the windows have been painted black and not a single ray of natural light enters.

I asked, “What are you doing here?” It turns out Duc actually requested a transfer to Corcoran in order to get out of Tehachapi, also maximum security, because of the pervasive racism. As one of the few Asians, he was a constant target of racial violence from inmates while guards harassed him for having white visitors. He spent a year in the Security Housing Unit for his “own protection,” where he was kept in solitary confinement and protected–from books. During those twelve months, a friend on the outside helped keep Duc’s mind and soul alive by photocopying whole novels and mailing them to him, pages at a time, in envelopes thin enough that they wouldn’t be confiscated. During his years in prison, Duc has been beaten and stabbed and has witnessed countless acts of brutality, but he says, “If I survived the SHU, I can survive anything.”

Though the California Department of Corrections is now the CDCR, with the “R” standing for “rehabilitation,” there are no programs to assist prisoners like Duc with higher education. For years, the authorities even blocked his attempts to take the high school equivalency exam. Friends on the outside raised money to pay his tuition for a college correspondence course-an opportunity most prisoners don’t have.

Here’s another “R” word: “restitution.” At Corcoran, I found Duc was working double shifts at his prison job, at 18 cents an hour to raise the $4,000 he owes. I used to think “restitution” meant compensation paid to a victim. There was no victim in the incident which led to Duc’s arrest but the State automatically takes 55% of his earnings to pay back the cost of prosecuting him.

Since Duc was featured in Juvies, people have rallied round him. Mark Geragos took his case pro bono and got the “enhancements” thrown out. More than two years ago, Duc’s sentence was reduced and he was ordered to be transferred out of maximum security, but two years later, he was still there. As the sentence remains indeterminate, the State can still keep him for life. Statistics show that youths who are tried as adults tend to get harsher sentences than real adults for comparable crimes. Duc has already served more time than some adults who’ve actually killed people.

Of course, his friends all waited and hoped he’d make parole. A small problem arose: Duc was told he had to complete an anger management class before going before the Parole Board-a date that keeps getting postponed–but at Corcoran, only inmates on psychiatric meds are allowed into the class.

Duc’s supporters finally managed to get him transferred out of max so that he could fulfill the anger management requirement. He was moved to Pleasant Valley State Prison, famous because the disease Valley Fever is endemic in the institution. Almost all inmates contract it after which they either develop immunity or suffer permanent organ damage.

Hector and I have only been to Pleasant Valley once as the prison has been on almost continuous lockdown-no visits permitted. Duc was happy, though, when we saw him. He had a new prison job, counseling other inmates, doing gang intervention and substance abuse counseling. He loved the work but he was being advised to quit. Now he’s told he must complete vocational training before the Parole Board date. The Associates degree he earned behind bars doesn’t count. His skill with computers doesn’t count. The fact that Mark Geragos talked about hiring him as a paralegal doesn’t count. And the counseling-which he would like to make a career-doesn’t count. At Pleasant Valley, he’s been advised to enroll instead in the approved vocational program that would train him for a lucrative career in…floral arranging.

That’s the world Duc lives in. And he’s one of the lucky ones, with champions on the outside and his own intelligence and strong spirit. If he gets out soon, I’m sure he’ll do well, but how much longer will he be able to keep his personality and integrity intact?

A few hours after I posted a version of this essay at LAProgressive.org, the phone rang with the news that Duc had contracted Valley Fever, a case severe enough to require lung surgery. He’s been transferred to a hospital in Bakersfield where he’ll be undergoing treatment - drugs with potentially severe side effects - for the next month or two. Today is October 22, 2008. If you want to send Duc a get well card in the hospital this fall, you can write him at Michael Duc Ta, #T05249, c/o Mercy Hospital, 2215 Truxton Avenue, Bakersfield, CA 99301; Attn: Guardian Unit, 5 West, Lt. Ellis.

And any Californian who can write a letter of support and express interest in hiring Duc should get in touch with us at imaginaction.org re your valuable support in writing once he gets a date with the Parole Board.

Hector Aristizábal was born in Medellín, Colombia, a city plagued by violence from the drug trade and from the country’s decades-long civil war. His poverty-stricken neighborhood was a prime recruiting ground for what he calls the nation’s “four armies”: the Colombian military, the guerrillas, the right-wing paramilitaries, and the cocaine mafia. He recalls, “I buried most of the kids with whom I played soccer.” He assumed his own life would be short, too, but then he escaped into books and theater and “won the lottery”: a scholarship to Antioquia University.

In 1982 Aristizábal was working as an actor-director and studying for his master’s degree in psychology when the family home was raided by soldiers. Under the Estatuto de Seguridad - Colombia’s version of Homeland Security - citizens were encouraged to report any suspected subversive or terrorist activity by their neighbors. A priest had turned in Aristizábal’s younger brother after overhearing the boy talk politics. When soldiers found “subversive” literature in the home, both Aristizábal and his brother were taken into custody.

Aristizábal’s brother was sent to prison, but Aristizábal was eventually released after being subjected to a mock execution, beatings, electric shock to the genitals, “el potro” - being hogtied, hung from a pole and stretched, and “water boarding” - being held underwater again and again to the verge of drowning.

He remained in Colombia for another seven years and continued to work as a human-rights activist, psychologist, and actor. Many of his friends were killed, and his own life was repeatedly threatened until, in 1989, he escaped into exile in the U.S.

He married an American and settled in Pasadena, California, where he earned his second master’s degree, in marriage-and-family therapy, from Pacific Oaks College. As a therapist he works with torture survivors, gang members, prisoners, AIDS patients, and low-income immigrant families. He is also a co-founder of the Colombia Peace Project, the Colombian Children’s Peace Fund, and the Los Angeles Center for Theater of the Oppressed.

Developed by Brazilian artist and activist Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed (TO), uses the techniques of theater to create dialogue and encourage creative thinking and action addressing economic and social problems. Boal worked with Brazil’s poor until 1971, when he was arrested by his country’s military dictatorship, tortured, and “encouraged” to go into exile. During his exile in Europe, Boal met people who struggled with internalized oppression, rather than direct repression by a military government, and he adapted his ideas to address their different needs.

It was through our mutual interest in Theater of the Oppressed that I first met Aristizábal a few years ago. There is much I’ve wanted to learn from him since then, but he is always in motion. Interviewing him meant chasing him around Los Angeles County and claiming whatever minutes I could. Our first meeting was at the Program for Torture Victims (”PTV”), where he is a board member and offers his own brand of nontraditional therapy. We continued during his lunch break in the spacious room at Cityscape, the arts-based therapy program he helped to start and for which he serves as clinical director. The walls there are covered with poems and drawings done by children and adolescents diagnosed with severe emotional disorders, many of whom were previously considered unreachable.

Our last interview took place on April 6 at his home. We were interrupted twice: once when he went to pick up his ten-year-old son from an after-school program, and again when a visitor arrived to tell of a shootout a few blocks away between gang members and police; he asked Aristizábal to talk to both sides in hopes of averting retaliation. At that point, I figured he had better things to do than answer my questions.

Lefer: You often quote the African saying, “The blessing is next to the wound.” What blessing can you possibly find in torture?

