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

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

After five Uruguayans disappeared in Argentina in April 1976, for example, the Campaign for the Abolition of Torture wrote: "The alarming reports of violent activities by rightwing squads-which have frequently singled out de facto refugees from other Latin American countries for harassment and assassination-plus increasing evidence of police collaboration between security agencies of Argentina and neighboring countries, warrant immediate appeals... "9 The violence described was the work of Condor squads, acting as a parallel force precisely to conceal state involvement and direction. The existence of the transnational system and its code name were not known at the time.

There is a growing scholarly literature on death squads and state terror. One classic work by E.V. Walter shows that the state's ultimate aim in using terror is to demobilize political opposition in society, thus solidifying power relations.10 Michael Stohl, Miles Wolpin" and others have argued that state elites employ a cost-benefit analysis when deciding on coercive instruments, calculating the efficacy of terrorist methods. In other words, state terror is not "inevitable." Jeffrey Sluka argues that "strong" states, not only "weak" ones, may choose the methods of terror. State terror is not simply a response to "threats from below," a formulation that implicitly places blame upon sectors of society that may be protesting inequitable or unjust conditions. Strong states may use terrorist methods to consolidate their rule, exert social control, and prevent future threats to their dominance.12 My own work has posited that the United States, a strong state, has acted to preserve its global hegemony through a preventive strategy, moving to set up counterinsurgency structures and parallel forces in client states even in the absence of internal threats.13 Bill Rolston has documented that democratic as well as nondemocratic states may use terror.14 He examines the presence of British intelligence agents in loyalist death squads in Northern Ireland, and shows that in this case a democratic state was intimately involved in terror, and indeed, regarded the rule of law and other democratic safeguards as obstacles to be overcome. Rolston's work indicates that the decision to use death squads is motivated by state elites' desire to act against an "enemy" rapidly and murderously, bypassing normal legal processes. Ted R. Gurr, significantly, links the state's use of terror to the formation and long-term existence of countertenor or political police units, which provide ready instruments for clandestine operations." Especially after the Cuban revolution, Washington moved to create precisely these types of structures in Latin America, in conjunction with the region's security forces, to combat-and prevent-social movements that challenged the status quo.

U.S. "modernization" (and in some cases, creation) of military, intelligence, and police institutions in Latin America during the Cold War greatly strengthened the region's repressive forces. Martha Muggins16 has shown that U.S. financing, training, and advice to police in Brazil were designed to ensure U.S. influence within, and access to, the force and to develop U.S. "assets"~personnel loyal to U.S. interests. She demonstrates that foreign police training-and similarly, for our purposes, training of military and intelligence forces~by a powerful modern state is designed to advance the offering country's own security agenda. U.S. officials claimed that assistance to the Brazilian police would promote professionalism, democracy, and justice, but in actuality it had the opposite effect. Police who employed terrorism, torture, death squads, and the like were rewarded with continuing U.S. assistance, financing, and cooperation. Huggins' book provides a rich case study of the ways in which U.S. security assistance centralized Brazil's internal security services and made them more militarized and authoritarian. Washington financed, trained, and assisted most of the Latin American military and police forces in similar ways, and, through the continental military system, fostered a hemispheric counterrevolutionary regime.