{"id":26029,"date":"2013-02-25T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-25T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=26029"},"modified":"2013-03-04T19:47:48","modified_gmt":"2013-03-04T19:47:48","slug":"the-latin-american-exception-how-a-washington-global-torture-gulag-was-turned-into-the-only-gulag-free-zone-on-earth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/02\/the-latin-american-exception-how-a-washington-global-torture-gulag-was-turned-into-the-only-gulag-free-zone-on-earth\/","title":{"rendered":"The Latin American Exception: How a Washington Global Torture Gulag Was Turned Into the Only Gulag-Free Zone on Earth"},"content":{"rendered":"

The map tells<\/a> the story.\u00a0 To illustrate a damning new report, \u201cGlobalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detentions and Extraordinary Rendition,\u201d recently published<\/a> by the Open Society Institute, the Washington Post <\/em>put together an equally damning graphic: it\u2019s soaked in red, as if with blood, showing that in the years after 9\/11, the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago.<\/p>\n

\"cia-rendition-map3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Back in the early twentieth century, a similar red-hued map was used to indicate the global reach of the British Empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set.\u00a0 It seems that, between 9\/11 and the day George W. Bush left the White House, CIA-brokered torture never saw a sunset either.<\/p>\n

All told, of the 190-odd countries on this planet, a staggering 54 participated in various ways in this American torture system, hosting CIA \u201cblack site<\/a>\u201d prisons, allowing their airspace and airports to be used for secret flights, providing intelligence, kidnapping foreign nationals or their own citizens and handing them over to U.S. agents to be \u201crendered<\/a>\u201d to third-party countries like Egypt and Syria.\u00a0 The hallmark of this network, Open Society writes, has been torture<\/a>.\u00a0 Its report documents the names of 136 individuals swept up in what it says is an ongoing operation, though its authors make clear that the total number, implicitly far higher, \u201cwill remain unknown\u201d because of the \u201cextraordinary level of government secrecy associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition.\u201d<\/p>\n

No region escapes the stain. \u00a0Not North America, home to the global gulag\u2019s command center.\u00a0 Not Europe, the Middle East, Africa, or Asia.\u00a0 Not even social-democratic Scandinavia.\u00a0 Sweden turned over at least two people to the CIA, who were then rendered to Egypt, where they were subject to electric shocks, among other abuses.\u00a0 No region, that is, except Latin America.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s most striking about the Post\u2019s<\/em> map is that no part of its wine-dark horror touches Latin America; that is, not one country in what used to be called Washington\u2019s \u201cbackyard\u201d participated in rendition or Washington-directed or supported torture and abuse of \u201cterror suspects.\u201d\u00a0 Not even Colombia, which throughout the last two decades was as close to a U.S.-client state as existed in the area. \u00a0It\u2019s true that a fleck of red should show up on Cuba, but that would only underscore the point: Teddy Roosevelt took Guant\u00e1namo Bay Naval Base for the U.S. in 1903 \u201cin perpetuity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two, Three, Many CIAs<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

How did Latin America come to be territorio libre<\/em> in this new dystopian world of black sites and midnight flights, the Zion of this militarist matrix<\/a> (as fans of the Wachowskis’ movies might put it)?\u00a0 After all, it was in Latin America that an earlier generation of U.S. and U.S.-backed counterinsurgents put into place a prototype of Washington\u2019s twenty-first century Global War on Terror.<\/p>\n

Even before the 1959 Cuban Revolution, before Che Guevara urged revolutionaries to create \u201ctwo, three, many Vietnams,\u201d Washington had already set about establishing two, three, many centralized intelligence agencies in Latin America.\u00a0 As Michael McClintock shows<\/a> in his indispensable book Instruments of Statecraft, <\/em>in late 1954, a few months after the CIA\u2019s infamous coup in Guatemala that overthrew a democratically elected government, the National Security Council first recommended strengthening \u201cthe internal security forces of friendly foreign countries.”<\/p>\n