Aristizábal: That’s up to the person. Each of us who survives must create meaning from the experience: Why did this happen to me? Why did I survive when other people didn’t? We seek meaning by creating narratives about our lives. The dominant narrative for torture is about “victims.” But I don’t believe in victimhood. People have tried to place me in the category of victim, and I won’t allow it. Those of us who’ve been tortured need to see it as simply one more event in our lives, not a defining characteristic of who we are. And any time you go through a difficult ordeal, it can awaken inner resources. Instead of being a victim, each person can learn the lesson his or her spirit needs to learn. This is very hard to do, though, especially immediately after the traumatic event. First you need medical doctors who will treat you physically and psychologists who will help you find emotional release-the range of services provided here at PTV.

Lefer: After the military let you go, did you have any sort of therapy?

Aristizábal: No, no one thought to give me any, but I had people who listened to me, and friends who hid me because we were afraid the army had only let me go in order to kill me, and I had people who protected me from myself, because I was capable then of doing something stupid. So I did have support.

Since then, I have tried to recast the experience of being tortured as an initiation experience. In a traditional society, initiation marks the end of your old life and the beginning of something new. And when the initiation ordeal is over, if you survive, you are welcomed back into the community. Perhaps you come back with a gift of knowledge to share.

People undergo many ordeals - not only torture, but accidents, illness, depression, divorce, imprisonment, even adolescence. But in this country we don’t have ceremonies to reintegrate people back into society. For someone who has been tortured, this is very important, because you have been isolated, alone in that room with your torturer. PTV executive director Michael Nutkiewicz has written that torture undermines your belief in relationships and leaves you stranded in an inner wilderness. Maher Arar, the entirely innocent Canadian citizen whom the U.S. sent to Syria to be tortured, was quoted in the New Yorker: he said the pain was so great, it makes you forget the taste of your mother’s milk. You lose your community, your language, your relations. All these connections are broken. So we who have been tortured have to reconnect to the world outside. If we don’t, we replicate the isolation of the torture chamber over and over. We have to find the door and the key to unlock it. That’s how we heal. For me, the most effective way to do this was to join with others to work for justice.

When I see the photographs from Abu Ghraib, or I read in the newspaper about this horrendous practice of “rendition,” in which the U.S. sends people to other countries to be tortured, I feel great anger. Right now, as we speak, the UN Commission on Human Rights is working to close legal loopholes in the Convention against Torture, but the U.S. delegation is busy in Geneva trying to keep those loopholes open. The Bush administration is shameless about this. But such news only reignites my passion to continue my work, to create awareness, and to unmask the rationales of those who would justify torture in any way.

Lefer: The U.S. has used many tools of repression against citizens of other countries. Do you see our government ever turning these tools against its own citizens?

Aristizábal: It would be very presumptuous of me to predict. I can say that, where I’m from, you grow up knowing that members of your military are being trained in the techniques of torture at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia. In 2000 Congress came close to dismantling the school, so the Department of Defense came up with the ploy of changing its name. Now it’s the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, but it continues training soldiers in so-called “counter-insurgency.” Colombia sends thousands of military officers there, and now the Colombian police and military also train at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. We Colombians know all about this, but most Americans don’t, so the things your government is capable of doing may come as a surprise to you.

Lefer: Can we return for a moment to the notion of the blessing being next to the wound? I understand you’re saying that your experience of being tortured led you to commit yourself to this campaign to stop torture and help other survivors. But you were working for human rights and social justice before you were ever arrested. So I don’t see your work as entirely a result of your experience.

Aristizábal: Maybe it gave me a new focus, or a greater intensity of desire. For a long time, during the dirty war in Colombia, when my friends were being shot dead all around me, my goal was just to survive. But after I was tortured, my goal changed. It was not just to survive, but to live a meaningful life. Sometimes, in the ordeal, we find the seeds of our identity.

There’s a poem by Miguel de Unamuno, translated by Robert Bly: “Throw yourself like seed; . . . from your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.” We can do that by recognizing our unique gift, and sometimes the gift is found through the wound. My youngest brother was gay and grew up in a society that despised him for his sexuality. The love that was denied him caused him great pain, and he became a crack addict. But he also had a great love of gardening, of plants. He didn’t have any formal training as a botanist, but he had this natural ability. When a mafioso hired him as a landscape designer, my brother stopped using drugs and prostituting himself. He changed his life because he had the chance to use his gift.

Lefer: A little ironic that he was saved by the Colombian mafia.

Aristizábal: Not by the mafia: by his gift. Later, this same mafioso paved over the gardens to make more room for his cars, and he cut down portions of the rain forest. He was a violent, ignorant man who ultimately destroyed what my brother cherished.

My brother later died of AIDS, but he had the chance to realize his gift before his death, and we all had the chance to recognize it. He was finally seen, and that is the real meaning of respect. It comes from the Latin respecere - “to look at again, to look back at.” Respect is the act of looking back at someone, of seeing him.

Lefer: It still seems ironic to me that a mafioso had such a positive influence on your brother’s life.

Aristizábal: The Colombian mafia came to influence almost every part of our lives: our politics, our economy, even our psyches. The Medellín cartel even offered to pay off Colombia’s external debt. That would have been great, a way to show the United States that we, too, have thieves who have made it. But of course our hypocritical political leaders wouldn’t allow it: they’ll take mafia money to run their political campaigns, but they say no to such an incredible possibility.

Instead the Colombian government obeys the International Monetary Fund. The IMF says, “Privatize!” and our government sells off our natural resources, putting them in the hands of transnational criminals. For example, the La Loma coal mines are now owned by the Drummond Company, based in Alabama, and this company is being sued in U.S. District Court for conspiracy in abduction, torture, and murder. It’s charged with hiring the paramilitaries who killed three union leaders in 2001. The working conditions in those mines would not be allowed in the U.S. The company increased the weight allowance on the front-end loaders from twenty-two tons to thirty-three tons. These buckets, if you look at the manufacturer’s specs, are not built to accommodate that weight, so the whole machine shakes and vibrates. It does damage to the disks in the workers’ backs, and some of them are crippled. It vibrates their skulls until they get symptoms like Parkinsons. I don’t know if this is better or worse than the mafia.

Lefer: The cocaine cartels are also the rationale for U.S. military aid.

Aristizábal: Plan Colombia was formulated to stop drug trafficking and eradicate the coca crops, but it’s accomplished nothing. Millions of your tax dollars have been wasted on interdiction. Has demand for the white powder gone down in the U.S? Has the supply disappeared or the price gone up? Plan Colombia pays for military training and equipment and chemical sprays - made by Monsanto - that have been used even in areas where there’s never been coca cultivation. They fumigated Departamento de Bolívar, where rich gold deposits have been mined for years in a very rustic way by the local people. Several towns were fumigated just to force the people to move.

And spraying destroys not only the coca plants but all the other flora and fauna. Bird-watchers know there is no place in the world like Colombia, with its rich biodiversity. It’s a paradise of birds. And these places are now being fumigated and the birds poisoned. And who gets displaced? Mostly poor peasants. There are more internally displaced people in Colombia than in any other country in the Western Hemisphere. Between 2.5 and 3 million people have been driven from their homes.

