The Doctrine of National
Security -- Terror:
The United States Teaches
Latin America How
excerpted from the book
Cry of the People
The struggle for human rights
in Latin America
and the Catholic Church in conflict with US policy
by Penny Lernoux
Penguin Books, 1980, paper
p156
The stories [of government atrocities] ... in Central America
are not bizarre instances of cruelty but common occurrences in
Latin America, endured by thousands of innocent people. The more
industrially advanced the country, the more sophisticated the
form of torture and death: in Ecuador, a horse bridle, in Honduras,
a bread oven; in Brazil, computerized terror, truth serum, and
electric shock. So systematized is torture that it has become
a way of life in many Latin-American countries. Yet these countries
claim to share the cultural values of the Western world, to show
the same respect for liberty and human rights.
There have been many explanations for
this situation. Some said it was a collective sickness in the
land; others, a return to the bloodthirsty lawlessness of the
early conquistadors. Still others claimed that, just beneath the
cultured surface, Latin America has always been a brutal continent.
There may be some truth in all these explanations, but the key
to the current terror and repression lies elsewhere-in the values
of the Western world itself.
p156
The sickness that has engulfed Latin America,
that endorses torture and assassination as Y routine in most of
these countries, was to a significant extent bred in the boardrooms
and military institutes of the United-States. _ Americans who
once shook their heads in disbelief at the idea of CIA agents
overthrowing a democratically elected government were shocked
into some awareness of the truth when the CIA's role in the downfall
of Salvador Allende was thoroughly documented by the United States
Congress And Chile was but part of the story. However the Department
of Defense may try to duck its responsibility, the Pentagon's
courses for Latin-American military officers were instrumental
in formulating the Doctrine of National Security, and it was this
doctrine that gave rise to totalitarianism ; in eleven Latin-American
countries. Even the RAND Corporation, the State Department's think
tank for Latin America, worried about what the Pentagon had done.*
*[Reported RAND: "United States preconceptions
about the seriousness of the Communist threat and about the subsequent
need for counterinsurgency and civic action for the Latin-American
military are producing undesired results. Paradoxically, U.S.
policies appear simultaneously to encourage authoritarian regimes
and to antagonize the military who lead them." (Luigi R.
Einaudi, Richard L. Maullin, and Alfred C. Stephan III, "Latin-American
Security Issues" [Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation,
Apr. 1969], p. v.)]
While Defense Department officials could
not be accused of deliberately encouraging the emergence of Latin-American
Hitlers, - and while no one was suggesting an international conspiracy,
cause and effect worked as they had during United Brands' long
history of corruption of Central American governments: United
Brands did not itself put the peasants in the Honduran bread oven,
but it helped create the political conditions necessary for such
atrocities.**
**["We must produce a disembowelment
of the incipient economy of the country in order to increase and
help our aims," a United Fruit (Brands) manager wrote a company
lawyer about Honduras. "We have to prolong its tragic, tormented,
and revolutionary life; the wind must blow only on our sails and
the water must only wet our keel." (Richard J. Barnet and
Ronald E. Muller, Global Reach [New York: Simon and Schuster,
1974], p. 87.)]
At the Nuremberg trials in postwar Germany,
a number of individuals and companies were found guilty of crimes
against humanity. It was no defense to say, "I was only following
orders, I didn't know what was going on," or "I was
just doing what everyone else did"; that was judged morally
indefensible. Three decades after World War II, it must again
be asked if the support by bribery of right-wing totalitarian
governments that have killed thousands of innocent people is morally
defensible because "if I don't do it, my competitor will."
Or whether it is acceptable to teach Latin-American paramilitary
organizations how to make bombs or to instruct governments in
press censorship and the persecution of the Catholic Church. That
is the United States' record in Latin America since World War
II, and there is not even the weak excuse that the Americans responsible
for this immorality were acting in the greater cause of their
country. Unlike the Germans, these people cannot possibly claim
that the American people have gained anything from the repression
and poverty of their Latin-American neighbors-only a few companies
have done so.