In the region, this meant three things.\u00a0 First, CIA agents and other U.S. officials set to work \u201cprofessionalizing\u201d the security forces of individual countries like Guatemala, Colombia, and Uruguay; that is, turning brutal but often clumsy and corrupt local intelligence apparatuses into efficient, \u201ccentralized,\u201d still brutal agencies, capable of gathering information, analyzing it, and storing it.\u00a0 Most importantly, they were to coordinate different branches of each country\u2019s security forces — the police, military, and paramilitary squads — to act on that information, often lethally and always ruthlessly.<\/p>\n

Second, the U.S. greatly expanded the writ of these far more efficient and effective agencies, making it clear that their portfolio included not just national defense but international offense.\u00a0 They were to be the vanguard of a global war for \u201cfreedom\u201d and of an anticommunist reign of terror in the hemisphere.\u00a0 Third, our men in Montevideo, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Asunci\u00f3n, La Paz, Lima, Quito, San Salvador, Guatemala City, and Managua were to help synchronize the workings of individual national security forces.<\/p>\n

The result was state terror on a nearly continent-wide scale.\u00a0 In the 1970s and 1980s, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet\u2019s Operation Condor<\/a>, which linked together the intelligence services of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Chile, was the most infamous of Latin America\u2019s transnational terror consortiums, reaching out to commit mayhem as far away as Washington D.C.<\/a>, Paris<\/a>, and Rome<\/a>.\u00a0 The U.S. had earlier helped put in place<\/a> similar operations elsewhere in the Southern hemisphere, especially in Central America in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans had been tortured, killed, disappeared, or imprisoned without trial, thanks in significant part to U.S. organizational skills and support. \u00a0Latin America was, by then, Washington\u2019s backyard gulag.\u00a0 Three of the region\u2019s current presidents — Uruguay\u2019s Jos\u00e9 Mujica, Brazil\u2019s Dilma Rousseff, and Nicaragua\u2019s Daniel Ortega — were victims of this reign of terror.<\/p>\n

When the Cold War ended, human rights groups began the herculean task of dismantling the deeply embedded, continent-wide network of intelligence operatives, secret prisons, and torture techniques — and of pushing militaries throughout the region out of governments and back into their barracks. \u00a0In the 1990s, Washington not only didn\u2019t stand in the way of this process, but actually lent a hand in depoliticizing Latin America\u2019s armed forces.\u00a0 Many believed that, with the Soviet Union dispatched, Washington could now project its power in its own \u201cbackyard\u201d through softer means like international trade agreements and other forms of economic leverage.\u00a0 Then 9\/11 happened.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh My Goodness\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

In late November 2002, just as the basic outlines of the CIA\u2019s secret detention and extraordinary rendition<\/a> programs were coming into shape elsewhere in the world, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld flew 5,000 miles to Santiago, Chile, to attend a hemispheric meeting of defense ministers.\u00a0 “Needless to say,\u201d Rumsfeld nonetheless said<\/a>, \u201cI would not be going all this distance if I did not think this was extremely important.” Indeed.<\/p>\n

This was after the invasion of Afghanistan but before the invasion of Iraq and Rumsfeld was riding high, as well as dropping the phrase \u201cSeptember 11th\u201d every chance he got.\u00a0 Maybe he didn\u2019t know of the special significance that date had in Latin America, but 29 years earlier on the first 9\/11, a CIA-backed coup by General Pinochet and his military led to the death of Chile\u2019s democratically elected president Salvador Allende.\u00a0 Or did he, in fact, know just what it meant and was that the point?\u00a0 After all, a new global fight for freedom, a proclaimed Global War on Terror, was underway and Rumsfeld had arrived to round up recruits.<\/p>\n

