[Peace-discuss] Our torturers

[C. G. Estabrook]

[How many bad apples / Do we have to see / Before we begin to / Consider
the tree?  -- While the government is busily explaining away the recent
revelations -- and the "Of-course-I-support-Our-Troops" liberals are
busily helping them -- I recall the case of the American Dan Mitrione, who
in my youthful innocence (I was living in his home state of Indiana) I
knew couldn't be what the Uruguayan students, who killed him, said he was.  
All I can say in my own defense was that I was very young and badly
educated. I didn't know that the Kennedy intellectuals -- the liberals
whom we admired -- were the source of the Mitriones and Abu Ghraibs of
this world. --CGE]
 
	Uruguay 1964-1970
	Torture - as American as apple pie
	excerpted from the book
	Killing Hope
	by William Blum
 
"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the
desired effect.''
 
The words of an instructor in the art of torture. The words of Dan
Mitrione, the head of the Office of Public Safety (OPS) mission in
Montevideo.

Officially, OPS was a division of the Agency for International
Development, but the director of OPS in Washington, Byron Engle, was an
old CIA hand. His organization maintained a close working relationship
with the CIA, and Agency officers often operated abroad under OPS cover,
although Mitrione was not one of them.

OPS had been operating formally in Uruguay since 1965, supplying the
police with the equipment, the arms, and the training it was created to
do. Four years later, when Mitrione arrived, the Uruguayans had a special
need for OPS services. The country was in the midst of a long-running
economic decline, its once-heralded prosperity and democracy sinking fast
toward the level of its South American neighbors. Labor strikes, student
demonstrations, and militant street violence had become normal events
during the past year, and, most worrisome to the Uruguayan authorities,
there were the revolutionaries who called themselves Tupamaros. Perhaps
the cleverest, most resourceful and most sophisticated urban guerrillas
the world has ever seen, the Tupamaros had a deft touch for capturing the
public's imagination with outrageous actions, and winning sympathizers
with their Robin Hood philosophy. Their members and secret partisans held
key positions in the government, banks, universities, and the professions,
as well as in the military and police.

"Unlike other Latin-American guerrilla groups," the New York Times stated
in 1970 "the Tupamaros normally avoid bloodshed when possible. They try
instead to create embarrassment for the Government and general disorder."
A favorite tactic was to raid the files of a private corporation to expose
corruption and deceit in high places, or kidnap a prominent figure and try
him before a "People's Court". It was heady stuff to choose a public
villain whose acts went uncensored by the legislature, the courts and the
press, subject him to an informed and uncompromising interrogation, and
then publicize the results of the intriguing dialogue. Once they ransacked
an exclusive high-class nightclub and scrawled the walls perhaps their
most memorable slogan: "O Bailan Todos O No Baila Nadie -- Either everyone
dances or no one dances."

Dan Mitrione did not introduce the practice of torturing political
prisoners to Uruguay It had been perpetrated by the police at times from
at least the early 1960s. However, in surprising interview given to a
leading Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police
Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US advisers, and in
particular Mitrione, had instituted torture as a more routine measure; to
the means of inflicting pain they had added scientific refinement; and to
that a psychology to create despair, such as playing a tape in the next
room of women and children screaming and telling the prisoners that it was
his family being tortured.

"The violent methods which were beginning to be employed," said Otero,
"caused an escalation in Tupamaro activity. Before then their attitude
showed that they would use violence only as a last resort."

The newspaper interview greatly upset American officials in South America
and Washington. Byron Engle later tried to explain it all away by
asserting: "The three Brazilian reporters in Montevideo all denied filing
that story. We found out later that it was slipped into the paper by
someone in the composing room at the Jornal do Brasil."

Otero had been a willing agent of the CIA, a student at their
International Police Services school in Washington, a recipient of their
cash over the years, but he was not a torturer. What finally drove him to
speak out was perhaps the torture of a woman who, while a Tupamaro
sympathizer, was also a friend of his. When she told him that Mitrione had
watched and assisted in her torture, Otero complained to him, about this
particular incident as well as his general methods of extracting
information. The only outcome of the encounter was Otero's demotion.

William Cantrell was a CIA operations officer stationed in Montevideo and
ostensibly a member of the OPS team. In the mid-1960s he was instrumental
in setting up a Department of Information and Intelligence (DII), and
providing it with funds and equipment. Some the equipment, innovated by
the CIA's Technical Services Division, was for the purpose torture, for
this was one of the functions carried out by the DII.

