{"id":130055,"date":"2019-04-01T12:00:02","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T11:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=130055"},"modified":"2019-04-08T11:42:20","modified_gmt":"2019-04-08T10:42:20","slug":"operation-condor-and-the-united-states-torture-death-squads-and-echoes-in-the-new-millennium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/04\/operation-condor-and-the-united-states-torture-death-squads-and-echoes-in-the-new-millennium\/","title":{"rendered":"Operation Condor and the United States: Torture, Death Squads and Echoes in the New Millennium"},"content":{"rendered":"

25 Mar 2019 – On December 2, 1823 in the wake of rebellions in Latin America that had ended Spanish rule in the Western Hemisphere, US President James Monroe<\/strong> announced that European colonial powers that attempted to assert influence in the region would be an overt threat to the national security of the US.\u00a0 Monroe claimed that European monarchies and colonialism were incompatible with the notions of democracy and republicanism that were featured in the New World.\u00a0 Monroe\u2019s proclamation set the stage for US foreign policies for nearly 200 years: US hegemony over Latin America was a natural extension of the messianic visions of Manifest Destiny and US exceptionalism.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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Graffiti in Buenos Aires, Argentina<\/p><\/div>\n

Beginning in the twentieth century US President Theodore Roosevelt<\/strong>, desiring to flex the muscles of the nation\u2019s burgeoning policies of imperialism, added the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1905) that stated the US would use its might to ensure the countries in the Western Hemisphere would remain \u201cstable, orderly and prosperous.\u201d\u00a0 The US began policies of intervention in Latin America that became routine for three decades into the twentieth century.\u00a0 After a hiatus during President Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s \u201cGood Neighbor Policy,\u201d the Organization of American States was formed in 1948 to protect the Western Hemisphere from dangerous, i.e. communist, elements abroad.\u00a0 As Cold War fears against the \u201cred menace\u201d escalated into the 1950s, US President Harry S. Truman<\/strong> approved a National Security Agency (NSA) memorandum that asserted in typical breathless tones of the era \u201cthe Cold War was in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, as Latin America became an increasingly important trading partner, the US poured $6 billion into the region by the late 1950s.\u00a0 Latin American nations in the region imported nearly 50 percent of their imports from the US.\u00a0 The US imported about 35 percent of the goods like sugar, coffee, bananas and wool that it consumed from Latin American nations.\u00a0 When Guatemalan President Jacobo \u00c1rbenz<\/strong> partially nationalized holdings without compensation of the US-based United Fruit Company, the largest landowner in Guatemala, US President Dwight D. \u201cIke\u201d Eisenhower<\/strong> ordered the CIA to orchestrate the overthrow of the democratically-elected \u00c1rbenz government.\u00a0 Working with reactionary elements in Guatemala in 1954 the CIA installed Carlos Castillo Armas<\/strong> a military dictator who rolled back \u00c1rbenz\u2019s reforms and began a repressive purge of \u00c1rbenz supporters.\u00a0 The message to reformers in Latin America was clear: Even the most moderate social reforms that effected US corporate interests would be met with the crushing might of the US and its allies in the oligarchies that dominated Latin America.\u00a0 This action set the groundwork for US policy in Latin America for the next 65 years to the present day.\u00a0 In the following passage, Zanchetta quotes from a secret CIA report that attempted to justify the US actions in Guatemala.1<\/sup> This justification would appear in various iterations in subsequent US misadventures around the globe too numerous to list in this offering.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost.\u00a0 There are no rules to such a game\u2026 long-standing rules American concepts of \u201cfair-play\u201d must be reconsidered.\u00a0 We must develop effective espionage and counter espionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us.\u00a0 It may become necessary that the American people be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 1959, when the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro<\/strong> forced the right-wing government of Fulgencio Batista a US ally out of power, panic erupted in Washington as fears of a communist toehold in the US sphere of influence became a reality.\u00a0 Meanwhile, reverberations were occurring in Latin America that included both left-wing and right-wing ideologies.\u00a0 On the left, workers, peasants, students, intellectuals and the clergy were politicized and began calling for an end to the pernicious lack of democracy, wealth inequality and government repression and brutality.\u00a0 Simultaneously, the dominate class including US corporations, the oligarchs and the military and intelligence agencies began to worry about \u201canother Cuba\u201d and \u201csubversives\u201d seeking to end the status quo.\u00a0 What emerged was a national security doctrine that yielded a messianic mission led by the military to secure Latin American states and eradicate the radicals that advocated communist subversion.<\/p>\n

