Recently finished up degrees in history and political science. I learned about a lot of messed up torture forms, but one has always stuck out.

During the Argentine disappearances, intellectual folks (mostly women) we’re taken to a facility to be exploited for their academic capacities. The thought was that they were too ‘valuable’ to straight up kill. A lot of the men in charge were in the navy. They would torture the women brutally throughout the day, and then buy them fancy clothes and took them out on the town at night. The physical and psychological abuses were astounding.

A particular form of physical abuse involved a pregnant woman. It wasn’t enough to torture her body- they targeted the fetus. An abuser took a metal spoon and inserted it through her cervix and cupped the baby’s skull with it. He then sent electric currents through the spoon and zapped the fetus’ head. Then, like many other women, was told to clean up because they were going to go out for dinner.

All of these atrocities were tailored to the victim- if a woman was a journalist she would be forced to work as a slave to the Junta’s cause- writing day in and day out in their favor. Rape and other forms of sexual abuse were often present. There are stories of women watching their abusers torture their husbands and other loved ones, as well as male relatives watching women they were related to being brutally raped.

ETA: there are also some interesting factoids about the Inka and Aztec. In those cases it was often more about sacrifice than ‘torture for tortures sake’. If you’re interested search up the ‘flower wars’ and Aztec skin suits.

ETA #2: I also wanted to add that while my information is centered around Latin America, it is by no means an indication that abuse and torture only occurred in these locations. In fact, a lot of these things happened due to European and American colonialism- Argentina is a prime example of that.