Lefer: Robin Kirk is an investigator with Human Rights Watch. She’s written extensively about the conflict and has spent a lot of time in Colombia at great personal risk. I’ve heard her say - and I don’t know if this is also the position of Human Rights Watch - that she’s not entirely against U.S. military aid to Colombia, because it may give us some leverage with the government.

Aristizábal: Leverage? When the appropriations are debated in Congress, no one debates whether military aid to Colombia is a good policy. It’s all about whether the contract for helicopters should go to Sikorsky in Connecticut or Bell in Texas. So they compromise and split it.

I would be very happy if Americans understood that they have an important role to play in history, and that it’s not the role of empire. But I hear myself starting to preach, and that’s not what I want to do. My work these days is about creating a space for imagination and conversation and listening. It’s not about telling people “the truth,” or telling anybody else what to do.

Lefer: That sounds like the realization that inspired Augusto Boal to create Theater of the Oppressed.

Aristizábal: Yes, about thirty-five years ago Boal and his theater company traveled to the northeast of Brazil and performed an agitprop drama for peasants whose land was being taken away. The play ended with the actors raising their rifles in the air - they were just props, of course - and calling on everyone to “spill our blood for the land.” So the peasant leaders said, “OK, let’s do it, and you join us.” That’s when Boal realized he had no right to tell people to run risks he wasn’t willing to take himself. Instead of taking up arms, he began to use theater to help people articulate their own goals and strategies.

Boal saw how the improvisational games employed by actors can also be used to foster community and promote social justice. Sometimes he would get a group of oppressed peasants to write a play about a real problem that seemed insoluble. And then, when the play was performed, people would be invited to interrupt the action and improvise changes to the scene: If we say this or do that, how will it change the outcome?Maybe you don’t find a solution, but people begin to see that they don’t have to follow a predetermined script that’s imposed on them. You show them another possibility. If you can change the script, you can change your life.

The methods are always evolving and are used now by teachers, therapists, and a variety of social and community organizations.

In TO, we don’t impose anything. We invite people to express ideas and feelings through their bodies, because a stance or gesture can have many meanings depending on your experience and who you are at a particular moment. If I stand like this, body rigid, glaring and pointing at you, you might say, “That’s a dictator,” but to me, it reminds me of my son when he was two years old. Then, if you take the time to reflect, you might ask what characteristics a two-year-old and a dictator share.

I was just in Ramallah doing a TO workshop that brought rabbinical students from the U.S. and Israel together with Palestinian activists and intellectuals, men and women. I said to them all, “We’re going to play some games.” I asked them to walk around the space and choose partners, but not to be with people they already know. I had them change partners again and again. I played the drum and they danced in groups of two, and then four, and then eight.

Lefer: Did you try to match Israelis up with Palestinians?

Aristizábal: No, it just happens naturally. When everyone is running around, it immediately democratizes the room. We were just playing. We were not Israelis and Palestinians, or men and women, or black and white. We touched each other, smelled each other.

Lefer: People were comfortable with touching?

Aristizábal: Oh, yes, because no one said, “Now we’re going to touch. If you have problem with touching . . .” That only invites people to say, “I have a problem.” I don’t tell them, “We’re going to act,” so no one says, “I don’t know how to act.” I simply offer them an invitation to perform some action. Later on in the day, we played a game in which I invited people to turn around and hug the person behind them. The organizers looked at me like, Hector! What are you doing? That’s not possible! So I said, “Wait, let’s stop for a moment. My friends, I cannot pretend to know your culture. I have no idea what you can and cannot do. So remember: I’m just inviting. You do it your own way. When I work with seniors, maybe they can’t move so easily. Maybe they can’t bend down. But they do what they can. So you just figure out what you can do.”

And you know what happened? Everybody hugged. I do things in a playful, respectful way. I don’t force - although I do push, because life pushes us. Otherwise, as adults, we would be just the same as we were at the age of ten.

Lefer: Did you deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directly?

Aristizábal: No, because I wasn’t going to be with them for a long time. It would have been irresponsible, like a surgeon opening someone up and walking away. But I did at one point ask two people to create an image of friendship or love. Then I asked them to transform that image into one of hate. Instead of saying hello, now they were strangling each other or showing their fists. Then I had everyone go back and forth: love, hate, love, hate! So now there was emotion in the room, but no one had to own it. Through the plasticity of theater, we could go in seconds from hate to love. You have an Israeli and a Palestinian, and they can show friendship, or they can show animosity. Either is possible.

After that, I asked them to create an image of the world in which everyone is doing something different, and it’s total chaos. Then, on the count of three, I had them transform that chaotic world into an ideal world. People ended up in a circle, making eye contact. Some of them were hugging. That’s how we get people to work together without anyone saying, “Now you have to work together.” It just happens in front of our eyes. People are not forced to change who they are; they are invited to experience the other, the unknown, through creating something together. And we discover that we all have this incredible capacity to transform ourselves, and the world.

Lefer: Is this the sort of work you do with your other clients?

Aristizábal: Sometimes. Say there’s someone who has been tortured and now is applying for political asylum in the U.S., but is still traumatized. Maybe he or she cannot meet your eye and is almost mute. How is this person going to go to a hearing and look at the immigration judge and the lawyers and answer questions about rape and torture? So we do theater games: nothing threatening, nothing at stake. No one is talking about torture or asylum. This allows people to come back into their bodies and take back their voices.

Most of the people I work with are so-called minorities - who together are the majority - and immigrants who don’t speak English. And I work with gang members no one else wants to deal with except to punish them or pathologize them. And I work in the Youth Authority, where a lot of the criminalized kids end up. I invite these people to see the social structures that are oppressing them.

In Los Angeles today, the schools are like prisons, and kids who get bad grades end up stigmatized as troublemakers, as rebels. Sometimes their parents are humiliated and blamed, or just disrespected and ignored. In my parenting groups, parents learn that the school is theirs: not the principal’s, and not the teachers’. Now these parents are writing letters and copying their letters to the LA Unified School District - and “miraculously” there are changes.

Instead of diagnosing and pathologizing poor people, why not connect them to their strengths? I listen to people, then help them tell their own stories of survival, stories that are distorted or ignored by the dominant culture, stories that too often end tragically inside our prison system.

Lefer: This is not typical therapy.

Aristizábal: No, it isn’t. Traditional therapy can be important, but too often the goal is to help people cope with or adapt to that which sickens them. The courts mandate “anger management.” That’s an atrocity. We don’t honor our emotions.

Lefer: I see plenty of anger: domestic violence, road rage.

Aristizábal: When emotions are suppressed and “managed,” they will erupt somewhere. We should be outraged at all the wars going on in the world. I’m not advocating violence, but nonviolence isn’t about managing your rage. It’s an exercise in transforming these angry impulses into something productive that honors life.

In my work I don’t try to fix anyone. I try to create spaces in which people can find their own inner strength. They can then use that strength to change the conditions of their lives, if that’s what they want. Collective action will arise from there, inspired by people’s strong emotions.

