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2 Death squads, disappearances and
torture By Greg Grandin
The world is made up, as Captain Segura in
Graham Greene's 1958 novel Our Man in
Havana put it, of two classes: the torturable
and the untorturable. "There are people," Segura
explained, "who expect to be tortured and others
who would be outraged by the idea."
Then -
so Greene thought - Catholics, particularly Latin
American Catholics, were more torturable than
Protestants. Now, of course, Muslims hold that
distinction, victims of a globalized network of
offshore and outsourced imprisonment coordinated by
Washington and knitted
together by secret flights, concentration camps,
and black-site detention centers. The CIA's
deployment of Orwellian "Special Removal Units" to
kidnap terror suspects in Europe, Canada, the
Middle East and elsewhere and the whisking of
these "ghost prisoners" off to Third World
countries to be tortured goes, today, by the term
"extraordinary rendition", a hauntingly apt
phrase. "To render" means not just to hand over
but to extract the essence of a thing, as well as
to hand out a verdict and "give in return or
retribution" - good descriptions of what happens
during torture sessions.
In the decades
after Greene wrote Our Man in Havana, Latin
Americans coined an equally resonant word to
describe the terror that had come to reign over
most of the continent. Throughout the second half
of the Cold War, Washington's anti-communist
allies killed more than 300,000 civilians, many of
whom were simply desaparecido -
"disappeared". The expression was already well
known in Latin America when, on accepting his 1982
Nobel Prize for Literature in Sweden, Colombian
novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez reported that the
region's "disappeared number nearly 120,000, which
is as if suddenly no one could account for all the
inhabitants of Uppsala".
When Latin
Americans used the word as a verb, they usually
did so in a way considered grammatically incorrect
- in the transitive form and often in the passive
voice, as in "she was disappeared." The implied
(but absent) actor/subject signaled that everybody
knew the government was responsible, even while
investing that government with unspeakable,
omnipotent power. The disappeared left behind
families and friends who spent their energies
dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies, only to
be met with silence or told that their missing
relative probably went to Cuba, joined the
guerrillas, or ran away with a lover. The victims
were often not the most politically active, but
the most popular, and were generally chosen to
ensure that their sudden absence would generate a
chilling ripple-effect.
An unholy
trinity Like rendition, disappearances
can't be carried out without a synchronized,
sophisticated and increasingly transnational
infrastructure, which, back in the 1960s and
1970s, the United States was instrumental in
creating. In fact, it was in Latin America that
the CIA and US military intelligence agents,
working closely with local allies, first helped
put into place the unholy trinity of
government-sponsored terrorism now on display in
Iraq and elsewhere: death squads, disappearances,
and torture.
Death Squads: Clandestine
paramilitary units, nominally independent from
established security agencies yet able to draw on
the intelligence and logistical capabilities of
those agencies, are the building blocks for any
effective system of state terror. In Latin
America, Washington supported the assassination of
suspected Leftists at least as early as 1954, when
the CIA successfully carried out a coup in
Guatemala, which ousted a democratically elected
president. But its first sustained sponsorship of
death squads started in 1962 in Colombia, a
country that then vied with Vietnam for
Washington's attention.
Having just ended
a brutal 10-year civil war, its newly consolidated
political leadership, facing a still unruly
peasantry, turned to the US for help. In 1962, the
Kennedy White House sent General William
Yarborough, later better known for being the
"Father of the Green Berets" (as well as for
directing domestic military surveillance of
prominent civil-rights activists, including Martin
Luther King Jr). Yarborough advised the Colombian
government to set up an irregular unit to "execute
paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities
against known communist proponents" - as good a
description of a death squad as any.
As
historian Michael McClintock puts it in his
indispensable book Instruments of
Statecraft, Yarborough left behind a "virtual
blueprint" for creating military-directed death
squads. This was, thanks to US aid and training,
immediately implemented. The use of such death
squads would become part of what the
counterinsurgency theorists of the era liked to
call "counter-terror" - a concept hard to define
since it so closely mirrored the practices it
sought to contest.
Throughout the 1960s,
Latin America and Southeast Asia functioned as the
two primary laboratories for US counterinsurgents,
who moved back and forth between the regions,
applying insights and fine-tuning tactics. By the
early 1960s, death-squad executions were a
standard feature of US counterinsurgency strategy
in Vietnam, soon to be consolidated into the
infamous Phoenix Program, which between 1968 and
1972 "neutralized" more than 80,000 Vietnamese -
26,369 of whom were "permanently eliminated".
As in Latin America, so too in Vietnam,
the point of death squads was not just to
eliminate those thought to be working with the
enemy, but to keep potential rebel sympathizers in
a state of fear and anxiety. To do so, the US
Information Service in Saigon provided thousands
of copies of a flyer printed with a ghostly
looking eye. The "terror squads" then deposited
that eye on the corpses of those they murdered or
pinned it "on the doors of houses suspected of
occasionally harboring Viet Cong agents". The
technique was called "phrasing the threat" - a way
to generate a word-of-mouth terror buzz.
In Guatemala, such a tactic started up at
roughly the same time. There, a "white hand" was
left on the body of a victim or the door of a
potential one.
Disappearances: Next up on
the counterinsurgency curriculum was Central
America, where, in the 1960s, US advisors helped
put into place the infrastructure needed not just
to murder but "disappear" large numbers of
civilians. In the wake of the Cuban Revolution,
Washington had set out to "professionalize" Latin
America's security agencies - much in the way the
Bush administration now works to "modernize" the
intelligence systems of its allies in the
president's "war on terror".
Then, as now,
the goal was to turn lethargic, untrained
intelligence units of limited range into an
international network capable of gathering,
analyzing, sharing and acting on information in a
quick and efficient manner. American advisors
helped coordinate the work of the competing
branches of a country's security forces, urging
military men and police officers to overcome
differences and cooperate. Washington supplied
phones, teletype machines, radios, cars, guns,
ammunition, surveillance equipment, explosives,
cattle prods, cameras, typewriters, carbon paper
and filing cabinets, while instructing its
apprentices in the latest riot control, record
keeping, surveillance and mass-arrest techniques.
In neither El Salvador, nor Guatemala was
there even a whiff of serious rural insurrection
when the Green Berets, the CIA and the US Agency
for International Development began organizing the
first security units that would metastasize into a
dense, Central American-wide network of
death-squad paramilitaries.
Once created,
death squads operated under their own colorful
names - an Eye for an Eye, the Secret
Anticommunist Army, the White Hand - yet were
essentially appendages of the very intelligence
systems that Washington either helped create or
fortified. As in Vietnam, care was taken to make
sure that paramilitaries appeared to be
unaffiliated with regular forces. To allow for a
plausible degree of deniability, the "elimination
of the [enemy] agents must be achieved quickly and
decisively" - instructs a classic 1964 textbook
Counter-Insurgency Warfare - "by an
organization that must in no way be confused with
the counterinsurgent personnel working to win the
support of the population." But in Central
America, by the end of the 1960s, the bodies were
piling so high that even State Department embassy
officials, often kept out of the loop on what
their counterparts in the CIA and the Pentagon
were up to, had to admit to the obvious
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