When President John F. Kennedy<\/strong> began his occupancy of the White House on January 20, 1961, his administration desired to approach Latin America in a more conciliatory tone than his predecessors by establishing the Alliance for Progress.\u00a0 The Alliance for Progress proposed to form a basis for the growth and development on democratic ideals throughout the Western Hemisphere.\u00a0 By establishing programs to enhance economic conditions, the need would decline for covert actions that fostered repressive regimes that toppled democratically-elected governments in Latin America<\/p>\n

Yet, the Kennedy administration did not abandon covert activities to thwart communist influence in the region.\u00a0 Kennedy continued with plans born in the Eisenhower administration to overthrow and assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba.\u00a0 The CIA was training right-wing Cuban exiles for an April 1961 invasion of the island nation to instigate a counterrevolution to eliminate the Marxist Castro government.\u00a0 The Bay of Pigs invasion was the result of CIA policymakers that ended in abject humiliation for the US intelligence service.\u00a0 A more successful ending to a major threat that threatened nuclear war between the US and Soviet Union was the Cuban missile crisis when the Soviets began a missile buildup in Cuba.\u00a0 As the crisis brought tensions between the two superpowers to a head, Kennedy invoked the long-standing Monroe Doctrine in an address to the nation on October 22, 1962:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis secret, swift and extraordinary buildup of communist missiles\u2014in an area well-known to have a special and historical relationship to the United States and the nations of the Western Hemisphere, in violation of Soviet assurances and in defiance of American and hemispheric policy\u2014this sudden, clandestine decision to station strategic weapons for the first time outside of Soviet soil\u2014is a deliberately provocative and unjustified change to the status quo which cannot be accepted by this country.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Kennedy administration and the Soviet Union\u2019s skillful negotiations that largely occurred through back-channel diplomacy successfully tamped down a serious threat to humanity\u2019s existence and reasserted the US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere.<\/p>\n

US interventions that established repressive military dictatorships in Latin America continued apace under the guise of \u201cfighting communism\u201d as the thinly veiled cover of establishing profit centers for US corporations and their allies among the ruling elites in the Americas.\u00a0 Beginning in the 1960s and escalating to a frenzy in the 1970s, the US government had its blood-soaked hands in regime changes that surged in countries like Brazil (1964), Bolivia (1971), Uruguay (1973), Chile (1973) and Argentina (1976).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>When in 1970 Marxist Salvador Allende<\/strong> was elected president of Chile, President Richard Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger<\/strong> were alarmed that Chile would become an expansion of the Soviet Union\u2019s influence in the region that Kissinger described as America\u2019s \u201cbackyard.\u201d\u00a0 The Nixon administration feared that Chile would lead to other nations falling like dominoes to the threat of communism.\u00a0 The outsized obsession of containing communism led to a fanatical and messianic fervor to let the ends justify the means\u2014Operation Condor would supply the means (McSherry, Predatory States 2005, 2-4; Zanchetta 2016,1084-1086).<\/p>\n

After General Augusto Pinochet<\/strong> toppled the Allende coalition government in Chile on September 11, 1973, Pinochet ordered the warrantless arrests by plain-clothes agents of the clandestine, blood-soaked Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) of political opponents.\u00a0 They were incarcerated in the national stadium in Santiago that was converted to a concentration camp with 40,000 prisoners.\u00a0 The following year the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva, Switzerland published a report of human-rights violations including torture (Zanchetta 2016, 1090).<\/p>\n

