(4 of 6)
> In Uruguay, once the democratic Switzerland of South America, it is estimated that an astonishing one out of every 50 citizens has been either interrogated, detained or jailed since 1972. "Half the prisoners have been tortured," says former Senator Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, "by which is meant they have been submitted to electric shock or submerged in water until they passed out." Another common method is the "planton," whereby a prisoner is forced to stand for hours or even days with his weighted arms out stretched and feet spread far apart.
> In India, claims of torture used against political prisoners have steadily increased since Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency 13 months ago. The New York-based International League for Human Rights charged last June that Indian jailers have been guilty of "torture, brutality, starvation and other mistreatment of prisoners." Common methods: beatings with steel rods and rifle butts, electric shock and burning with candles.
>In the Philippines, President Ferdinand Marcos has declared that "no one but no one has been tortured." An investigation by the Association of Major Religious Superiors, representing the leaders of the country's Roman Catholic orders, charged that prisoners in a police and army network of detention centers and "safe houses" have been tortured by beatings, electric shock and other methods. In an unreleased report that was presented to the Philippine government for comment last fall, Amnesty International charges that torture is used in the Philippines "freely and with extreme cruelty, often over long periods."
> In Spain, the torture of political suspects, especially Basque separatists, apparently continues despite King Juan Carlos' seemingly genuine wish to liberalize political life. This is in part because the notorious Guardia Civil, the most feared of Spain's law-enforcement agencies, is virtually a law unto itself in the four Basque provinces. One common torture method used by the Guardia is bastinado, the continual flogging of the soles of the feet with a rubber truncheon.
Unfortunately, the list of countries continues to stretch across the globe. There have been several well-documented cases of torture and even death during interrogation in South Korea. According to Amnesty International, there have been numerous charges of brutal, disfiguring tortures in Iraq, especially in Baghdad's Kasr-al-Nihaya Prison. In many black African countries, few torture victims survive to tell their stories. In such one-man dictatorships as Francisco Macias Nguema's Equatorial Guinea, Idi Amin's Uganda, Jean Bedel Bokassa's Central African Republic and Ahmed Sekou Toure's Republic of Guinea, unimaginably cruel, capricious and unpredictable tortures are everyday occurrences. In tiny Equatorial Guinea, which has suffered a reign of terror since gaining independence eight years ago, political prisoners have had their eyes gouged out by torturers of the notorious Macias Youth. Other prisoners have been forced to stand for days in a pit, up to their necks in mud and water.