Moments of Truth : Books: Americans, Lawrence Weschler says, need to know how brave Uruguayans and Brazilians defied and exposed their torturers.

There is a moment of truth in the relationship between a torturer and his victim. It happens when the torturer says, “Go ahead, scream. Scream all you like, scream your lungs out--nobody can hear you, nobody would dare to hear you, nobody cares about you, nobody will ever know.”

For Lawrence Weschler, a New Yorker magazine staff writer who documented how torture victims in Brazil and Uruguay ultimately defied their tormentors by making their experiences public, there was another such seminal moment. It occurred when he found himself smiling as a Uruguayan general ghoulishly described the techniques his men had used to break the minds and bodies of thousands of their countrymen.

As Weschler recounted the incident in his new book, “A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts With Torturers” (Pantheon), “Either I was going to smile back, showing that I was the sort of man who understood these things, or the interview was going to be abruptly over.

“So I smiled, and now I was doubly horrified by the very fact that I was smiling. I’m sure he realized this, because he now smiled all the more, precisely at the way he’d gotten me to smile and how obviously horrified I was to be doing so.

“He swallowed me whole,” wrote Weschler.

Weschler, a 38-year-old Van Nuys native, became interested in the topic of political repression a decade earlier while reporting on Solidarity and martial law in Poland--long before the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe. He is intent on making indifferent Americans aware of the ways in which the torture they are inadvertent accomplices to “undermines the reality of the world.”

“Americans suffer from MEGO when it comes to torture,” he explained. “That stands for ‘My Eyes Glaze Over.’ ”

But Weschler, who has built a career on writing about “how people--or nations--catch fire,” has enormous faith in his own illuminative capacities.

“Torture is boring for boring people,” declared Weschler. “Besides, we journalists get paid good money to make what’s important interesting. It’s a hard job, but it’s our job.”

The grandson of Viennese-Jewish emigre composer and Pulitzer Prize-winner Ernst Toch, Weschler was already an accomplished oral historian when he moved into journalism. He had spent 18 months eliciting his grandmother’s memories of Toch on behalf of the oral history program at UCLA. His four-volume, 2,000-page oral memoir of Marta Feuchtwanger, wife of emigre writer Leon Feuchtwanger, was well-received and established him as an authority on Los Angeles’s emigre community.

The idea of writing about torture came to him in 1986, when he discovered he was the only reporter at a New York press conference launching the American edition of a best-selling Brazilian book on the subject.

“Torture in Brazil” originally had been published the year before as “Brasil: Nunca Mais” (“Brazil: Never Again”). Described on the jacket cover as “a shocking report on the pervasive use of torture by Brazilian military governments, 1964-1979,” the book inspired little or no interest in the United States. What made the book stand out for Weschler, however, was the story of how it came to be written.

Over the course of three years, a team of 30 people--many of them former torture victims, clerics, human rights activists and professionals working under the aegis of the archbishop of Sao Paolo--had spirited more than 1 million transcripts of military trials out of government archives in Brazil.

“The Supreme Military Courts of Brazil had a blow-by-blow account of who had done the torturing to whom, under what conditions, where, for how long,” said Weschler. “These people figured out a way to smuggle documents out of the archives, Xerox them, return them the next morning, and continue doing this for three years. At the end, they had Xeroxed the entire universe of archives, which they spent another three years distilling into a powerful account of the full scope of torture in Brazil.

“I saw this as the perfect political thriller,” said Weschler, who soon left for Brazil on behalf of the New Yorker, hoping to meet the people who had participated in the book. But when he arrived in Sao Paolo a month after the press conference, none of the principals would meet with him.

“They thought I was CIA,” he said. Jaime Wright, the Brazilian-American Presbyterian minister who had organized the ill-fated press conference in New York (and who had initiated the entire project) would only confirm or deny what Weschler was able to turn up on his own.

Weschler’s problems in documenting the project were compounded by the fact that few of the principals knew who their cohorts were. Tasks had been divided in such a way that most hadn’t even known what they were working on.

Then luck intervened. Weschler met a Brazilian journalist who was also a friend of his wife. The journalist asked Weschler what he was up to. Somewhat despondently, he told him about his hitherto fruitless efforts to track down the authors of “Brasil: Nunca Mais.”

“Oh,” said his wife’s friend. “My ex room-mate was one of the journalists who wrote the book.” Within a day, Weschler had a list of nearly a dozen participants willing to talk. With their help, he was able to piece together the saga.

According to Weschler, the participants in the Nunca Mais project had put themselves at risk, even though their country had reverted to civilian rule. “Wherever a military regime begins to democratize,” explained Weschler, “you have the problem of what to do with the prior regime’s torturers. In many such countries, the military still controls the weapons. The minute you try to get them to account for having broken the law, the military demands an amnesty. And they are not beyond threatening another coup if they don’t get it.”

“They had to pack up everything and move to new offices three times during the course of their work,” Weschler said. “In one instance, they had a phone that was only to be used for placing calls. One day, however, it began to ring. They were all out of there, with their computers and copying machines and files, within hours.”

When the book finally appeared on the shelves in Brazil, Weschler said, the military was stunned. There had been moments of suspicion over what had appeared to be a sudden run on court documents, and indeed, steps had been taken to restrict access to them. No one within the Brazilian military, however, had imagined so daring an attempt by people they had thought of as victims.

Once the book was out, however, there didn’t seem to be anything the military could do except ignore it. Banning its sale, said Weschler, would have been like pouring gas on the flames.

“In a very popular Brazilian soap opera,” he said, “one of the main characters took to walking around with a copy of the book tucked under her arm.”