I don’t tell my clients they’re going to be cured. I don’t ask them to accept labels and embrace the status quo, because the status quo is horrendous. You have to think about all the dangers these kids face just walking home from junior high. Most of my clients live in gang-infested neighborhoods. I had two kids this week who witnessed a drive-by: someone got shot in the chest in front of them. When the police arrived, they handcuffed these two twelve-year-olds for being witnesses and took them to the police station and showed them photographs of gang members and said, “Which one did it?” So now of course these kids are afraid that the gang that killed this kid will be gunning for them. These are the realities that they face every day. They don’t need therapy. They need to survive these incredibly dangerous conditions.

Lefer: A lot of the kids you work with haven’t just been witnesses. They’re violent gang members.

Aristizábal: So what? Before I left Colombia, I was involved in a study of violence in Medellín. I interviewed many of the sicarios - the teenage hired assassins who were so notorious at the time. They carried out killings for the mafia and the paramilitaries - an extreme right-wing militia with ties to the official Colombian Army and access to U.S.-supplied weapons. (The government claims to be breaking those ties, but the latest report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says the relationship continues.) These teens were trained to fire machine guns from motorcycles traveling thirty-five kilometers per hour. I would interview these boys in the barrio, or in the hospital, because every weekend some of them got shot. One day I had just interviewed this kid named Chucho in his hospital room when I heard gunfire, right there in the hospital. I threw myself on the floor. Bullets came through the door, and when it was over, Chucho had forty or fifty bullets in him.

Most of the boys were killed during the course of the study. But their attitude was: So what if I live only another two years, or another two months? Right now I’ve got a Kawasaki, and I can buy a house for my mom and support the family. These were the same kids who had killed friends of mine. Hector Abad Gómez, an intellectual and a doctor, was shot standing next to me while we were attending a funeral. So was Leonardo Betancur, another doctor who worked in human rights. The thirteen-year-old kid who killed them both was shot a block away as he ran from the scene. You might think I would hate these kids for these senseless killings, but they were just like the boys I had grown up with. I’d seen how boys who turned to crime helped their families. In my neighborhood, rundown houses had become three-story buildings filled with the latest gadgets. So I can’t just demonize them. In many ways I was once the same as them: My life, too, was a mess. I lived each day as if it were my last.

I saw an entire generation destroyed in the poor neighborhoods of Medellín, and I see the same thing happening here with this gang culture. They’re just kids, and no one has taught them to love life. They haven’t been initiated into life. Instead the gangs have initiations - or pseudo initiations - into a culture of death.

I can relate this to my own experience. In 1999 my brother Juan Fernando was snatched off the street by the paramilitaries, and I went back to Colombia to search for him. After they had found his body, I witnessed the autopsy and saw with my own eyes the atrocities that had been done to him in the ten days before they’d finally killed him.

After I had buried my brother, I asked a close friend to take me to the place where my brother’s body had been found, in a ditch beside the highway in a town controlled by the paramilitaries. In my delusional state, I wanted to find my brother’s killers and kill them. So here we were, headed into the lion’s den. My friend was driving, and we were drinking aguardiente. Halfway there he turned to me and said, “What are you doing? And what am I doing taking you there? I don’t want to die with you this way.” So we turned around and got drunk and ended up going to a strip bar, which was for me a way to touch bottom. I realized that I was wounded and out of my mind with pain. I had wanted to kill, but I knew I wasn’t a killer. So instead I had decided to be killed. It was a way to stop the suffering.

I think a lot of these kids who get involved in gangs don’t really want to hurt anyone. They just want it all to stop. They live in poisonous environments, war zones where the police are the biggest gang around. Many kids are terribly depressed because they cannot cope with their living conditions. One of my therapy clients, an eight-year-old boy, was recently diagnosed with a “conduct disorder,” a very serious label, and I went to visit him.

Lefer: Do you often visit clients at home?

Aristizábal: Yes, I never wait in an office with a potted plant and my diplomas on the wall for people to come and see me. I go out and find them.

Lefer:Do you arrange to meet them?

Aristizábal: No, I just figure out where they are. I don’t work with schedules. It’s ridiculous to expect people whose lives are disrupted to be able to keep appointments. Crisis doesn’t fit into a schedule, even for middle-class people.

So I went to this boy’s home. He lives with his pregnant mother and five siblings in a one-bedroom apartment. His mother sleeps in the bedroom with her latest boyfriend and the two youngest kids. There’s a thirteen-year-old with cerebral palsy, and the rest are all under nine years of age. So there are literally kids crying all day long. What had this boy with the “conduct disorder” done? He’d tried to burn the apartment down.

If you look just at what he did, you might see him as a monster. But if you go there, you understand that this kid is crying for help. I would want to burn that apartment down, too. Who would want to live there? How could you take it? And his mother has had six kids with six different men. Men come into her life, use her until she gets pregnant, and then leave. And yet that woman, who has been abandoned and betrayed so many times, still manages to feed her children. She doesn’t leave them. She goes out to sell bedspreads in the street and puts a roof over their heads, I don’t know how. I have two kids and many more resources, and I can hardly make it. This woman manages to raise her children - in conditions of great deprivation, yes, but who am I to judge her? I have to honor her strength and her resiliency and her incredible capacity to survive. I see her this way, and hopefully I help her see herself this way, too.

Sometimes I sit at the computer and type my clients’ stories as they dictate them. Then I reflect their stories back to them in a mythical framework so they can see their strengths, so they can see themselves as heroes. I read back what they’ve written, and I ask them, “Would you watch this movie?” And they say yes, and I say, “That’s you! You crossed the Rio Grande when you were seven months pregnant. You didn’t know how to swim, and you saw two people drown in front of you, but you kept going. And you got to the desert, and you didn’t have water for three days, and you didn’t know where you were going, but you kept walking. Isn’t that a hero?”

Later, I’ll read the story to her kid, who’ll say, “My mom did that when she was pregnant with me?”

“Yeah,” I’ll say. “You were the kid in that belly. You helped her float through the river and make it to the other side.”

For me, the American dream belongs to the people who are crossing the border as we speak. I don’t see a lot of people who were born here who still honor the dream.There’s so much unhappiness along with all the comfort. The inner wilderness, where we live in anguish because our connections are broken, comes in many forms. For many Americans, maybe it’s the isolation chamber of privilege, the emptiness we try to fill by buying things.

Lefer: You connect to many people, but you’ve said you feel cut off and unhappy here in the U.S.

Aristizábal: It’s a struggle for me to learn to love being in this country. Colombia is in my veins. But if I went back there, I would be killed. Here I can work on campaigns to support and protect union leaders and teachers in Colombia and to raise awareness of what American businesses like Coca-Cola, Occidental Petroleum, and Drummond are doing there. For years I hated being in the U.S. This was the wolf’s mouth, the country I had fought against for my entire youth. Yet I’ve ended up falling in love with an American woman, having American children, becoming an American.

It would be easy for me to hate this place, but also very useless. Who cares? The entire world hates this place. I’m tired of hating Bush. I have realized there’s no point in simply acting in opposition to others. I have to live my own desires instead of just opposing theirs. This is what we all have to do: find our own style of living and working and making love, and do it, I hope, with some beauty and grace.