Certain ideals, such as freedom and respect
for the individual's rights, form part of the United States' heritage,
but how is anyone to respect that heritage when Americans say
one thing at home and do another in the poorer countries? "In
the face of the facts, it must be said that our recent performance
has been high on rhetoric but poor in real terms," said Archbishop
Peter L. Gerety, of Newark, New Jersey. "Whether the case
cited is the Soviet Union, Korea, Chile, South Africa or Rhodesia,
the actual influence of human-rights considerations in U.S. policy-making
does not appear to be substantial or sustained."
The Catholic Church has been severely
persecuted in Latin America for denouncing the Defense Department
and the immoral business practices of a host of U.S. corporations,
yet it is merely asking the American people to respect their own
ideals. "We only want for ourselves what you want for yourselves,"
Nicaraguan Jesuit Fernando Cardenal told the U. S. Congress. "If
you don't want dictators in this country, do not support them
in other countries. What is good for you is also good for US."
Creole Fascism
Ever since 1823, when the Monroe Doctrine
became the cornerstone of U.S. policy for Latin America, Washington
has befriended dictators. Before World War II these were usually
yes-men who identified with U.S. interests, an example being Anastasio
Somoza, who held Nicaragua in reserve for the United States in
case Washington should ever want to build a second transisthmian
canal in Central America. (One of Somoza's predecessors was booted
out of office for opening canal negotiations with the Japanese.)
After World War II U.S. interests were broadened to include cold-war
priorities. Even when no specific economic or political advantage
was to be gained, Washington supported Latin-American dictators
who claimed to be anti-communist, as in the case of General Stroessner
in Paraguay. But the result of this preoccupation with communism
was the revival of another monster: a creole version of European
fascism.
A latent force in several of the most
important South-American countries, fascism - particularly Mussolini's
corporate state-had long attracted certain military and civilian
sectors. During the 1930s it was also popular within an influential
wing of the Catholic Church because of its virulent anti-communism
and emphasis on "God, Fatherland, and Family." Called
"integralism" in South America, this creole brand of
European fascism made its greatest impact on Argentina, although
the Brazilian populist dictator Getulio Vargas (president 1930-45,
1951-S4) also flirted with integralism, especially after 1937,
when he seized total power and established his Estado Novo. Chile
and Paraguay were also influenced by fascism.
Based on a rigid hierarchical society
in which people are departmentalized according to social class
and productive function, the integralist corporate state was well
suited to Latin America's older feudal order and also accommodated
economic and political changes brought about by industrialization.
While all sectors of society theoretically have equal political
representation in a corporate state, integralism as it evolved
in Latin America essentially meant that the military, large landowners,
and industrialists tightened their control over the government
and the economy.
p160
In contrast to Brazil's armed forces, which took a technological
approach to totalitarianism, the Argentine military reverted to
the mysticism and fervor of the medieval Christian knights to
justify fascism. Though both see Catholicism as a necessary component
of military dictatorship, Argentina's generals, with their Augustinian
vision of a world of order and discipline ruled by God's chosen
few in the Argentine military, are more sincere and therefore
more dangerous Catholics than their Brazilian counterparts. General
Juan Carlos Ongania's 1966-70 dictatorship, the forerunner of
Argentina's virulently right-wing regimes in the late seventies,
was a clear example of this mystical, barracks-born corporate
state, with its emphasis on the "Christian and military virtues"
of Spanish knighthood. Ongania felt himself "personally called"
to shape the country's destiny during a religious retreat he made
shortly before his mid-1966 coup, and many of the generals and
industrialists appointed to his Cabinet shared his belief that
these "virtues" would restore mental, cultural, social,
and political discipline to Argentina. The feudal aspects of integralism
particularly appealed to these men, who were convinced that God
had ordained an obedient, hierarchical society in which everyone
knew his place. It was natural that they should think so, for
many of these values, particularly obedience and loyalty to the
chain of command, formed part of the military mentality. Ongania's
notion of an elite corps of rulers called by God to serve and
save the nation was totally out of step with a modern Argentine
society searching for more democratic forms of government, and
popular discontent eventually forced the military to replace him
with a less dogmatic ruler. Nevertheless, many ideas survived
and thrived in the right wing of the Argentine armed forces, particularly
among the hard-liners in the Army and the Navy because these men
had been influenced by U.S. counterinsurgency courses that polarized
the world forever between Western capitalism and Eastern communism.
