Does Torture Work? Evidence from Guatemala

Christopher Sullivan, a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan and a Fellow at Yale University’s Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence, has a guest post up at Political Violence @ a Glance based on a recent article he published in the Journal of Peace Research.

I haven't read the original article (you can read it here) but it does look very interesting. There's a lot of quantitative data out there on the Guatemalan civil war that is available to scholars who are interested in trying to answer questions about the local level dynamics of the conflict. 

In a new article at the Journal of Peace Research, I bring to bear micro-level data from Guatemala to generate a systematic evaluation of how torture affects violence within the context of an organized insurgency. This is a case in which highly skilled military personnel tortured with near impunity. Among other tactics, agents of the Guatemalan military forced the victims to stand hooded for hours or days, forced them to eat excrement, forced them to stay awake for days at a time, refused to give them food or water, subjected them to electric shocks, stripped them naked, burned them with cigarettes, suspended them from chains, sexually abused them, submerged them in water, cut them and broke their fingers. Combining data from Guatemala’s Commission for Historical Clarification with a research strategy designed to overcome many of the hurdles associated with causal inference, the analysis identifies how local-level dynamics of violence change in the aftermath of torture. The study examines torture’s impacts on subsequent killings perpetrated by both insurgents and counter-insurgents.

Two trends emerge from the analysis:

• First, torture has no identifiable systematic association with decreases in insurgent perpetrated killings.

• Second, torture is shown to be robustly associated with increased killings perpetrated by counterinsurgents.