This final DE post took a few days longer than I expected, but I couldn’t let myself leave with­out pimp­ing “The Hidden Tor­ture Cells of Bolivia,” a long arti­cle I’ve been work­ing on for well over a year, which has now been pre-​released in Narrative’s Back­stage sec­tion and will be pub­lished in the magazine’s Spring 2011 issue.

The arti­cle tracks the his­tory and legacy of the Boli­vian dic­ta­tor­ships through the story of Marcos Farfán. As a teenager in the 1970s, Farfán joined the National Lib­er­a­tion Army (ELN), a rev­o­lu­tion­ary orga­ni­za­tion founded by Che Gue­vara. Farfán’s pre­co­cious mil­i­tancy got him arrested and tor­tured by the right­ist regime of Hugo Banzer Suárez, about whom I’ve writ­ten here before. In 2007 Farfán was appointed a deputy min­is­ter in the Gov­ern­ment Min­istry, and one of the first things he did after claim­ing his office was to visit the building’s base­ment, the same base­ment where he and his mother had been tor­tured thirty-​five years earlier.

It’ll cost you $4 to read the arti­cle now, but since Nar­ra­tive footed my report­ing expenses, I’d be thrilled if you paid. Here’s the open­ing of the piece:

THEY WERE about to let him go. After ten days of tor­ture in a cir­cuit of secret pris­ons, they were about to let him go. The first night they had taken him to the base­ment of the Inte­rior Min­istry and had beaten him with boards and rifle butts until he couldn’t see, until he could no longer remem­ber what they wanted or why he was there. The second night they had locked him in a cell on the third floor with a tiny window that looked down on the roof of the United Nations build­ing next door. They had jammed nee­dles under his fin­ger­nails and shocked his teeth and tes­ti­cles with a cattle prod. The third night they had taken him to the Depart­ment of Polit­i­cal Order and beat him some more, as they would each suc­ces­sive night. Edit­ing was his crime: the ministry’s civil­ian agents had dis­cov­ered his hand­writ­ten cor­rec­tions in the mar­gins of a sub­ver­sive type­script. But ten days of what you might call enhanced inter­ro­ga­tion tech­niques had sat­is­fied the agents that Marcos Farfán was a naive stu­dent, a small fish, some­one they could safely toss back. After all, they must have fig­ured, how much could he really know? He was only sixteen.