DEATH SQUADS AS PARALLEL FORCES: URUGUAY, OPERATION CONDOR, AND THE UNITED STATES

Journal of Third World Studies, Spring 2007 by McSherry, J Patrice

Since the late 1940s Washington had employed covert operations, using secret paramilitary forces, to shape political events in foreign lands and pursue perceived U.S. economic, political, and military interests. As one expert has noted, paramilitary operations "can be more accurately described as secret wars, the most extreme form of covert action."4 In Guatemala, one such secret war in 1954 resulted in the overthrow of progressive Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz,5 bringing the Cold War to Latin America. U.S. covert operations made use of local paramilitary fighters and guerrillas, including socalled "stay-behind armies" in Europe that incorporated rightist extremists in the anticommunist cause. In 1950 the CIA also began experimenting with new methods of torture, diffused in the 1960s to Latin American security forces.6 Under the Kennedy administration (1961-63) the Special Forces were created to specialize in counterinsurgency and irregular or unconventional warfare. By the early 1960s U.S. security strategists were incorporating French counterinsurgency doctrine and tactics to carry out the anticommunist wars, and Washington pressured Latin American governments and militaries to combine forces against subversion. U.S. training and doctrine included the use of terrorism, sabotage, and subversion as tools of paramilitary warfare,7 tactics that were enthusiastically adopted by many Latin American security forces. The CIA and the Special Forces were the key advocates, trainers, and advisers of counterinsurgency warfare on the ground in Latin America.

While politically repressive regimes had existed before in the region, including the use of secret police in some countries, the creation of parallel forces and the widespread use of extralegal methods were linked to postwar counterinsurgency warfare and national security doctrine. The systematic use of death squads and mass "disappearances," for example, appeared first in the 1960s, in Guatemala. Using plainclothes paramilitary and parapolice forces, government elites could augment the power of the state, hunt insurgents, and control populations, while avoiding accountability. I define parastatal forces (or the parallel state) as the forces and infrastructure of "black world" special operations created by military-intelligence commanders. Paramilitary and intelligence units were formed to carry out covert political and coercive actions and psychological warfare, operating outside lawful state action. These lethal groups appeared to be autonomous, but in reality reported to top commanders, bypassing ordinary chains of command; they had a secret command structure and operated secretly within military and security organizations. Parastatal forces allowed the national security states to circumvent legal boundaries and civilized norms, but covertly; it was, in essence, a strategy to insure impunity. Thus, death squads created as covert forces to fight dirty wars were a key element of the parallel state.

Also part of the parallel state was the vast shadow infrastructure that included secret prisons, fleets of unmarked cars and unregistered aircraft, unofficial cemeteries, secure communications and computer systems, false papers and documentation, and other parallel structures funded by "black budgets." The grupos de tareos-essentially death squads-created in the 1960s and 70s in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and elsewhere carried out disappearances, torture, executions, assassinations, and illegal transfers across borders (in the Condor system). Death squads as parastatal forces allowed the state to accomplish "unofficially" (or, in the parlance of Condor operatives, par izquierda) what the state wanted to avoid doing openly. In Latin America the use of such parallel forces grew exponentially in conjunction with U.S. training programs,8 and new patterns of repression appeared throughout the region in the 1960s and 70s. The widespread appearance of parastatal death squads, torture, disappearance and other forms of terror represented a terrifying new form of political repression-and a form deniable by the state.