There, in Santiago, the city out of which Pinochet had run Operation Condor, Rumsfeld and other Pentagon officials tried to sell what they were now terming<\/a> the \u201cintegration\u201d of \u201cvarious specialized capabilities into larger regional capabilities\u201d — an insipid way of describing the kidnapping, torturing, and death-dealing already underway elsewhere. \u201cEvents around the world before and after September 11th suggest the advantages,\u201d Rumsfeld said<\/a>, of nations working together to confront the terror threat.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh my goodness,\u201d Rumsfeld told<\/a> a Chilean reporter, \u201cthe kinds of threats we face are global.\u201d\u00a0 Latin America was at peace, he admitted, but he had a warning for its leaders: they shouldn\u2019t lull themselves into believing that the continent was safe from the clouds gathering elsewhere.\u00a0 Dangers exist<\/a>, \u201cold threats, such as drugs, organized crime, illegal arms trafficking, hostage taking, piracy, and money laundering; new threats, such as cyber-crime; and unknown threats, which can emerge without warning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese new threats,\u201d he added ominously, \u201cmust be countered with new capabilities.\u201d Thanks to the Open Society report, we can see exactly what Rumsfeld meant by those \u201cnew capabilities.\u201d<\/p>\n

A few weeks prior to Rumsfeld\u2019s arrival in Santiago, for example, the U.S., acting on false information supplied by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, detained Maher Arar, who holds dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship, at New York\u2019s John F. Kennedy airport and then handed him over to a \u201cSpecial Removal Unit.\u201d He was flown first to Jordan, where he was beaten, and then to Syria, a country in a time zone five hours ahead of Chile, where he was turned over to local torturers.\u00a0 On November 18th, when Rumsfeld was giving his noon speech in Santiago, it was five in the afternoon in Arar\u2019s \u201cgrave-like\u201d cell in a Syrian prison, where he would spend the next year being abused.<\/p>\n

Ghairat Baheer was captured in Pakistan about three weeks before Rumsfeld\u2019s Chile trip, and thrown into a CIA-run prison in Afghanistan called the Salt Pit.\u00a0 As the secretary of defense praised Latin America\u2019s return to the rule of law after the dark days of the Cold War, Baheer may well have been in the middle of one of his torture sessions, \u201chung naked for hours on end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Taken a month before Rumsfeld\u2019s visit to Santiago, the Saudi national Abd al Rahim al Nashiri was transported to the Salt Pit, after which he was transferred \u201cto another black site in Bangkok, Thailand, where he was waterboarded.\u201d After that, he was passed on to Poland, Morocco, Guant\u00e1namo, Romania, and back to Guant\u00e1namo, where he remains.\u00a0 Along the way, he was subjected to a \u201cmock execution with a power drill as he stood naked and hooded,\u201d had U.S. interrogators rack a \u201csemi-automatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled before them.\u201d\u00a0 His interrogators also \u201cthreatened to bring in his mother and sexually abuse her in front of him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Likewise a month before the Santiago meeting, the Yemini Bashi Nasir Ali Al Marwalah was flown to Camp X-Ray in Cuba, where he remains to this day.<\/p>\n

Less than two weeks after Rumsfeld swore that the U.S. and Latin America shared \u201ccommon values,\u201d Mullah Habibullah, an Afghan national, died \u201cafter severe mistreatment\u201d in CIA custody at something called the \u201cBagram Collection Point.\u201d A U.S. military investigation \u201cconcluded that the use of stress positions and sleep deprivation combined with other mistreatment… caused, or were direct contributing factors in, his death.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two days after the secretary\u2019s Santiago speech, a CIA case officer in the Salt Pit had Gul Rahma stripped naked and chained to a concrete floor without blankets.\u00a0 Rahma froze to death.<\/p>\n

And so the Open Society report goes… on and on and on.<\/p>\n

Territorio Libre\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rumsfeld left Santiago without firm commitments. \u00a0Some of the region\u2019s militaries were tempted by the supposed opportunities offered by the secretary\u2019s vision of fusing crime fighting into an ideological campaign against radical Islam, a unified war in which all was to be subordinated to U.S. command.\u00a0 As political scientist Brian Loveman has noted<\/a>, around the time of Rumsfeld\u2019s Santiago visit, the head of the Argentine army picked up Washington\u2019s latest set of themes, insisting that \u201cdefense must be treated as an integral matter,\u201d without a false divide separating internal and external security.<\/p>\n