For me, theater is both a way for me to express myself and a wonderful social and political tool. I once did a TO workshop in the largest men’s prison in India. The superintendent was the archetype of a despot, and he had barred the way to every organization that wanted to bring services to the prisoners. I don’t know why he let this crazy Colombian in. I worked with forty men, and for three hours they created images of the oppression they felt in their lives, and then imagined what liberation from this oppression would look like. The superintendent watched us, and afterward he asked me to his office. To my amazement, he invited me back to work with all of his four thousand inmates. Maybe what had happened was, for the first time, he’d seen the prisoners. When he’d recognized their humanity, he himself had become humanized.

Theater offers “at-risk” youth the opportunity to transform their view of the world, and of themselves. Some of these kids are trying to fulfill a need for belonging through gang involvement, and theater can bond them together in a productive way. There are all these creative seeds buried in people, no matter how oppressed they’ve been, and you can find these seeds in their stories. With the recent extreme rains here, seeds of plants that have been dormant for centuries are sprouting. They have somehow kept themselves alive for all that time. This same potential is always alive inside people.

When we do a youth performance, I invite the parents and the teachers and people from the community so that the kids can be seen by as many of them as possible. After the show, parents often ask how I got their “lazy” kids to memorize all those lines. I invite people to bring food, and there’s always more than we can eat. Remember, these are very poor people, but they feel honored that they were asked to bring something. And then we do a simple ritual, like create a tunnel with our hands for the kids to walk through as we say their names. A ritual doesn’t have to be elaborate and sophisticated.

What most helped me heal after Juan Fernando was killed was a ritual that I did with Michael Meade, the mythologist and storyteller, and Malidoma Some, the shaman from Burkina Faso, and Luis Rodríguez, the poet from East LA. I’ve learned much from these three men. At the ritual a hundred men I didn’t know heard the story about Juan Fernando and saw the pictures that I’d taken at his autopsy. They did a symbolic burial of my brother, and then they cried for me, because I couldn’t cry. My eyes were dry. I was still in shock. These hundred men cried for me and created an incredible shrine, an entire room filled with nature, rocks, candles, and the tears of men.

Lefer: You like to say that we need imagination, not fantasy. What’s the difference?

Aristizábal: Imagination connects to the deep self, which we can compare to the spirit, the psyche, the unconscious. It is that which moves you, the reason you get up every day. Fantasy connects to the ego. I see most kids today spending their time with fantasy: video games, television - images on a screen that don’t connect to anything. When people consume these products that do not connect to life, they consume themselves. When my son does a theater improvisation or is trying to learn his lines and discover a character, he’s connected to something. When he’s playing Gameboy, he can be absorbed for hours, and all I see afterward is an exhausted child with nothing to give back.

Lefer: I wonder if imagination is also more open-ended. You don’t know where it’s going. With fantasy you have your preset goal manufactured for you. You can’t change it; you can only participate in it.

Aristizábal: You cannot even participate in it. You can only consume it, and very little is asked of you, except that you pay with your time and your money. It’s an assassination of the spirit. Some of the kids I work with, they don’t talk. It’s not only because their parents speak a different language or don’t have time to talk with them, but also because they are always watching a screen rather than conversing with other people. Computers are wonderful tools, but you don’t speak back to them. We’re so invested in bringing computers into the classroom, but computers cannot teach, because they cannot love.

Lefer: You’ve said that you used to be very confrontational, but now you’d rather seduce than confront. Have you changed, or have you merely changed your tactics?

Aristizábal: In my own country, the people I argued with the most were the people I loved. When you don’t have a lot materially, all you have are your ideas and your passion, and you don’t hold back. But here, I find that argumentative mode becomes polarizing. So, yes, I go about things in a different way. And I’m not as naive. I used to think if I could just make people understand the history that I was reading, then we could all start the revolution and live in a peaceful and just society. Today I don’t force my ideas on anyone.

Lefer: But you do proselytize, and quite passionately.

Aristizábal: I am very clear about certain facts and where I stand, but I don’t demonize those who disagree with me. I do want to expose people to ideas that are not in the mainstream media. For this reason, in Pasadena, I help organize a political documentary series called Conscientious Projector, and I have watched some of these films with my kids. We watch, and sometimes we cry. Some people may think these films are not appropriate for children, but kids watch a thousand killings a year on television with no explanation, no truthfulness. They watch the protagonist get shot, but at the end his body looks perfect. That’s not how your back looks after being shot. I want kids to know that. So I show them videos in which gang members display their scars.

When the war started in Iraq, my daughter’s teacher called me and said she’d asked the students to draw a picture of how they were feeling about the war. Most of the kids drew images of the flag and airplanes dropping bombs, but my daughter wrote, “The war started” and drew herself crying. She was five at the time. I didn’t tell her to draw that. But that made me feel very proud, that she is connected.

Lefer: But your kids know you’re a peace activist.

Aristizábal: I used to mock the peace movement. “Peace?” I’d say. “Without justice, there can be no peace. Without anger, there can be no peace. How can we have peace with all this oppression?” I was dealing with pain and anger and the desire for revenge, and I hated being in the U.S., knowing what my tax dollars support.

But then I met some kids from the Colombian Children’s Peace Movement. These were kids who had gone through situations similar to mine or worse; whose parents had been killed, kidnapped, or tortured; who had witnessed massacres, or their friends being killed by gangs. But they pledged not to retaliate, not to take up weapons. None of them spoke in ideological terms, as my generation had. When I met these kids, I realized they had something I didn’t. The generations that had come before them were destroying the country, and these children understood that none of these groups, right-wing or left-wing, would bring justice and peace to Colombia. These thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds represented a whole new paradigm: their actions and their hearts were in complete accord.

Colombia held a referendum called the Children’s Mandate for Peace and Rights in which only children could vote, and they got millions of children to come out and vote for peace. Can you imagine? And here I was forty years old and talking about violence. I wanted to think of myself as a warrior, and yes, I was full of rage, but the truth is, I like beauty and dialogue. So that is the strength I need to build on. I stopped struggling with myself. No, that’s not true. The struggle is never over. But these kids allowed me to connect with my compassion and desire to create, not destroy; to love, not kill.

It’s still easier for me to sit in a room with Israelis and Palestinians and imagine nonviolence than to imagine peace in my own country. But I like to think the work I do now is preparing me to go back to Colombia one day and sit in the same room with a worker, a peasant, a military person whose institution tortured me, a paramilitary like the ones who killed my brother, a guerrilla who probably wants to kill me because of how I criticized his movement, and a CEO from a big company that I’ve called evil, and we will talk about how we can all work together to rebuild our country.

Actor and activist Hector Aristizabal had to leave his home country of Colombia in 1989 after enduring torture under the military regime. He has since worked in Los Angeles and around the world using a technique developed in Brazil in the 1960s called “Theater of the Oppressed,” in which workshop participants can express their views on different social issues by forming images and scenes with their bodies. This past weekend, Aristizabal came to Oberlin to hold workshops at both the high school and College that explored the tension between the College and town, educated about globalization and celebrated the power of youth.

How did you feel Oberlin reacted to your work?

