The Lobo-Cabernite Affair

December 1, 1999. I wish to clarify certain points in Robert Wallerstein's commentary on Janine Puget's review of my book Psychoanalysis, Dictatorship, and Torture (JAPA 47/3,

About Amilcar Lobo. (1) We all know that the job of army psychiatrist that Wallerstein attributes to Lobo did not involve work exactly proper to a psychiatrist. (2) The general headquarters on Barão de Mesquita in Rio de Janeiro, where Lobo “worked” with a torture squad, was not simply a “military detention center.” Its cellars and secret rooms were designed specifically for the use of the most sophisticated methods for torturing political prisoners. This fact was not unknown to the public, although in the 1970s it was forbidden to talk or write about the torture of political prisoners. (3) Lobo worked as a military doctor of his own free will, given that his regular job as a doctor serving in the armed forces had terminated in 1972. Most likely, both Antonio Dutra, his first analyst, and then Leã Cabernite knew this, as Lobo in fact confirms in his autobiography. (4) Lobo was not just “an army psychiatrist complicit in the torture” (p. 965); he was in fact and directly a torturer. This was established particularly by the declarations of political prisoners at Brazilian Bar Association (OAB) hearings. The proceedings of those hearings were forwarded to the IPA Council in 1981 by the president of the OAB, but never received any response, although this was explicitly requested. Why was this?

About the participation of Cabernite and IPA officers. (1) Despite Cabernite's unquestionably unethical conduct in several episodes of this affair, it seems to me completely unproductive to set him up as the sole culprit, the scapegoat, very probably in an effort not to tell the story of the participation of many IPA boards and presidents, as has been happening in many of their reports and even in Wallerstein's very interesting commentary, in which considerable care seems taken not to mention the commitment of