Ongania converted this into a medieval-like crusade against communism,
which he called the "West Point Doctrine" in honor of
the academy where his ideas were first formulated.
Although Ongania and his military successors
harped constantly on the Christian nature of their dictatorships,
only far-right wings of the Argentine Church took their claims
to God-given superiority seriously, in part because the Church
itself was undergoing a social revolution, and in part because
the "saviors of the nation" frequently turned out to
be bloodthirsty crooks whose real ambitions were power and money.
The military's principal support within the Church came from another
throwback to the Middle Ages known as "Tradition, Family,
and Property" (TFP), whose knights errant go forth in flowing
red capes to do battle with the communist dragon.
There was no such confusion of medieval
mysticism with twentieth-century totalitarianism in Brazil, although
the results were similar. Brazil's military also views itself
as the "chosen few," but less on religious than on technological
grounds, the Brazilians believing themselves "nation builders";
the Argentines, "nation saviors." Like Hitler, Brazil's
generals view Catholicism as a useful weapon to control the masses,
but they neither expect nor accept active participation by the
Church in the field of social action or human rights. As in Argentina,
however, the Brazilian branch of TFP was a useful ally of the
military, particularly during the period leading up to the coup
against President Joao Goulart.
Whereas Argentina's generals want to drag
the bishops physically into the crusade against communism, the
Brazilian military considers the critical, post-Conciliar Church
a political nuisance because it won't restrict itself to its nineteenth-century
role as caretaker of souls or fit in with the military's new scheme
to replace God with a bank of computers. General Golbery do Couto
e Silva, the principal ideologist of Brazil's Doctrine of National
Security, believes that Catholicism, though outdated as a faith,
still has its social uses-in teaching children, for example, to
respect their parents, or discouraging them from killing one another.
This essentially materialistic view of religion is to a degree
an extension of the military's consuming faith in technology as
the solution to all mankind's problems and its commitment to the
welfare of the amoral multinationals. But there is also a strong
streak of the superiority complex so obvious in Argentina's armed
forces: Brazil's generals are devout in one respect-they sincerely
believe that they know better than anyone else, bishops included,
what is good for Brazil.
A basic difference between the two armed
forces is that the Argentines needed very little outside help
to convince themselves of their natural superiority, since they
had run the country for most of this century, whereas it is unlikely,
in view of Brazil's democratic traditions, that its military would
even have viewed itself with such satisfaction had it not been
for the influence of the U. S. Department of Defense. The American
brass not only taught their Brazilian counterparts to see themselves
as the chosen few, but also encouraged them to resurrect and update
integralism as part of the great cold-war anti-communist crusade.
Because of Peron's lasting influence, fascism never died in Argentina
and could be revived with little or no outside prompting; in Brazil
it was reborn thanks largely to Brazil's "greatest friend,"
the United States. And today Brazil, not Argentina, calls the
shots in Latin America.
Grad School for Juntas
Ironically, Brazil's modern military state
had its origins in the Allied invasion of fascist Italy in 1945,
when a number of Brazilian officers participating in the campaign
were exposed to American military ideas and tactics. General Humberto
de A. Castelo Branco, who was to lead the 1964 coup against Joao
Goulart, returned to Brazil with a lasting admiration for U.S.
military methods, as did General Golbery do Couto e Silva, the
Brazilian military's grey eminence. Castelo Branco's roommate
in Italy, General Vernon Walters, later deputy director of the
CIA, was also to play an important role in the 1964 putsch.
Couto e Silva, who served two Brazilian
military rulers and at one time was head of Dow Chemical's Brazilian
division, was particularly influential in the formation of Brazil's
Advanced War College, popularly known as the "Brazilian Sorbonne,"
which is responsible for national security studies, the development
of military strategy, and a variety of specialized courses for
officers and businessmen. Founded in 1949 during the height of
the cold war, the War College incorporated many of the Pentagon's
ideas on national security and nation building, the latter an
outgrowth of the U. S. Army's experience in reconstructing postwar
Japan.