But history was not on Rumsfeld\u2019s side.\u00a0 His trip to Santiago coincided with Argentina\u2019s epic financial meltdown, among the worst in recorded history.\u00a0 It signaled a broader collapse of the economic model — think of it as Reaganism on steroids — that Washington had been promoting in Latin America since the late Cold War years.\u00a0 Soon, a new generation of leftists would be in power across much of the continent, committed to the idea of national sovereignty and limiting Washington\u2019s influence in the region in a way that their predecessors hadn\u2019t been.<\/p>\n

Hugo Ch\u00e1vez was already president of Venezuela.\u00a0 Just a month before Rumsfeld\u2019s Santiago trip, Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva won the presidency of Brazil. A few months later, in early 2003, Argentines elected N\u00e9stor Kirchner, who shortly thereafter ended his country\u2019s joint military exercises with the U.S. \u00a0In the years that followed, the U.S. experienced one setback after another.\u00a0 In 2008, for instance, Ecuador evicted<\/a> the U.S. military from Manta Air Base.<\/p>\n

In that same period, the Bush administration\u2019s rush to invade Iraq, an act most Latin American countries opposed, helped squander whatever was left of the post-9\/11 goodwill the U.S. had in the region.\u00a0 Iraq seemed to confirm the worst suspicions of the continent\u2019s new leaders: that what Rumsfeld was trying to peddle as an international \u201cpeacekeeping\u201d force would be little more than a bid to use Latin American soldiers as Gurkhas<\/a> in a revived unilateral imperial war.<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s \u201cSmokescreen\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show the degree to which Brazil rebuffed efforts to paint the region red on Washington\u2019s new global gulag map.<\/p>\n

A May 2005 U.S. State Department cable<\/a>, for instance, reveals that Lula\u2019s government refused \u201cmultiple requests\u201d by Washington to take in released Guant\u00e1namo prisoners, particularly a group of about 15 Uighurs the U.S. had been holding since 2002, who could not be sent back to China.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Brazil\u2019s] position regarding this issue has not changed since 2003 and will likely not change in the foreseeable future,\u201d the cable said.\u00a0 It went on to report that Lula\u2019s government considered the whole system Washington had set up at Guant\u00e1namo (and around the world) to be a mockery of international law.\u00a0 \u201cAll attempts to discuss this issue\u201d with Brazilian officials, the cable concluded, \u201cwere flatly refused or accepted begrudgingly.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition, Brazil refused to cooperate with the Bush administration\u2019s efforts to create a Western Hemisphere-wide version of the Patriot Act<\/a>.\u00a0 It stonewalled, for example, about agreeing to revise<\/a> its legal code in a way that would lower the standard of evidence needed to prove conspiracy, while widening the definition of what criminal conspiracy entailed.<\/p>\n

Lula stalled for years on the initiative, but it seems that the State Department didn\u2019t realize he was doing so until April 2008, when one of its diplomats wrote a memo calling Brazil\u2019s supposed interest in reforming its legal code to suit Washington a \u201csmokescreen.\u201d\u00a0 The Brazilian government, another Wikileaked cable complained<\/a>, was afraid that a more expansive definition of terrorism would be used to target \u201cmembers of what they consider to be legitimate social movements fighting for a more just society.\u201d Apparently, there was no way to \u201cwrite an anti-terrorism legislation that excludes the actions\u201d of Lula\u2019s left-wing social base.<\/p>\n

