|
The Unholy
Trinity - From Latin America To Iraq
Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture
By Greg Grandin
12/18/07 "TomDispatch
" -- - 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
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comment Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We encourage engaging, diverse
and meaningful commentary. Do not include
personal information such as names, addresses,
phone numbers and emails. Comments falling
outside our guidelines – those including
personal attacks and profanity – are not
permitted.
See our complete
Comment Policy
and
use this link to notify us if you have concerns
about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and remove any
inappropriate postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