It’s been a very beautiful experience. Everyone has been so enthusiastic and responsive. I was able to work at the local high school and the College, and I found there was a strong desire to work together, to build, to use the privilege and access to resources that the College has and integrate it into the community. The images that came out at the beginning [of the workshop] represented the challenges, the difficulties, the conflicts. Which is great, because that’s what we do this for. I could experience, and some other people verbalized this, that there is division and hostility and separation between the College and the community at large. People’s perceptions are based on stereotypes of who the “other” is. So the perception the high school has of the College is that they’re not wanted, that there’s no access to the College for them…not even to skateboard. They feel the College is full of privileged, white hippies and weird people, people who don’t want to see the surrounding community. They don’t perceive the College as very multicultural. But still, there is a desire, a curiosity.

The images that the College students created of the community were very similar. That they’re dangerous, that they don’t want them there, that the community is somehow jealous of the privileged kids, but also a desire to work together. So there are seeds of hope.

During Thursday night’s workshop, you mentioned that university students are inherently dangerous. Can you explain?

In South America, where I grew up, we were perceived as dangerous, because we had all the energy, all the passion, all the idealism and all the sense of invincibility that this age gives you. Your body is awake 24 hours and you want to change the world, discover who you are and discover why you are alive on this earth. That’s why you’re having sex all the time, using drugs all the time, reading every book ever written and experimenting with everything. The purpose of humans is to get into trouble, but you have to find the right kind of trouble, the kind that will show you who you are.

The danger is this: when people really find who they are, they become very powerful. They have the capacity to effect change. You feel like you can be everything and everywhere. I feel the passion here [at Oberlin], the fire for change. But what I also feel here is, like a lot of other colleges, when that energy doesn’t have an outlet, it becomes very destructive, especially self-destructive. You have the highest levels of drug consumption and promiscuity in colleges. If you don’t get high from what you’re studying, then you have to get high with substances. And you don’t get raided here by the police like in the inner city. It’s almost like you have permission, because you’re the rich kids.

In South America, I was tortured just for being a college student. That was enough for the army to see me as subversive.

Do you think college students here are aware of their power?

Mostly, no. I can sense the power here. I see the creativity that comes out in so many ways — in the way you guys dress, in the way you are confronting the status quo, the girls are growing hairs everywhere while the boys are painting their hairs and putting makeup on. That’s not just craziness, that’s something coming out that needs to be seen. I think that we’re failing you as adults in really seeing you. Everyone wants to be seen. That’s why teenagers get into gangs, to be recognized.

I see the power here, but I also see the apathy, the stress, the “what the hell are we doing here?” That’s an impression of what’s happening in the society at large. There is a sense of being lost. We are consuming the world, but we are starving. But in Oberlin, I see good things. People are clear about what they want to do, or at least they’re clear that they want to do something.

Twenty-five years after he landed in a Colombian torture ‘chamber,’ Hector Aristizabal has devoted his life to ending torture

On a bare stage, armed with a few small props, Hector Aristizabal lures people into the darkest horror of his life.

His one-man show is called Nightwind, a true story of imprisonment and torture, and he tours it around the world wherever people are engaged in discussions of the brutality human beings inflict on one another.

A Colombian now living in California, Mr. Aristizabal, 47, was in Ottawa last weekend to perform Nightwind at the Quaker Initiative to End Torture conference.

“We go to bed at night knowing that, in our name and with our money, people are being tortured.” With the burden of his own experience, he says, that is an unbearable thought.

He speaks of the hundreds of people held in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay.

“And I know exactly what they’re feeling.”

It is not difficult for Mr. Aristizabal to climb inside the battered heads and bodies of the prisoners held by the United States on suspicion of terrorist involvement — or the detainees turned over by Canadian soldiers to Afghan prison officials.

Twenty-five years ago, when he was a university student in Medellin — a young man who studied psychology, helped out at a psychiatric hospital, loved the arts, lived with his family, had plans and a future — Mr. Aristizabal was tortured.

But unlike most survivors, he has not repressed the painful memories. A theatre professional as well as a psychotherapist, he engages audiences with powerful directness in his story and in the medium that has come to be known as Theatre of the Oppressed.

Mr. Aristizabal is passionate about getting his message out. It is crucial, he suggests, in a post-9/11 world where civilized discussions question the existence of torture — when they are not debating its degrees of usefulness in service of a good cause.

“I want to show people what torture is,” he says, “since there are so many doubts.”

Mr. Aristizabal’s own immersion into its brutal intricacies occurred during the rule of Julio Cesar Turbay in 1982, when students, like teachers and labour leaders, were deemed a danger to Turbay’s vision of Colombian democracy.

Mr. Aristizabal was 22, his brother 17, when the two of them ended up together in what he still calls the torture “chamber.” His brother had gone camping with friends and, soaked in an unexpected rainstorm, had sought shelter at the house of a village priest. During the night, says Mr. Aristizabal, the priest overheard his young guests talking politics and called the authorities. Soldiers came and arrested them, and, not long afterward, other soldiers went to his family home. After ransacking the place, they arrested Mr. Aristizabal, too. Although neither was politically active, the brothers were accused of being leftists, guerrilla sympathizers. He was accused of being a guerrilla commandant.

For three days and three nights, he was kept blindfolded and standing in solitary confinement.

The “interrogation” techniques were designed not to leave marks. In a method called “the submarine,” heads were submerged in buckets of water until just before the drowning point. Powerful jolts of electricity were applied to the testicles. The hitting was open-handed. In a technique called “El Potro” (the rack), bodies were suspended by their bound hands until the circulation ceased to flow.

Once he and some of the others were lined up against a wall as soldiers, calling them “comunistas” and “hijos de putas” (sons of whores), aimed their rifles and pretended to shoot them.

After 10 days, unable to prove anything — and with a general election on — they let him go. His brother and his friends were kept another two months before an amnesty released them.

All had been victims, says Mr. Aristizabal, of graduates of the School of the Americas, the notorious U.S. army training facility for U.S.-supported countries in Latin America. Situated at Fort Benning in Georgia, the Spanish-language school (which, in 2000, changed its name to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Co-operation) has been linked to Latin American death squads and torture, especially after disclosures eight years ago about its torture training manuals.

On the SOA’s celebrity graduate list are such names as those of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, Argentinian dictator Leopoldo Galtieri and numerous high-ranking officers in Argentina’s “Dirty War.” Two of those involved with the 1980 assassination in El Salvador of Archbishop Oscar Romero were SOA graduates.

While some other Latin American countries have stopped sending their people to train at the SOA, Mr. Aristizabal’s country, which is still heavily supported by the U.S., has not.

“Colombia still sends soldiers,” he says. “It has always been the biggest user of the School of the Americas, and the biggest abuser of human rights in South America.”

Mr. Aristizabal calls the SOA “the oldest terrorist training camp in the world,” not a farfetched description given the definition of terrorism as “the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.” Every year, he joins thousands of other American citizens at Fort Benning to call for the SOA’s closure. Organized by an activist monitoring group called School of the Americas Watch, a vigil is also held to honour the thousands killed over the years by graduates of the facility.

In 1989, Mr. Aristizabal moved to California for the safety and the opportunity, even though — as he thought — he hated everything about the country and its people. It didn’t take long for him to understand his mistake.

“Most people in the United States have no idea what American foreign policy is all about.”

His work aims to address that gap. Besides being involved in his politically-charged theatre work, he works with victims of torture, is a member of the Colombia Peace Project and is involved in a Los Angeles art therapy initiative. He is also a busy father of two, a 12-year-old son and 10-year-old daughter, though he and the children’s mother divorced three years ago.