One U.S. diplomat complained<\/a> that this \u201cmindset\u201d — that is, a mindset that actually valued civil liberties \u00a0— \u201cpresents serious challenges to our efforts to enhance counterterrorism cooperation or promote passage of anti-terrorism legislation.\u201d \u00a0In addition, the Brazilian government worried that the legislation would be used to go after Arab-Brazilians, of which there are many.\u00a0 One can imagine that if Brazil and the rest of Latin America had signed up to participate in Washington\u2019s rendition program, Open Society would have a lot more Middle Eastern-sounding names to add to its list.<\/p>\n

Finally, cable after Wikileaked cable revealed that Brazil repeatedly brushed off efforts by Washington to isolate Venezuela\u2019s Hugo Ch\u00e1vez, which would have been a necessary step if the U.S. was going to marshal South America into its counterterrorism posse.<\/p>\n

In February 2008, for example, U.S. ambassador to Brazil Clifford Sobell met with Lula\u2019s Minister of Defense Nelson Jobin to complain about Ch\u00e1vez.\u00a0 Jobim told<\/a> Sobell that Brazil shared his \u201cconcern about the possibility of Venezuela exporting instability.\u201d\u00a0 But instead of \u201cisolating Venezuela,\u201d which might only \u201clead to further posturing,\u201d Jobim instead indicated that his government \u201csupports [the] creation of a \u2018South American Defense Council\u2019 to bring Chavez into the mainstream.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was only one catch here: that South American Defense Council was Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s idea in the first place!\u00a0 It was part of his effort, in partnership with Lula, to create independent institutions parallel to those controlled by Washington. \u00a0The memo concluded with the U.S. ambassador noting how curious it was that Brazil would use Chavez\u2019s \u201cidea for defense cooperation\u201d as part of a \u201csupposed containment strategy\u201d of Ch\u00e1vez.<\/p>\n

Monkey-Wrenching the Perfect Machine of Perpetual War<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unable to put in place its post-9\/11 counterterrorism framework in all of Latin America, the Bush administration retrenched<\/a>.\u00a0 It attempted instead to build a \u201cperfect machine of perpetual war\u201d in a corridor running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. \u00a0The process of militarizing that more limited region, often under the guise of fighting \u201cthe drug wars,\u201d has, if anything, escalated in the Obama years.\u00a0 Central America has, in fact, become the only place Southcom — the Pentagon command that covers Central and South America — can operate more or less at will.\u00a0 A look at this other map<\/a>, put together by the Fellowship of Reconciliation, makes the region look like one big landing strip for U.S. drones and drug-interdiction flights.<\/p>\n

Washington does continue<\/a> to push and probe further south, trying yet again to establish a firmer military foothold in the region and rope it into what is now a less ideological and more technocratic crusade, but one still global in its aspirations.\u00a0 U.S. military strategists, for instance, would very much like to have<\/a> an airstrip in French Guyana or the part of Brazil that bulges out into the Atlantic.\u00a0 The Pentagon would use it as a stepping stone to its increasing presence<\/a> in Africa, coordinating the work of Southcom with the newest global command, Africom.<\/p>\n

But for now, South America has thrown a monkey wrench into the machine.\u00a0 Returning to that Washington Post<\/em> map, it\u2019s worth memorializing the simple fact that, in one part of the world, in this century at least, the sun never rose on US-choreographed torture.<\/p>\n

_______________________________<\/p>\n

Greg Grandin is a TomDispatch regular<\/a> and the author of <\/em>Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford\u2019s Lost Jungle City<\/a>, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.\u00a0 Later this year, his new book, <\/em>Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World, will be published by Metropolitan Books.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright 2013 Greg Grandin<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 tomdispatch.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The map tells the story. To illustrate a damning new report, \u201cGlobalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detentions and Extraordinary Rendition,\u201d recently published by the Open Society Institute, the Washington Post put together an equally damning graphic: it\u2019s soaked in red, as if with blood, showing that in the years after 9\/11, the CIA turned just about the whole world into a gulag archipelago. No region escapes the stain. No region, that is, except Latin America.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[197,57,65,53,139],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-special-feature","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","category-latin-america-and-the-caribbean","category-justice"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}