Page 2 of
2 Death squads, disappearances and
torture By Greg Grandin
links between US-backed
intelligence services and the death squads.
Washington, of course, publicly denied its
support for paramilitarism, but the practice of
political disappearances took a great leap forward
in Guatemala in 1966 with the birth of a death
squad created, and directly supervised, by US
security advisors. Throughout the first two months
of 1966, a combined black-ops unit made up of
police and military officers working under the
name
"Operation Clean-Up" - a term US counterinsurgents
would recycle elsewhere in Latin America - carried
out a number of extrajudicial executions.
Between March 3 and 5 of that year, the
unit netted its largest catch. More than 30
Leftists were captured, interrogated, tortured,
and executed. Their bodies were then placed in
sacks and dropped into the Pacific Ocean from
US-supplied helicopters. Despite pleas from
Guatemala's archbishop and more than 500 petitions
of habeas corpus filed by relatives, the
Guatemalan government and the American Embassy
remained silent on the fate of the executed.
Over the next two and a half decades,
US-funded and trained Central American security
forces would disappear tens of thousands of
citizens and execute hundreds of thousands more.
When supporters of the "war on terror" advocated
the exercise of the "Salvador Option", it was this
slaughter they were talking about.
Following US-backed coups in Brazil,
Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, death squads not
only became institutionalized in South America,
they became transnational. Throughout the late
1970s and 1980s, the CIA supported Operation
Condor - an intelligence consortium established by
Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet that
synchronized the activities of many of the
continent's security agencies and orchestrated an
international campaign of terror and murder.
According to Washington's ambassador to
Paraguay, the heads of these agencies kept "in
touch with one another through a US communications
installation in the Panama Canal Zone which covers
all of Latin America". This allowed them to
"co-ordinate intelligence information among the
southern cone countries". Just this month,
Pinochet's security chief, General Manuel
Contreras, who is serving a 240-year prison term
in Chile for a wide-range of human rights
violations, gave a TV interview in which he
confirmed that the CIA's then-deputy director,
General Vernon Walters (who served under director
George H W Bush), was fully informed of the
"international activities" of Condor.
Torture: Torture is the animating spirit
of this triad, the unholiest of this unholy
trinity. In Chile, Pinochet's henchmen killed or
disappeared thousands - but they tortured tens of
thousands. In Uruguay and Brazil, the state only
disappeared a few hundred, but fear of torture and
rape became a way of life, particularly for the
politically engaged. Torture, even more than the
disappearances, was meant not so much to get one
person to talk as to get everybody else to shut
up.
At this point, Washington can no
longer deny that its agents in Latin America
facilitated, condoned and practiced torture.
Defectors from death squads have described the
instruction given by their US tutors, and
survivors have testified to the presence of
Americans in their torture sessions. One Pentagon
"torture manual" distributed in at least five
Latin American countries described at length
"coercive" procedures designed to "destroy [the]
capacity to resist".
As Naomi Klein and
Alfred McCoy have documented in their recent
books, these field manuals were compiled using
information gathered from CIA-commissioned mind
control and electric-shock experiments conducted
in the 1950s. Just as the "torture memos" of
today's war on terror parse the difference between
"pain" and "severe pain," "psychological harm" and
"lasting psychological harm", these manuals went
to great lengths to regulate the application of
suffering. "The threat to inflict pain can trigger
fears more damaging than the immediate sensation
of pain," one handbook read.
"Before all
else, you must be efficient," said US police
advisor Dan Mitrione, assassinated by Uruguay's
revolutionary Tupamaros in 1970 for training
security forces in the finer points of torture.
"You must cause only the damage that is strictly
necessary, not a bit more." Mitrione taught by
demonstration, reportedly torturing to death a
number of homeless people kidnapped off the
streets of Montevideo. "We must control our
tempers in any case," he said. "You have to act
with the efficiency and cleanliness of a surgeon
and with the perfection of an artist."
Florencio Caballero, having escaped from
Honduras's notorious Battalion 316 into exile in
Canada in 1986, testified that US instructors
urged him to inflict psychological, not
"physical", pain "to study the fears and weakness
of a prisoner". Force the victim to "stand up",
the Americans taught Caballero, "don't let him
sleep, keep him naked and in isolation, put rats
and cockroaches in his cell, give him bad food,
serve him dead animals, throw cold water on him,
change the temperature." Sound familiar?
Yet, as Abu Ghraib demonstrated so clearly
and the destroyed CIA interrogation videos would
undoubtedly have made no less clear, maintaining a
distinction between psychological and physical
torture is not always possible. As one manual
conceded, if a suspect does not respond, then the
threat of direct pain "must be carried out". One
of Caballero's victims, Ines Murillo, testified
that her captors, including at least one CIA agent
- his involvement was confirmed in Senate
testimony by the CIA's deputy director - hung her
from the ceiling naked, forced her to eat dead
birds and rats raw, made her stand for hours
without sleep and without being allowed to
urinate, poured freezing water over her at regular
intervals for extended periods, beat her bloody
and applied electric shocks to her body, including
her genitals.
Anything goes
Murillo was definitely a member of
Greene's torturable class. Yet Greene was writing
in a more genteel time, when to torture the wrong
person would be, as he put it, as cheeky as a
"chauffeur" sleeping with a "peeress". Today, when
it comes to torture, anything goes.
Ideologues in the war on terror, like
Berkeley law professor John Yoo, have worked
mightily to narrow the definition of what torture
is, thereby expanding possibilities for its
application. They have worked no less hard to
increase the number of people throughout the world
who could be subjected to torture - by defining
anyone they cared to choose as a stateless "enemy
combatant", and therefore not protected by
national and international laws banning cruel and
inhumane treatment. Even former US attorney
general John Ashcroft has declared himself
potentially torturable, telling a University of
Colorado audience in late November that he would
be willing to submit to waterboarding "if it were
necessary".
Things are so freewheeling
that Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz - who,
at his perch at Harvard would undoubtedly be
outraged if he were to be tortured - thinks that
the practice needs to be regulated, as if it were
a routine medical act. He has suggested empowering
judges to issue "warrants" that would allow
interrogators to insert "sterile needles"
underneath finger nails to "to cause excruciating
pain without endangering life".
Pinochet,
who didn't shy away from justifying his actions in
the name of Western Civilization, would never have
dreamed of defending torture as brazenly as has
Dick Cheney, backed up by legal theorists like
Yoo. At the same time, revisionist historians,
like Max Boot, and pundits, like the Atlantic
Monthly's Robert Kaplan, rewrite history, claiming
that operations like the Phoenix Program in
Vietnam or the death squads in El Salvador were
effective, morally acceptable tactics and should
be emulated in fighting today's "war on terror".
But this kind of promiscuity has its
risks. In Latin America, the word "disappeared"
came to denote not just victimization but moral
repudiation, as the mothers and children of the
disappeared led a continental movement to restore
the rule of law. They provide hope that one day
the world-wide network of repression assembled by
the Bush administration will be as discredited as
Operation Condor is today in Latin America. As
Greene wrote half a century ago, on the eve of the
fall of another famous torturer, Cuba's Fulgencio
Batista, "it is a real danger for everyone when
what is shocking changes".
Greg
Grandin is the author of a number of books,
most recently Empire's Workshop: Latin
America, the United States, and the Rise of the
New Imperialism. He teaches history at NYU.
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