"One of the pieces of equipment that was found useful," former New York
Times correspondent A. J. Langguth learned, "was a wire so very thin that
it could be fitted into the mouth between the teeth and by pressing
against the gum increase the electrical charge. it was through the
diplomatic pouch that Mitrione got some of the equipment he needed in
interrogations, including these fine wires.''

Things got so bad in Mitrione's time that the Uruguayan Senate was
compelled undertake an investigation. After a five-month study, the
commission concluded unanimously that torture in Uruguay had become a
"normal, frequent and habitual occurrence inflicted upon Tupamaros as well
as others. Among the types of torture the commission's report made
reference to were electric shocks to the genitals, electric needles under
the fingernails, burning with cigarettes, the slow compression of the
testicles, daily use of psychological torture ... "pregnant women were
subjected to various brutalities and inhuman treatment" ... "certain women
were imprisoned with their very young infants and subjected to the same
treatment."

Eventually the DII came to serve as a cover for the Escuadron de la Muerte
(Death Squad), composed, as elsewhere in Latin America, primarily of
police officers, who bombed and strafed the homes of suspected Tupamaro
sympathizers and engaged in assassination and kidnapping. The Death Squad
received some of its special explosive material from the Technical
Services Division and, in all likelihood, some of the skills employed by
its members were acquired from instruction in the United States. Between
1969 and 1973, at least 16 Uruguayan police officers went through an
eight-week course at CIA/OPS schools in Washington and Los Fresnos, Texas
in the design, manufacture and employment of bombs and incendiary devices.
The official OPS explanation for these courses was that policemen needed
such training in order to deal with bombs placed by terrorists. There was,
however, no instruction in destroying bombs, only in making them;
moreover, on at least one reported occasion, the students were not
policemen, but members of a private right-wing organization in Chile.
Another part of the curriculum which might also have proven to be of value
to the Death Squad was the class on Assassination Weapons-

"A discussion of various weapons which may be used by the assassin" is how
OPS put it. Equipment and training of this kind was in addition to that
normally provided by OPS: riot helmets, transparent shields, tear gas, gas
masks, communication gear, vehicles, police batons, and other devices for
restraining crowds. The supply of these tools of the trade was increased
in 1968 when public disturbances reached the spark-point, and by 1970
American training in riot-control techniques had been given to about a
thousand Uruguayan policemen.

Dan Mitrione had built a soundproofed room in the cellar of his house in
Montevideo.

In this room he assembled selected Uruguayan police officers to observe a
demonstration of torture techniques. Another observer was Manuel Hevia
Cosculluela, a Cuban who was with the CIA and worked with Mitrione. Hevia
later wrote that the course began with a description of the human anatomy
and nervous system

Soon things turned unpleasant. As subjects for the first testing they took
beggars ... from the outskirts of Montevideo, as well as a woman
apparently from the frontier area with Brazil. There was no interrogation,
only a demonstration of the effects of different voltages on the different
parts of the human body, as well as demonstrating the use of a drug which
induces vomiting-I don't know why or what for-and another chemical
substance. The four of them died.

In his book Hevia does not say specifically what Mitrione's direct part in
all this was but he later publicly stated that the OPS chief "personally
tortured four beggars to death with electric shocks''.

On another occasion, Hevia sat with Mitrione in the latter's house, and
over a few drinks the American explained to the Cuban his philosophy of
interrogation. Mitrione considered it to be an art. First there should be
a softening-up period, with the usual beatings and insults. The object is
to humiliate the prisoner, to make him realize his helplessness, to cut
him off from reality. No questions, only blows and insults. Then, only
blows in silence.

Only after this, said Mitrione, is the interrogation. Here no pain should
be produced other than that caused by the instrument which is being used.
"The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the
desired effect," was his motto.

During the session you have to keep the subject from losing all hope of
life, because this can lead to stubborn resistance. "You must always leave
him some hope ... a distant light . "

"When you get what You want, and I always get it," Mitrione continued, "it
may be good to prolong the session a little to apply another softening-up.
Not to extract information now, but only as a political measure, to create
a healthy fear of meddling in subversive activities. "

The American pointed out that upon receiving a subject the first thing is
to determine his physical state, his degree of resistance, by means of a
medical examination. "A premature death means a failure by the technician
... It's important to know in advance if we can permit ourselves the
luxury of the subject's death.''