The cornerstone of United States-Latin
American military cooperation had already been laid in 1947 at
Rio de Janeiro with the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance,
itself the culmination of a series of bilateral military pacts
that were signed during World War II to combat the Axis powers.
It was under the Rio treaty's umbrella that the Defense Department
in 1951 set up its Military Assistance Program (MAP) to arm and
train Latin America's armies. Although MAP, like the treaty, was
conceived as a defense against external military threat, it soon
became a mechanism to promote U.S. military strategy and the "American
way of life," one of the principal goals being to keep the
hemisphere safe from internal subversion of the sort that occurred
in Guatemala, where in 1954 the Arbenz government was overthrown
for its temerity in trying to expropriate some United Fruit lands.
By 1959, when President Eisenhower convened the Draper Committee
to evaluate MAP's effectiveness, the pretense of external threat
had been dropped: the principal objective of U.S. military assistance
was to influence the region's future military leaders. "There
is no single aspect of the military assistance program that produced
more useful returns for the dollars expended than these training
programs," the committee found, adding that the relations
developed with Latin-American military officers would help instill
in them a sense of U.S. priorities and policies.
MAP became yet more important after Castro's
successful 1959 revolution, not only in developing counterinsurgency
programs but also in encouraging Latin-American military officers
to look upon themselves as an elite. As Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara explained to a House Appropriations Committee:
Probably the greatest return on our military-assistance
investment comes from the training of selected officers and key
specialists at our military schools and training centers in the
United States and overseas. These students are hand-picked by
their countries to become instructors when they return , home.
They are the coming leaders, the men who will have \ the know-how
and impart it to their forces. I need not dwell '~ upon the value
of having in positions of leadership men who | have firsthand
knowledge of how Americans do things and l how they think. It
is beyond price to us to make friends of such men. [Emphasis added.
Professor Lucian Pye, one of MIT's cold-war
social scientists, was even more specific about U.S. military
goals, arguing that the armed forces "have been consistently
among the most modernized institutions in their society"
and that therefore the United States should support military governments.
Poorer countries, he said, should not "be deprived of the
developmental value of the military organizations simply because
the ideological basis of the military in advanced societies rejects
the appropriateness of the military openly touching upon essentially
civilian functions," adding that this was particularly true
"in countries faced with serious insurgency or subversion."
Pye's ideas, published in 1961, were echoed almost word for word
by Nelson Rockefeller eight years later, when, after his historic
tour of Latin America, he announced that the military was "the
essential force of constructive social change."
The United States fostered the idea of
armies as nation builders in several ways, including civic action
programs in which the Latin-American military took over a number
of civilian functions, such as building roads. The purpose was
to improve relations with the local populace, but such projects
were never popular with the military, which felt it had been reduced
to the status of a local Peace Corps, or with the civilians, who,
quite properly, suspected the military's motives. More to the
point, courses designed to give the Latin-American military officers
a broader background in government were introduced at U.S. military
schools and academies. Explained the Department of Defense:
Normally the subjects available in United
States institutions denote a degree of academic sophistication
far beyond that achieved in the schools of the less developed
countries. Yet in these countries . . . the need for training
in management, economics, public administration, the social sciences,
and related fields is most critical. In many of these countries
where the military plays a predominant role in national development,
the collateral benefits accruing from the training of senior officers
are obvious.
At the Inter-American Defense College
(IADC) at Washington's Fort McNair, for example, Latin-American
officers study industrial and financial management, transportation,
trade, agriculture, energy, communications, and international
finance. "The college is training people to more efficiently
manage a government," said Admiral Gene LaRocque, IADC director
from 1969 to 1972. Although he admitted that "it's unhealthy
to build up a cadre of military governors all over the world and
this is what we do to some extent," he immediately added
that in Latin America "the more efficient the military are,
the more powerful the military are, and the more powerful our
military are. These days when you need a problem solved, you go
to the Pentagon. The admiral there knows the admiral in Latin
America.'' (Someone, perhaps, like Admiral Emilio Massera, an
IADC graduate and ultra-rightist, who used his position as head
of the Argentine Navy to set up a network of torture and terror
in Buenos Aires).*
*[LaRocque's successor, Air Force General
Kermit C. Kaericher, took a more optimistic view of dictatorship
m Latin America, stating that "if problems were left to the
military, we would have a lot less war and problems." Asked
what sort of model government he had in mind, General Kaericher
said he certainly had been impressed by Paraguay. Recalling a
visit to that impoverished South American country, Kaericher said
he had told President Stroessner that he had "never been
to a place where the people were so poor and looked so happy.
