Cruel Modernity

Cruel Modernity is a bold and important analysis of acts of extreme cruelty perpetrated in Latin America, and the ways that governments and rogue organizations justify their barbarity. Jean Franco argues that genocide and casual violence are legacies of colonial conquest that have been recast to advance programs of modernization. In the instances of savagery that she examines, cruelty is justified as necessary for the protection of national racial purity and national security: in the Dominican Republic's vicious attempt at ethnic cleansing in 1938; in the brutal military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay; and in Guatemala's and Peru's ruthless slaughter of thousands of indigenous peoples considered "alien to modernity" as the states sought to quash insurgencies.

Drawing on evidence from truth commissions, the confessions of torturers, and the testimony of torture victims, Franco describes how aberrant forms of masculinity have been exploited with devastating consequences for women. Rape has become an instrument of war. Moreover, where states have often attempted to hide their atrocities, contemporary drug gangs flaunt their viciousness, publicly displaying mutilated bodies as warnings to rival gangs, the government, and civil society. For Franco, understanding why states, organizations, and individuals choose to engage in cruelty is a necessary step toward curtailing it.