This work seeks to develop a philosophical reflection over the relevance of the use of Foucault's categories in order to think about the torture situations during the last military dictatorships in Latin American Southern Cone. In order to do that, the analytical corpus about punitive power and it mechanisms developed by Michel Foucault will be used and related to the work of Latin Americans intellectuals will be review. All this will be done with the intention to see a possible use and performance of some categories in order to think about our historical and political recent past.