[Peace-discuss] American brutality

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture
	-- from Latin America to Iraq
	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 García Márquez reported that the region's 
"disappeared number nearly one hundred and twenty thousand, 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 U.S. 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 which 
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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, U.S. 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 "Global 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 U.S. 
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 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 U.S. 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 3rd and 5th 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 U.S.-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, U.S.-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 U.S.-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 U.S. 
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 U.S. 
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 U.S. 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 U.S. 
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, Inés 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

     Inés 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 Attorney General John Ashcroft has declared himself 
potentially torturable, telling a University of Colorado audience 
recently 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.

Copyright 2007 Greg Grandin