(Jeffrey Stein, "Grad School for Juntas," The Nation
[May 21, 1977], pp. 621-24.)]
But undoubtedly the Pentagon's strongest
motive for pushing its idea of nation building was its reliance
on the -military as the "guardian of national security"
in the ongoing crusade against communism. Almost all the courses,
whether in ballistics or communications, were, and still are,
heavily laden with pro-United States, anti-communist propaganda
that encourages the Latin Americans to abhor as subversive anything
that seems to run t_ counter to U.S. interests. Moreover, as builders-and
saviors-of the nation, only the armed forces can judge what is
and is not subversive. As evolved in Latin America, these ideas
led the military to believe that their job was to defend traditions
and the status quo; any suggestion of change, whether agrarian
reform or a return to democratic government, was per se subversive
of the established order. It was but a short step from this definition
to the use of terror and torture in defense of the "need
for order," and here again the United States provided the
necessary training and arms. Among the subjects taught Brazilian
officers in U.S. military courses, according to information supplied
to a U. S. Senate Committee, were the following:
... censorship, checkpoint systems, chemical
and biological operations, briefings on the CIA, civic action
and civil affairs, clandestine operations, counter-guerrilla operations,
cryptography, defoliation, dissent in the United States, electronic
intelligence, electronic warfare and countermeasures, the use
of informants, insurgency, intelligence, counterintelligence,
subversion, counter-subversion, espionage, counterespionage, interrogation
of prisoners and suspects, handling mass rallies and meetings,
nuclear weapons effects, intelligence photography, polygraphs,
populace and resources control, psychological operations, raids
and searches, riots, special warfare, surveillance, terror, and
undercover operations.
According to U.S. government officials,
these courses, and $4 billion in aid, served the national interests
of the United States in Brazil. But when questioned more closely
about exactly what those interests were, the AID director, William
A. Ellis, admitted to the U. S. Congress that they were "the
protection and expansion, if possible, of our economic interests,
trade, and investment.'' Yet a multitude of independent surveys,
including those made by the State Department's think tank at the
RAND Corporation, have shown that the only economic interests
at stake were, and are, those of a few large U.S. corporations.
p168
Belgian theologian Jose Comlin
"Not merely do [the Latin-American
elites] reject the genuine origins of their nations -- African,
Indian, and Iberian -- but they regret that they themselves are
not French, English or North American: this is alienation of a
kind to be found nowhere else.''
p169
80 percent of the officers who carried out the 1964 coup against
President Goulart [Brazil] had been trained by the United States.
p172
AIthough Brazil's apparatus of repression resembled that of European
fascism, its lack of popular support distinguished it from its
German and Italian counterparts and made it intrinsically Latin-American.
Brazilian economist Helio Jaguaribe described it as `'colonial
fascism"-fascism because it was "a model for promoting
economic development without changing the existing social conditions";
colonial, because it depended on "the West in general, and
the United States in particular, due to its need for foreign assistance
and foreign markets." Far from encouraging social mobility,
capitalism's marriage to "colonial fascism" only intensified
class differences as the rich grew richer and the poor, poorer.
The development promoted by such foreign aid programs as the Alliance
for Progress was as much a farce as the periodic elections staged
by the Brazilian military. The rich local elites refused to accept
change, and Washington was unwilling to do anything that might
adversely affect U.S. corporate interests. As U.S. political scientist
James Petras pointed out, "By building up and indoctrinating
the Latin-American armed forces to the point where they influence
policy and exercise a personal veto and then using them to protect
U.S. economic interests, Washington's military has gone straight
to the heart of the hemisphere political system." Because
the rulers of Brazil, the "privileged satellite," were
economically and militarily dependent on the United States, Washington
was able to do away with the outdated military intervention implicit
in the Monroe Doctrine.