But the old wounds, his and his native country’s, are never far from his thoughts.

Colombia today, he says, is far from healed. “It is still the most violent country in the Western Hemisphere. There are three million internally displaced people, the second-largest population in the world. And an average of 20 people every day are killed for political reasons. But we’re not even in the news.”

And the brutality continues, even if it leaves fewer survivors these days.

The ironic thing about torture, Mr. Aristizabal suggests, is that it actually accomplishes nothing. After his release, his brother did, in fact, join the rebel guerrillas, more determined than ever to fight the regime that had brutalized him and his family.

In 1999, his brother was “disappeared,” his body found shortly after that in a roadside ditch. Mr. Aristizabal, who had flown to Colombia for the family crisis, insisted on an autopsy and — although he can’t remember how he was able to get through the horror of it — took pictures of everything that had been done to his brother before his murder.

“He was horribly tortured.” Empty intestines suggested that he had been deprived of food and water. There were wounds in his eyes and burn marks all over his body. There were lacerations and broken ribs.

“I thought, ‘This cannot be in vain.’” The pictures he took appear with Mr. Aristizabal himself in the 2003 film, Hidden in Plain Sight. The documentary, narrated by Martin Sheen, examines the School of the Americas and U.S. policy in Latin America.

“My work is my way to remember my brother and to honour him.”

It’s been 25 years now since Mr. Aristizabal was taken from his home and terrorized, 25 years since he was beaten, his head held under water, his testicles jolted with an electric charge like a million whips.

But he remembers it all in excruciating detail, and it comes back with a wallop from time to time. When he sees images of torture in the news — when, for example, the pictures of American soldiers and Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib prison were everywhere — he “goes PTSS,” as he puts it, feeling again some of the lasting effects of post-traumatic stress syndrome. That, he says, is the lot of every torture survivor.

He also recalls with disturbing clarity one of the recurring questions that kept bouncing around relentlessly inside his head while he was being tortured. Its memory, a bleak memory of isolation, is what drives him.

“One of the things you think when you are in the chamber of tortures is, ‘Where’s my family, my friends? Where is the constitution? Where are my human rights?’

“You think, ‘Where’s everybody? Where is the world?’”

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007

Torture is a juicy little lunchroom or talk radio subject. Should it be used? How would you react? How much could you take?

But lunch ends and people go back to work. The radio host moves on to another topic. People get on with their lives.

Except, that is, people like Hector Aristizabal, who brought his one-man dramatic performance and 25 years of memories to a Cal State Fullerton philosophy symposium on torture the other day.

It was not a comedy.

Aristizabal, 46, a Colombian who moved to the U.S. in 1989, was taken from his home with his brother in 1982, he says, and tortured over a three-day period.

He says he was subjected to electrical shocks on various parts of his body, including his testicles, beaten, kept awake for three days, held under water to simulate drowning and stood up against a wall as soldiers fired toward him in a mock execution. He and his brother were turned in by a priest, he says, who told the Army they might be subversives.

And so you wonder, what does being tortured do to a person?

For Aristizabal, it made him want to kill the people who did it to him. It made him want to torture them. That darkness of mind then led him on a personal odyssey to fight off those feelings. Along the way, it has made him a fervent opponent of torture.

We talked by phone Sunday night from his Pasadena home. Aristizabal said he refuses to let memories of torture define his existence, even as it has shaped his professional life — both as a psychotherapist and dramatist and sometime actor.

“The feelings can pass for a while,” he says, “but my brother [not the same one captured with him in 1982] was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Colombian paramilitary death squads in 1999, and that reawakened in me the desire for revenge and the anger and the blindness of that anger. One of the things that helped me was to have my own children and see how much they need me, but for at least a year, I was blinded crazy, with nightmares and fantasies of revenge.”

The 30-minute play he presented at Cal State is meant both to simulate his own torture and to provoke audience response. He asks them to create their own images of how they might respond.

He plays several characters, including his mother, his brother, his children and the torturer. “I use plasticity and the magic of theater to take people into the process,” he said.

Having been tortured makes him a status symbol, of sorts. Obviously, most people don’t know someone who’s been tortured, only to find themselves in the presence of someone “who fantasizes about killing people and who has tried hard not to.”

In a sense, he says, only someone who has been tortured can torture another. What he means, he says, is that he realizes that he could have, if given an opportunity under certain conditions, “inflicted great pain on people who killed my brother and hurt me.”

That fight against torture has been broadened to working for what he considers social justice. As such, he has counseled many people — including juveniles — caught up in the criminal justice system.

But torture is the subject for this day.

He discounts the “ticking bomb” scenario that often is used as a rationale to defend torture. That rationale says that, for example, if a suspect is the only one who knows details of an imminent terrorist attack, torture may be the only tool available.

Aristizabal says that scenario “has never occurred in history.” Even if he’s right that it has never occurred, I suggest, it won’t stop people from intuitively using it as an argument.

“A society that allows torture creates, both for the torturer and the survivor, a society that is torturing itself, its own human values,” he says. “It affects the psyche not only of the two people involved, but those of us who know we live in a world where torture exists. The main idea of it is to create fear, not gather intelligence.”

He says he has come almost all the way back from the person who, in the torture chamber, was made to feel like nothing and bereft of a person’s normal bolstering sources — like family, friends and institutions.

That sense of hopelessness and abandonment is the special wickedness of torture, he says.

And so his one-man plays will continue, if only to convince people that the U.S. lowers itself when it embraces torture anywhere in the world, Aristizabal says.

“Doing this show in universities, symposia, conferences, and hearing the response of people, which is as visceral as my own experience, it’s like a ritual in which I remember what happened to me, but I’m also asking people to remember what we’re doing.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at http://www.latimes.com/parsons .

For Hector Aristizábal, the stage is a place of terror and rebirth.

In 1982, soldiers took him and his brother, Juan Fernando, from their home in a war-torn Colombian village on suspicion of involvement with anti-government Marxist rebels. For a week they suffered physical and psychological pain — electric shock to the genitals, beatings, near-drowning in a bucket of dirty water, even a mock execution with bullets whizzing past their heads — difficult enough for anyone to describe, let alone experience, though it’s been the fate of thousands.

But re-living his torture has been the only way Aristizábal, now a psychotherapist and part-time actor living in Pasadena, has been able to deal with it. And acting out the trauma in front of an audience, he says, is as much a tool for healing as it is an opportunity for activism.

He will perform “Nightwind,” a one-man play about his experience, on Sunday at The Theatre@Boston Court and on Wednesday at the Pasadena Public Library before taking it to South America this summer.

“It takes me back to the torture chamber and ignites my desire to do what I can to stop it and educate people to the existence of this atrocious human act,” said Aristizábal, 45, and father of two boys ages 8 and 11.

“Art is a wonderful way to open the heart,” he said. “When the heart is open we are able to have the difficult conversations on issues that most people prefer to deny or not to look at.”

Art, hopes Aristizábal, will also spark change: namely the closure of the infamous School of the Americas, an American-run military training camp for South American soldiers where he believes his captors learned how to torture.

Renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001, the Georgia-based facility is often targeted by activists who see it as a symbol of America’s bloody hand in decades-long conflicts throughout South America.

“The issue is not complicated. It’s about men with guns,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a former Maryknoll missionary to Bolivia who 20 years ago founded School of the Americas Watch, an organization committed to shutting down the facility. According to the group, the School of the Americas has trained thousands of soldiers who are responsible for torture and other heinous acts throughout the continent.

Though several nations no longer train troops there, Colombia, where things are much the same as when Aristizábal left it, still receives US military training and aid. Four violent groups — government soldiers, pro-government paramilitary groups, socialist rebels and the personal armies of drug lords — continue a bloody struggle for control of that nation.

Blase Bonpane, a former Maryknoll missionary expelled from Guatemala in the 1960s for organizing workers as civil war raged there, said stories like Aristizábal’s are all too common in Colombia, which he last visited with a peace delegation in 1997.

“It’s almost the rule rather than the exception — just so very sad — in much of Colombia. It’s an extremely ugly situation,” said Bonpane, director of the LA-based Office of the Americas peace organization.

For decades, American aid to Colombia has served only to “pour gasoline on the problem,” said Bonpane, by training those who commit atrocities and holding peacekeeping efforts at a standstill.

Bourgeois, who joined Aristizábal in Washington last week in lobbying Congress to shutter the School of the Americas and will help bring “Nightwind to Colombia, described him as having “a gentle spirit” uncommon for those who have suffered such abuse.

But this wasn’t always the case.

After Aristizábal escaped to America in 1989 and became a citizen through marriage, he returned briefly to Colombia the next year after hearing his own brother had again been captured. This time Juan Fernando did not survive, and his body was found in a ditch.

“I ordered an autopsy and took pictures of his body. I witnessed his entrails had been taken out of him, his ribs broken … burns and internal wounds he had because of the way he was tortured. I wanted the world to know what these people did to my brother and to know this is done to many people in Colombia and in many places in the world, and that we are financing it — allowing it,” said Aristizábal.

“Many times I have felt like a terrorist, like I could be vengeful, and I can find all the rationalizations in the world to justify becoming a killer. But that would make me one more person who has become so dehumanized as to have to dehumanize others, which I feel we, as a society, are becoming now under the cloud of fear and fundamentalism that allows us to go across the ocean to kill civilians in other countries,” he said.

Thus “Nightwind,” said Aristizábal, is about much more than South America. It’s also about the war in Iraq, a conflict that has also been linked to alleged incidents of torture through the Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and CIA secret prison scandals. He is at once, it seems, both condemning and sympathetic of the troops who fight our government’s war on terror.

“We allow our kids to become serial killers, to drop bombs on kids in other cities in our name. And when they come back, they come back with those scars, their spirits shattered by the same bombs that they used to kill others. And what we do as a society, we don’t welcome them; we don’t treat them. So they walk among us like zombies with shattered psyches, carrying alone the atrocities they committed in our name,” he said.

But at its core, “Nightwind” is also a very personal tale. Aside from music by Altadena artist Enzo Fina, Aristizábal is alone on stage, with only a few black cloths he uses as a blindfold, a gun and other props to help him tell his story.

“People can see this and think about their own experiences, like domestic violence or being raped. I don’t want them to think ‘that poor guy, what happened to him.’ I want them to connect to their own wounds. Most people don’t have the tools to face such atrocious acts,” he said, now tapping his career as a psychotherapist who works with victims of violence and torture.

“If you don’t face it, you miss the opportunity to learn for that experience, create meaning. After the death of my brother and the horrible fantasies I had on a daily basis of taking revenge, one of the things that saved me was when I met [members of] the Colombian Children’s Peace Movement, kids 13 to 15 that had witnessed massacres … and yet they had decided they would not take up weapons.”

It’s something like that experience in Colombia that Aristizábal is trying to recreate for his audience.

“I invite them to look at this reality and do something to stop this,” he said.

See a free performance of “Nightwind” at noon Sunday at The Theatre@Boston Court, 70 N. Mentor Ave., Pasadena. Call (626) 683-6883.

The second free performance is 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Pasadena Public Library, 285 E. Walnut St., Pasadena. Call (626) 744-4066.

Photos of “Nightwind” by artist Nick Sparks will be on display after May 15 at the Armory Northwest, 965 N. Fair Oaks Ave., Pasadena. Call (626) 792-5101.

‘Theatre of oppression’ uses games and exercises to create images of a situation of oppression for the target audience.

Hector Aristizabal — Photo: N. Balaji

Theatre can be used to heal, to teach and to bring about change. So, Hector Aristizabal, a Colombian who now lives in California, is in India to take his shows hopefully to Gujarat among other places. He talks to R. Sujatha of his experiences and aspirations.

HECTOR USES theatre to bring out in the open hate, distress, and fear and help people deal with it. Though not a new concept, `theatre of oppression’ has turned into a powerful tool for helping communities the world over face difficult situations — by finding alternatives using images.

Evolved by Brazilian theatre artist Augusto Boal in the 1950s after his experience with villagers who lost their farms to land grabbers, `theatre of oppression’ uses games and exercises to create images of a situation of oppression for the target audience.

Hector recalls his visit to Tanzania where he worked with tribal women. They walked miles to fetch water but they were against a well being dug closer to home. “They used the occasion to socialise and if water could be fetched from the vicinity, they felt it would encroach upon the time spent away from family.”

Hector presented their problem in a series of images and encouraged the women to come up with answers. Soon, they learnt other skills like basket weaving and built a community hall to socialise.

He understood problems because of his rural background. But the going was never easy. Paramilitary `death squads’ in Colombia tortured him; his brother was kidnapped, tortured and murdered by them in the 1990s.

These memories are difficult to forget. There are scenes in the shows depicting the escape to the U.S., from his captors 14 years ago. But he continues to work with communities in Colombia and with minorities in America. Hector says his theatre “empowers people by teaching them to use their imagination, and come up with alternative solutions to their problems.”

He has worked with `incarcerated youths’ in Los Angeles through his Centre for the Theatre of the Depressed. While “middle aged men build infrastructure and provide for the family, the adolescents are neglected and get recruited into gangs. It is about identity crisis. Most people go through an ordeal of death and life and think it is initiation (into peer group).”

During adolescence, a child is taught why he, his surroundings and his people are different from others. “Initiation starts in high school. Some tribes require boys to shoot a lion, with others it is tattooing. In men, initiation is looked upon as a group affair. If you succeed then you are considered a man.” This is why teenagers get involved in gang shootouts and pregnancies, he says.

This is his second visit to India. Last time, he visited Mumbai, Thane and Pune, where he worked on domestic violence.

Last week at Auroville, Pondicherry he screened Juvies, a film on America’s gang culture.

He has watched the banned documentary Final Solutions, the story of Hindu-Muslim riots in Gujarat.

“I was fascinated to see such extreme expression of violence. Ordinary society is repressed. In Colombia, nearly 20 people are killed a day. Something similar is happening in Iraq” Hector says he would like to take his theatre to the communities in Gujarat.

Next year, he proposes to hold an international conference of theatre therapists in America, which will be attended by Augusto Boal. Hector can be contacted by e-mail at: haristizabal60@earthlink.net