Operation Condor<\/strong> was a covert transnational organization that was formed in the 1970s in repressive military dictatorships as a bulwark to halt \u201csubversive\u201d elements from establishing socialist (and socio-democratic) governments in Latin America.\u00a0 Key members were Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil; Ecuador and Peru were added later with a more limited participation.\u00a0 Operatives were selected for their fervor to crush what they believed to be a threat from godless communists and their fellow travelers.\u00a0 The operatives came from the military, local police departments, clandestine intelligence services and select right-wing civilian groups.\u00a0 Condor operated secretly under a centralized military command structure that was independent of the mainstream command hierarchy of disparate nations.\u00a0 Condor\u2019s mission was to exterminate political enemies not just among the collection of member nations in South America, but the entire planet.\u00a0 Condor was the quintessential transnational criminal enterprise that by the 1990s led to prosecutions in Latin American and European courts of numerous Condor officers.2<\/sup><\/p>\n

Torture techniques used during the Cold War in Latin America were supported covertly by US policymakers at the highest levels of government and the military.\u00a0 As early as 1948, the CIA had clandestine prisons in Germany, Japan and the Panama Canal Zone.\u00a0 The prison at the Panama Canal Zone was described in 2005 by Tom Polgar, who was the CIA station chief in Buenos Aires during the runup to the 1973 overthrow of the Salvador Allende government in Chile.\u00a0 Polgar said, \u201c(The Canal Zone was) like Guant\u00e1namo, it was anything goes.\u201d\u00a0 The Panama prison was the largest of the three facilities that functioned as lawless torture chambers to interrogate suspected double agents.\u00a0 Under a program called \u201cProject Artichoke\u201d prisoners were injected with drugs including LSD and tortured\u2014these prisoners were among the \u201cguinea pigs\u201d in the CIA\u2019s 15-year search for methods of mind control known as Project MKUltra.\u00a0 The brutal methods that originated in China and the Soviet Union were widely adopted by US instructors by the 1960s at the School of the Americas in the US where torture manuals illustrated the techniques.\u00a0 During the 1970s and 1980s, these techniques were applied to \u201csubversives\u201d during Operation Condor in Latin America.<\/p>\n

President G. W. Bush boasted in his State of the Union Address on January 28, 2003 that approximately 3,000 captives had been seized and incarcerated without criminal charges or benefit of legal counsel in detention centers chosen for their invulnerability to scrutiny in the courts and agencies responsible for monitoring human-rights violations.\u00a0 The captives were denied prisoner of war (POW) status that would entitle the prisoner certain legal rights.\u00a0 Instead, the Bush administration called them \u201cenemy combatants\u201d and claimed they had no legal rights whatsoever.<\/p>\n

By 2005, the Bush administration and the CIA began to publicly justify so called \u201cenhanced interrogations,\u201d i.e. torture, at myriad offshore \u201cblack sites.\u201d The techniques of torture and rendition that appeared in Guant\u00e1namo, Iraq, Afghanistan and the so-called CIA black sites were identical to those used Latin America\u2019s \u201cdirty wars\u201d under the rubric of Operation Condor: near drowning (submarino<\/em>), forced standing (plant\u00f3n<\/em>), confinement in coffin-size boxes as stinging insects were introduced, forced nudity, sexual violence, hanging in contorted positions and others. Additionally, the policies of disappearance, \u201crendition\u201d to countries participating in the Operation Condor network and extrajudicial execution reappeared during the Bush administration.\u00a0 CIA Director Porter Goss claimed the torture of forcing water into a prisoner\u2019s airway known as \u201cwaterboarding\u201d was \u201ca professional interrogation technique.\u201d\u00a0 In 2004 the US Army appointed General Antonio M. Taguba to investigate procedures initiated in US detention sites.\u00a0 Taguba concluded, \u201cThere is no longer any doubt as to whether the current (George W. Bush) administration has committed war crimes.\u201d (McSherry, Counterterror Wars and Human Rights 2009; Fitzpatrick, 2003; Weiner 2008 72-73).<\/p>\n

Condor\u2019s sinister structure offered several functions:<\/p>\n