Death Squads, Disappearances, Torture: Past & Present

Death Squads, Disappearances, and Torture
By Greg Grandin
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174873/greg_grandin_on_the_torturable_and_the_untorturable

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.

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