Carmen’s narrative about her detention, incarceration and the persecution of her family by state agents speaks not only to the arbitrariness and violence of the detentions but also to the emotions involved in these experiences and how they still shape her relationships with the state. I met with Carmen approximately 13 years after her release from jail. Even though it seems a long time ago, the experiences of the detention and incarceration still have effects in her present and in their relationships with the state. She not only lost trust in state institutions, but she has been waiting for a lawsuit of direct reparation against the state for a decade. She also expects to know the truth about the persecution by the state and her detention and incarceration.
Several of the conversations and interviews I conducted with women and men who were detained and incarcerated were very emotional. I was also emotionally touched by their
experiences and injustice. Overall, the narratives of the victims regarding their encounters and experiences of the state, in the context of the arbitrary detentions and their aftermath, talked about several emotions such as humiliation, fear, anger, suspicion, distrust, indignation, hate, sadness but also dignity and hope. Emotional accounts of victims regarding experiences of their encounters with state institutions and officials in the context of detentions and incarceration and their aftermath also speak about victims’ emotional engagement and affective attachment to the state.
The affective and emotional dimensions of relationships and encounters with the state are connected to the workings of state power. In the following section I provide insights into some of the workings of the state and state power in the context of the arbitrary and mass detentions which operated as a form of state terror in the context of relationships between state institutions, officials, and campesinos during the fight against guerrilla groups and the implementation of counterinsurgency policies.
State terror relates to state power and emotional aspects. Scholars have shown how fear operates in contexts of state terror, the lasting effects and the legacies of fear in societies (Corradi, Weiss and Garretón 1992). Several scholars have studied cultures of fear and terror to understand how violence lingers in the aftermath of war (Corradi, Weiss and Garretón 1992; Green 1999; 2004; Burrell 2013). For example, Green (1999) shows that fear and terror are major mechanisms of sociopolitical control in post-conflict Guatemala. For the author, fear is not only a subjective personal experience, but has also penetrated the social memory in Guatemala, producing lasting effects in the post-conflict setting.
I examine not only some aspects of the use of fear in the context of the detentions and incarceration but also broader effects on communities and relationships with the state that are not
limited to fear. These effects on communities and the victims, and specifically state effects, also relate to the workings of state power (Mitchell 1999; Trouillot 2001).
Here, I understand state terror according to Sluka’s definition: “the use or threat of violence by the state and its agents or supporters, particularly against the civilian individuals and population, as a means of political intimidation and control” (Sluka 2000: 2).
Ethnographic and other research has studied affective issues and emotions involved in state documents, processes, and bureaucracies (Linke 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2012; Krupa and Nugent 2015; Woodward 2014). By focusing on the conceptual discussion about the sensual life of the state, Linke points out that modern states are not only imagined or discursive cultural regimes but embodied forms. Emotions are “engendered by the everyday zones of contact between embodied subjects and the political state apparatus” (Linke 2006:4).
In an edited volume about the state and rule in the Andean region, Krupa and Nugent (2015) propose the concept of state affect to refer to the “emotional investment people make” regarding promises “that seems to adhere to the state as an object of desire” or a form of attachment. Needs and hopes, desires and expectations around “the obligation of the state to its constituents” are essential to understand “how affect commonly becomes effect and the affective dimension of this bond of obligation” (Krupa and Nugent 2015:14). Building on the concept of state affect by these scholars, I use the category to refer to people’s emotional engagement with and attachment to the state resulting from their encounters with state processes, practices, officials, and related experiences.
Navaro-Yashin examines the affective aspects of bureaucracies and documents. According to the author, institutions and their objects such as documents, modes of governance, administrative and legal practices produce and are charged with affect. Since bureaucracies as a
practice “produces and incites specific modes of affect” (Navaro-Yashin 2012:82), they should not be analyzed only as rationalizing apparatuses but also as an emotive realm.
In an edited volume, Laszczkowski and Reeves (2018) use the concept of affective states to refer to a range of “affects, feelings, and emotions for and about the state and its agents, and explore how those contribute to the state’s emergency, transformation, endurance, or erosion” (p. 2). By examining sites and spaces of affective engagement ethnographically, these scholars explore the affective workings of the state.
Despite these studies, the affective dimension and emotions involved in state processes, encounters, and experiences have received relatively little scholarly attention, especially ethnographically (Laszczkowski and Reeves 2018). According to Gupta (2015), one of the “underexplored aspects in the study of the state is the question of emotion, of the feelings that connect or alienate people from the state,” even though to be a “subject and citizen is to be emotionally invested in the state.” The emotional ties between citizens and the state and emotions such as fear, frustration, disappointment, and hope are central to understand people’s responses to state initiatives and actions (p. 274).
Ahmed (2004) and Beatty (2019)’ studies on emotions are relevant for the analysis in this chapter. Ahmed points out that emotions are about objects and are shaped by contact with objects. However, objects do not necessarily have a material existence; they also can be imagined. For example, a memory of something, “can be the object of my feelings in both senses: the feeling is shaped by contact with the memory, and also involves an orientation towards what is remembered” (Ahmed 2004:7). In turn, Beatty (2019) highlights the narrative structure of emotion and how emotions implicate narrative and vice versa. He is not only alluding to the narrative as text but the “structuring of emotions as construals of events” (Beatty 2019:279).
In the case of the arbitrary detentions, memories and oral accounts of what happened to victims and campesino communities, current processes related to the detentions such as lawsuits against the state, temporary detentions after acquittal or completion of sentences, expectations and claims for truth and reparations, and the effects on victims, families, and communities become objects which trigger emotions (Ahmed 2004) and shape state affect.