Torture's purpose? To instill fear, one victim says

But lunch ends and people go back to work. The radio host moves on to another topic. People get on with their lives.

Except, that is, people like Hector Aristizabal, who brought his one-man dramatic performance and 25 years of memories to a Cal State Fullerton philosophy symposium on torture the other day.

It was not a comedy.

Aristizabal, 46, a Colombian who moved to the U.S. in 1989, was taken from his home with his brother in 1982, he says, and tortured over a three-day period.

He says he was subjected to electrical shocks on various parts of his body, including his testicles, beaten, kept awake for three days, held under water to simulate drowning and stood up against a wall as soldiers fired toward him in a mock execution. He and his brother were turned in by a priest, he says, who told the Army they might be subversives.

And so you wonder, what does being tortured do to a person?

For Aristizabal, it made him want to kill the people who did it to him. It made him want to torture them. That darkness of mind then led him on a personal odyssey to fight off those feelings. Along the way, it has made him a fervent opponent of torture.

We talked by phone Sunday night from his Pasadena home. Aristizabal said he refuses to let memories of torture define his existence, even as it has shaped his professional life -- both as a psychotherapist and dramatist and sometime actor.

"The feelings can pass for a while," he says, "but my brother [not the same one captured with him in 1982] was kidnapped, tortured and killed by the Colombian paramilitary death squads in 1999, and that reawakened in me the desire for revenge and the anger and the blindness of that anger. One of the things that helped me was to have my own children and see how much they need me, but for at least a year, I was blinded crazy, with nightmares and fantasies of revenge."

The 30-minute play he presented at Cal State is meant both to simulate his own torture and to provoke audience response. He asks them to create their own images of how they might respond.

He plays several characters, including his mother, his brother, his children and the torturer. "I use plasticity and the magic of theater to take people into the process," he said.