Underpinning Brazil's repressive apparatus
was a series of "institutional acts" decreed between
1964 and 1971 that allowed the regime, when it saw fit, to suspend
Congress, habeas corpus, civil rights, unions, student federations,
and freedom of the press-all in the name of national security.
The death sentence, abolished in 1922, was reintroduced for political
crimes, and a number of common crimes, such as armed robbery,
became political ones. Heads of university faculties were given
police powers to bar professors from teaching for five years and
students from studying for three years, and to order their arrest
and trial by military tribunal. Any Brazilian whom the armed forces
considered undesirable could be banished from the country, which
amounted to "civil death." And the President of Brazil
was authorized to draw up a series of secret decrees in the area
of national security.
Under the Code of Military Penal Procedure,
Brazilians and foreigners could be arrested by the military police
of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or one of the many special paramilitary
groups that "assisted" in security operations, such
as "Operacao Bandeirantes," a right-wing vigilante force
created by the Second Army Command in Sao Paulo and responsible
for the deaths of five hundred to one thousand people between
1964 and 1970. Prisoners could be held incommunicado indefinitely
until they confessed under torture. According to Amnesty International,
prisoners "who attempt to rescind testimony given under torture,
and refuse to sign the statements given to them during the police
inquiry phase of the proceedings against them, are tortured again
until they agree to do so." All political crimes are judged
by military tribunals, and, reported Amnesty International, "numerous
cases are known of last-minute shifts of both military and civilian
personnel, when the authorities feared that the verdict would
not go as the government wished. Although the trial, including
the hearing before the military tribunal, should be completed
within a maximum time limit of seventy days, hundreds of cases
are known where prisoners have awaited trial for more than three
years."
Under Brazil's Doctrine of National Security,
all power rests in the executive branch, which is composed of
the military community, represented by the general staff of the
armed forces; the organs of intelligence and repression such as
the National Information Service; and an alliance of the military
with the business community in the National Security Council.
The executive branch is not only responsible for enforcing the
institutional acts; it also has the power to ensure that the Brazilian
people "think correctly" in Orwellian fashion. Under
the Moral and Civic Education Program created in 1969, for example,
all schoolchildren spend two hours a week studying courses designed
to "promote a regard for obedience to law, fealty to work,
adjustment to the community, and the responsibility of every Brazilian
for national security." Children are encouraged to "denounce
enemies of the fatherland," with specific instruction on
how to identify and report such traitors, including their parents.
Religion's importance is instilled, in a step-by-step progression,
from a correct "scale of values" to the legitimization
of the military government and its "present development effort"
and "Brazil's membership in the Western bloc." Any teacher
who refuses to sign a written agreement to support the goals of
this indoctrination program can be barred from teaching.
Cultural repression ranges from censorship
and blacklisting (the works of two Latin-American Nobel Prize
winners are banned) to imprisonment of writers, actors, and journalists.
A partial count by the influential, pro-business daily Estado
in Sao Paulo showed the banning in 1976 of seventy-four books,
seven theater scripts, thirteen films, five TV series, and various
TV documentaries. In addition, a "freeze" was placed
on one hundred films and plays, meaning they were neither banned
nor approved. Eight newspapers were subject to prior censorship.
In that repressive a society, atrocities
proliferate. The "dragon chair," for example, is a device
invented in the Rio military police barracks whereby the prisoner
receives electric shocks while a dentist's drill shatters his
or her teeth; after which, if the prisoner is a man, he is held
upside down while his testicles are crushed. Parents are tortured
in front of their children, or vice versa, as in the case of a
three-month-old baby who was tortured to death by police in Sao
Paulo's notorious Tiradentes Prison. After a while, reported U.S.
