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

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

In Latin America counterinsurgency warfare spawned death squads in a number of countries where none had existed before. NACLA research in 1974 showed that "the countries with the most active para-police assassination squads-Brazil, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Uruguay-[were] also the recipients of the largest U.S. police training grants in the region.17Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman showed that in Latin America, all ten states in which death squads had appeared in the 1970s were tightly linked to U.S. military aid and training programs. Additionally, 74% of the other states in the world that used torture on a regular basis were clients of the U.S. government."18 A 1981 report by Lars Schoultz demonstrated that during the 1970s U.S. aid tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments that tortured their citizens. Three of the six most repressive states, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay-all Condor members-received 69% of the total military aid to Latin America in 1975. Schoultz's quantitative survey showed that five of the six Condor countries were the most repressive in the region, and also were among the top recipients of U.S. military and economic aid in 1975-76. Schoultz concluded that U.S. aid was distributed disproportionately to countries with repressive governments, and that this represented not a few isolated cases but a clear pattern.19

The Latin American death squads used similar forms of torture such as the submarino, near-drowning of a bound prisoner. Such methods were considered legitimate under the brutal national security doctrine, in which the ends justified the means-and were endorsed by the United States.20 Significantly, in 2005 CIA Director Porter Goss (a former ClA officer who ran Cold War covert operations in Latin America) defended the U.S. use of "waterboarding" against prisoners in the "war on terror"-a practice identical to the submarino -as "a professional interrogation technique."21

The use of death squads and torture was aimed not only to neutralize specific victims, but also to instill fear and dread in entire societies, as E.V. Walter argued. The objectives were to create political paralysis in the population, to force people to choose sides between the government and the opposition, and to "teach a lesson" about challenging the status quo, demanding change, supporting insurgencies, or criticizing governments. The darker aspect of targeting civilians-a violation of the Geneva Accords22 - continues to be a central tenet of counterinsurgency doctrine, as was revealed during a 2005 Pentagon debate regarding whether U.S. Special Forces should train and lead abduction or assassination teams in Iraq. The problem was that the Sunni population, while not actively supporting the insurgents, still did not turn them in. One military source told a Newsweek reporter that new offensive operations were needed to create a fear of aiding (even if passively) the insurgency. He said, "The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists. From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation."23 In Latin America during the Cold War, a similar mentality, and policy, led to state terror and massive violations of human rights. General Paul Gorman, chief of the Southern Command, acknowledged in 1984 that targeting civilians was a deliberate military objective. He said that counterinsurgency was "a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object."24