The book did not put a chink into what Weschler describes as the military’s “rock-solid amnesty.” What it did do, however, was put a dent in its inflated self-image.

“Suddenly, everyone knew who the torturers were. Their claim to complete secrecy had been denied them. And their characteristic strut--a suspended disbelief in their honor one sees in many Latin American military organizations--had been wiped out.”

In Uruguay, which Weschler visited for the New Yorker in 1986 and wrote about in the second half of his book (the book was serialized in the magazine), the military similarly discovered that mere amnesty would not shield it from the repercussions of the terror it had caused.

During the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, said Weschler, Uruguay had been one of the best places to live. The country had a 95% literacy rate, free education through the university level, universal medical care and a thriving economy. Among the middle class, home ownership was proportionately at a world high. And the main task of the country’s military was picking up litter off the beaches.

Toward the end of the 1950s, however, the Uruguayan economy began to collapse. In 1967, the gross national product declined 5.9%. By 1968, inflation topped 125%. Money started flowing out of the country, and workers became more militant in their attempts to preserve their gains. By the time the street-smart, theatrically adept teen-aged Tupamaros , an urban guerrilla movement, began to wage a war against the increasingly inept civil government, there was little left of the Latin Shangri-La.

More ominously, the Uruguayan military began training in counterinsurgency and interrogation techniques during these years, and came to resemble its counterparts in other Latin American countries. In 1972, following massive strikes, the military began arresting and torturing thousands of people in an attempt to decimate the Tupamaros infrastructure. That took about a year to accomplish. Then in 1973, the military decided to go after the Tupamaros ‘ perceived allies in the country’s unions, universities, opposition political parties and professions. By June of that year, the military suspended the Uruguayan Congress, putting a Supreme Military Council in charge of the country.

During the 12 years of military dictatorship in Uruguay, Weschler said, the country came as close as any in recent history to resembling George Orwell’s fictional dystopia. Political overseers were even attached to kindergarten classes. People needed government permits to stage birthday parties. Those perceived as enemies of the regime--people who, for instance, might have signed a petition in 1964 protesting the American invasion of the Dominican Republic--were arrested, tortured and imprisoned for record periods of time.

“Uruguay had the highest per-capita torture rate in Latin America,” said Weschler. “One in 500 people were tortured.” Those deemed fundamentally untrustworthy by the regime--mostly those, said Weschler, who had not evidenced consistent and outspoken support for established policies--were denied employment, harassed, and, in many cases, hounded into exile.

As in Brazil, the Uruguayan military agreed to the resumption of democracy only after receiving a general amnesty for its misdeeds. Unlike Brazil, however, that amnesty agreement turned out to be vulnerable to citizen protest.

Efforts to overturn the amnesty were what drew Weschler there. Here, in a country of 3 million, one could see the dramatic encounter between torturer and former victim played out up close. “It’s such a small country,” Weschler said, “that people were constantly running into their torturers in the street. In many instances, both might have gone through high school together.”

The Uruguayan constitution allows referendums to be called on any legislation as long as 25% of the country’s population sign a petition asking for one. But the organizers of the campaign to overturn the amnesty soon faced obstacles. Each signature had to be accompanied by a government-issue I.D. number. More formidable, however, were threats from the military that success in producing the requisite number of signatures would result in another coup. “The generals were saying ‘Go ahead--sign. We’ll use the petition for our next list of people to torture,’ ” said Weschler.

Despite such threats, 30% of the Uruguayan population signed. The military responded by striking vast numbers of names from the petition on technicalities and by actively preventing many people from signing. Ultimately, however, said Weschler, the pro-referendum forces triumphed. A national referendum was scheduled for April 16, 1989.

Voter turnout for the referendum proved heavy--about 80%. But the measure itself died, with 54% of the country against rescinding the amnesty.

“The funny thing is,” said Weschler, “by then it no longer mattered. Because by then everything had been set out in the open.”

In fact, said Weschler, most of the torture victims engaged in truth-telling in both countries seemed singularly uninterested in seeking revenge against their tormentors. They did not insist upon jail terms or on their being drummed out of service. What they could not abide, however, was the silence their torturers desired.

Weschler regards the story of Uruguay as instructive for other countries. He asked a woman how a country as graced as Uruguay could have gone so thoroughly down the tubes. What she told him chilled him. He quoted her answer:

“Any country that faces a systemic economic crisis and responds with political paralysis--the political parties are not able to give voters an option--can become a military dictatorship. Any country.”

In case Americans believe they are somehow exempt from such a fate, Weschler mentions the moment during the Iran-Contra hearings when Oliver North was questioned about plans he had been asked to formulate for the imposition of martial law on America in the event of widespread civil unrest. Whatever his response was remains a secret told in closed session.

“I’ll tell you this, though. I am sure that executive order, which is probably still on the books for all we know, is the same they had in Brazil. Ollie learned all that stuff hanging out with the Argentine junta, with the Contras and all the others he trained with,” Weschler said.

What Weschler really wants now is to get Americans, whose administrations have supported regimes that relied on torture, to face up to their own complicity. He realizes he will probably have a harder time than did the Brazilians or Uruguayans. Americans, he believes, are for the most part blissfully unconcerned by foreign events, and most especially by those in Latin America. Moreover, now that Communism appears to be in decline, support for repressive regimes will be justified in the context of the war against drugs, he said.

Torturers will always justify their actions. “I asked that Uruguayan general what he would be doing now that the war against Communism was over. He said: ‘I’m not so sure the war is over. What about the fate of Soviet Jews?’ Can you believe it? These guys had pictures of Hitler in their torture chambers, they always gave Jews special treatment, and now this general’s saying ‘Let My People Go.’ ”