“Is the sun shining, is it sunny?”—A torture survivor of Bolivia’s military dictatorship tells his story

"I was taken to a room of which I never knew the colour of the walls."

Manuel Rojas Boyan is a survivor of one of the darkest chapters in modern history. Confined underground in the pitch-black and tortured for his support of revolution against the military dictatorship of Bolivia in the 1970s, Manuel refused to give up the names of friends and very nearly paid with his life.

Tormented by the death of his mother as he knelt, hands bound behind his back, eating scraps off the filthy floor of his cell, Manuel came close to total despair.

"I actually think that there is perhaps no other point that could be more damaging. That you totally lose all notion. I mean, you don't know if you're on this planet, where you are, or what you are. You lose all notion."

The pain and suffering of Manuel's physical torture by the Bolivian military was made even more severe by systematic psychological torture and its mental impact. Those two elements, physical or mental suffering intentionally inflicted by the State, form the core elements of the Article 1 definition of torture in the Convention Against Torture, adopted by the United Nations 40 years ago.

Speaking to the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), a member of the United Against Torture Consortium, 50 years on from his ordeal, Manuel's coping mechanism for his psychological torture gave him the simple but beautiful title of his memoir of that time.

"Then, since nobody spoke to me, I had no contact with anybody except for that plate that came through the hole at the bottom [of the cell door]. So, I would try to talk to the person who brought me the food, saying, 'Hey, what's your name? How are you? Tell me something.' Nothing! He wouldn't answer me. They were forbidden to talk to me.

Then, one day, it occurred to me to ask, ‘Is the sun shining? Is it sunny?’ And until now, I'm not sure if he answered me or if I imagined it. ‘Yes.’ Just one word.

So, for me, the question, ‘The sun is shining?’ was a way of showing myself that I was alive. The sun shines because it is to return to life, to feel the brightness and warmth of the sun that brings me back to life."

Escaping as a refugee from Bolivia to Denmark, Manuel was one of the first torture survivors to go through a rehabilitation programme under a pioneering partnership between Danish doctors and Amnesty International.

He went on to earn a PhD in anthropology, reconnect with his children, and use his newfound purpose to campaign for the human rights of the indigenous people of Lake Titicaca. The doctor who treated him, Inge Genefke, went on to establish the global network of torture rehabilitation centres that is the IRCT.

Manuel's story is also the story of the USA's role in systematising torture as a tool for its military allies in Latin America at the time. In its Cold War with the Soviet Union, Washington was determined to crush leftist uprisings in South America. Under Operation Condor, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supported military dictatorships in Bolivia and across the continent in a decades-long campaign of kidnap, torture, rendition, and murder of perceived Marxists.

Despite Manuel's suffering, his message is unequivocal: "I wouldn't change a single thing of all that I have experienced. What I went through is what I am now. I would invite anyone following my story, or anyone who has been a victim of torture themselves, to think: 'It is
possible. We can do it!'"

The United Against Torture Consortium is an EU-funded project that pools the strengths and expertise of six international anti-torture organisations (IRCT, OMCT, REDRESS, Omega Research Foundation, APT and FIACAT) in partnership with over 200 civil society groups and other partners in 100+ countries to strengthen and expand torture prevention, protection, rehabilitation and strategic litigation.