Methodist missionary Fred Morris, who himself was tortured for
seventeen days at Recife in northeastern Brazil, such horrors
become routine. "These people had a nine-to-five job, except
that their job was to torture for a living." (Chilean prisoners
described a similar attitude, their inquisitors calling for a
prisoner with the phrase "It's time to go to work.")
According to one European psychiatrist, Brazil's hierarchical,
authoritarian order is eminently suited to attract the type of
mentality that can be developed into an efficient torturer, one
who seeks and accepts authority and obeys orders without question,
who is fanatically patriotic and self-righteous but unbalanced
and vindictive toward anyone who does not share such views.
It was people of this sort whom the United
States trained in its ten-year public safety program in Brazil,
the largest in Latin, America and the most costly, with over one
hundred thousand federal and state police and six hundred high-ranking
officers.
p176
" A great blind spot'"
After reading case after nauseating case
of the atrocities committed in the name of national security,
and after recognizing the United States' involvement in the creation
of military, police, and paramilitary agencies responsible for
these horrors in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile,
Bolivia-seventeen Latin-American countries in all-one comes to
the conclusion either that the Americans who helped to establish
and run these military and police training programs were deranged
or that they never considered the predictable results of their
work-possibly didn't want to consider them. For any normal person,
the idea of torturing a three-month-old baby to death or putting
a human being through the torments of the "dragon chair"
is so appalling that it does not bear thinking about. In the words
of AID Administrator David Beli, trying to justify the police
assistance programs to the U. S. Congress: "It is obviously
not our purpose or intent to assist a head of state who is repressive.
On the other hand, we are working in a lot of countries where
the governments are controlled by people who have shortcomings."
In other words, better stick to the nine-to-five job and not ask
too many questions. This was relatively easy to do, since very
few U.S. personnel ever bothered to study the real causes of popular
discontent or repression in Latin America. Few could speak Spanish
or Portuguese with any fluency, and for most of them Latin America
was merely a two- or three-year tour en route to some other part
of the globe. The majority lived and worked exclusively with Latin
America's social and military elites, feeding each other's fears
and rationaiizations, unable or unwilling to penetrate the slums
or rural villages where most Latin Americans live, because they
could not communicate with the people or because it was just too
uncomfortable. The rich Latin Americans, in contrast, were well
educated, well mannered, eager to please their friends the Americans,
and of course spoke English. Four decades after Secretary of State
Henry Stimson appointed Anastasio Somoza to head the National
Guard in Nicaragua on the sole qualification that he spoke English,
many Americans still judge this to be the primary qualification
for a leader, or a business partner. But however much U.S. historians
try to explain the United States' behavior in Latin America as
"inadvertently misguided" or "unthinking"-Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., called it "a great blind spot"-there
is no way they can avoid their country's responsibility for the
results of that behavior.
When did it all begin? Although the groundwork
was laid in the 1940s and 1950s under the Truman and Eisenhower
administrations, it was during the years of John F. Kennedy's
Camelot that the terms of traditional U.S. military and political
strategy were redefined. After France's defeat at Dien Bien Phu
and the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba, classic military strategy
was replaced by counterinsurgency methods to contain and destroy
guerrilla or popular insurrections and provide the necessary "security
for development." As Secretary of Defense McNamara explained,
"The goals of the Alliance [for Progress] can only be achieved
within a framework of law and order."
The factor missing in this dual strategy-and
the cause of so much subsequent suffering and bloodshed in Latin
America-was any appreciation of the political and social conditions
responsible for popular discontent, or indeed any reference to
the U.S. military's own definition of insurrection as a revolution
or uprising against a constituted government. All the Latin-American
Presidents overthrown with U.S. help in recent years represented
constituted governments: Arbenz in Guatemala (1954), Goulart in
Brazil (1964), Allende in Chile (1973). It mattered not whether
the perceived threat was a democratically elected government or
a guerrilla group; it was a dangerous precedent to be eliminated
by military force. As General Maxwell Taylor told Third World
police graduates of AlD's International Police Academy in Washington:
The outstanding lesson of the Indochina
conflict] is that we should never let another Vietnam-type situation
arise again. We were too late in recognizing the extent of the
subversive threat. We appreciate now that every young, emerging
country must be constantly on the alert, watching for those symptoms
which, if allowed to develop unrestrained, may eventually grow
into a disastrous situation such as that in South Vietnam. We
have learned the need for a strong police force and a strong police
intelligence organization to assist in identifying early the symptoms
of an incipient subversive situation.