Not long after this conversation, Manual Hevia disappeared from Montevideo
and turned up in Havana. He had been a Cuban agent-a double agent-all
along.

About half a year later, 31 July 1970 to be exact, Dan Mitrione was
kidnapped by the Tupamaros. They did not torture him. They demanded the
release of some 150 prisoners in exchange for him. With the determined
backing of the Nixon administration, the Uruguayan government refused. On
10 August, Mitrione's dead body was found on the back seat of a stolen
car. He had turned 50 on his fifth day as a prisoner.

Back in Mitrione's home town of Richmond, Indiana, Secretary of State
William Rogers and President Nixon's son-in-law David Eisenhower attended
the funeral for Mitrione, the city's former police chief. Frank Sinatra
and Jerry Lewis came to town to stage a benefit show for Mitrione's
family.

And White House spokesman, Ron Ziegler, solemnly stated that "Mr.
Mitrione's devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly
world will remain as an example for free men everywhere.''

"A perfect man," his widow said.

"A great humanitarian," said his daughter Linda.
 
The military's entry into the escalating conflict signaled the beginning
of the end for the Tupamaros. By the end of 1972, the curtain was
descending on their guerrilla theater. Six months later, the military was
in charge, Congress was dissolved, and everything not prohibited was
compulsory. For the next 11 years, Uruguay competed strongly for the honor
of being South America's most repressive dictatorship. It had, at one
point, the largest number of political prisoners per capita in the world.
And, as every human rights organization and former prisoner could testify,
each one of them was tortured. "Torture," said an activist priest, "was
routine and automatic."

No one was dancing in Uruguay.

In 1981, at the Fourteenth Conference of American Armies, the Uruguayan
Army offered a paper in which it defined subversion as "actions, violent
or not, with ultimate purposes of a political nature, in all fields of
human activity within the internal sphere of a state and whose aims are
perceived as not convenient for the overall political system."

The dissident Uruguayan writer, Eduardo Galeano, summed up his country's
era of dictatorship thusly: "People were in prison so that prices could be
free."'

The film "State of Siege" appeared in 1972. It centered around Mitrione
and the Tupamaros and depicted a Uruguayan police officer receiving
training at a secret bomb school in the United States, though the film
strove more to provide a composite picture of the role played by the US in
repression throughout Latin America. A scheduled premier showing of the
film at the federally-funded John F. Kennedy Arts Center in Washington was
canceled. There was already growing public and congressional criticism of
this dark side of American foreign policy without adding to it. During the
mid-1970s, however, Congress enacted several pieces of legislation which
abolished the entire Public Safety Program. In its time, OPS had provided
training for more than one million policemen in the Third World. Ten
thousand of them had received advance training in the United States. An
estimated $150 million worth of equipment had been shipped to police
forces abroad. Now, the "export of repression' was to cease.

That was on paper. The reality appears to be somewhat different.

To a large extent, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) simply picked
up where OPS had left off. The drug agency was ideally suited for the
task, for its agents were already deployed all over Latin America and
elsewhere overseas in routine liaison with foreign police forces. The DEA
acknowledged in 1975 that 53 "former" employees of the CIA were now on its
staff and that there was a close working relationship between the two
agencies. The following year, the General Accounting Office reported that
DEA agents were engaging in many of the same activities the OPS had been
carrying out.

In addition, some training of foreign policemen was transferred to FBI
schools in Washington and Quantico, Virginia; the Defense Department
continued to supply police type equipment to military units engaged in
internal security operations; and American arms manufacturers were doing a
booming business furnishing arms and training to Third World governments.
In some countries, contact between these companies and foreign law
enforcement officials was facilitated by the US Embassy or military
mission. The largest of the arms manufacturers, Smith and Wesson, ran its
own Academy in Springfield Massachusetts, which provided American and
foreign "public and industrial security forces with expert training in
riot control".

Said Argentine Minister Jose Lopez Rega at the signing of a US-Argentina
anti-drug treaty in 1974: "We hope to wipe out the drug traffic in
Argentina. We have caught guerrillas after attacks who were high on drugs.
The guerrillas are the main drug users in Argentina. Therefore, this
anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerrilla campaign as
well.

And in 1981, a former Uruguayan intelligence officer declared that US
manuals were being used to teach techniques of torture to his country's
military. He said that most of the officers who trained him had attended
classes run by the United States in Panama. Among other niceties, the
manuals listed 35 nerve points where electrodes could be applied.

*****