The cost-conscious Secretary of Defense
put it another way: It was cheaper politically and economically
to let the Latin Americans put out local fires. The United States
could not be everywhere at once, said McNamara, and, besides,
it cost a lot less to keep a Latin-American soldier than an American-$540
per year against $4,400. Neither Taylor, McNamara, nor anyone
else in the Kennedy administration ever stopped to think that
there might be good reasons for the local fires, such as decades
of dictatorship. It was much easier to explain the appearance
of Marxist guerrillas in Latin-American countries as part of an
international communist conspiracy, although most guerrilla uprisings
in Latin America have occurred in response to internal influences,
Castro's insurrection against the corrupt, repressive Batista
dictatorship being the obvious example. It is quite possible that
had Cuba enjoyed more social mobility, a better distribution of
wealth, and less repression, Castro would never have carried off
his revolution. Costa Rica, the only stable democracy in Central
America, has no recent experience of insurrection. In contrast,
its neighbors, governed by military or quasi-military regimes,
have long histories of guerrilla movements, some of them, as in
Nicaragua, dating back to the 1920s.
Because it was beyond the capacity of
the Pentagon's counterinsurgency strategists to grasp the real
causes of popular discontent in Latin America-and because Washington
would not have sanctioned meaningful social change if they had-every
potential disturbance had to be met with military and police tactics.
Moreover, to recognize that there were legitimate causes for revolution
would have cost the counterinsurgents their reason for being.
Long hours were spent in study of the writings of Mao Tse-tung,
General Vo Nguyen Giap, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, and other
Marxist revolutionaries, the idea being to beat the revolutionaries
at their own game by adopting guerrilla tactics, though these
writings had no meaning to the average Latin American or practical
application to his problems. Liberated zones became strategic
hamlets; a political organization, psychological warfare; and
guerrilla units, Special Forces. Frequently unable to communicate
with or understand the people, U.S. military advisers assumed
that the guerrillas could win over the people only by terror;
therefore they responded in kind. But for every peasant shot by
guerrillas, at least fifteen were killed by U.S.-supported government
forces.
p179
Thus the counterinsurgents' preoccupation with military and police
techniques, with repression and terror, became an end in itself.
As I. F. Stone put it:
In reading the military literature on
guerrilla warfare now so fashionable at the Pentagon, one feels
that these writers are like men watching a dance from outside
through heavy plate glass windows. They see the motions but they
can't hear the music. They put the mechanical gestures down on
paper with pendantic fidelity. But what rarely comes through to
them are the injured racial feelings, the misery, the rankling
slights. So they do not really understand what leads men to abandon
wife, children, home, career, friends, to take to the bush and
live gun in hand like a hunted animal; to challenge overwhelming
military odds rather than acquiesce any longer in humiliation,
injustice, or poverty....
p180
Course 0-47 on urban counterinsurgency operations, taught at the
U. S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone...
It suggests ways whereby the presence of communist guerrillas
may be detected:
a. The disappearance or movement of youths
possibly indicates the recruitment to form guerrilla bands in
the area. You should report the reluctance of families of said
missing youths to speak about them.
b. The refusal of peasants to pay rents,
taxes, or agricultural loans or any difficulty in collecting these
will indicate the existence of an active insurrection that has
succeeded in convincing the peasants of the injustices of the
present system, and is directing or instigating them to disobey
its precepts.
Hostility on the part of the local population
to the government forces, in contrast to their amiable or neutral
attitude in the past. This can indicate a change of loyalty or
of behavior inspired by fear, often manifested by children refusing
to fraternize with members of the internal-security forces.
d. Short, unjustified, and unusual absences
from work on the part of government employees.
e. Networks of police and informants don't
provide the kind of reports they should. This could indicate that
the sources of information have become allied with the insurgent
.movement, or that they fear the retaliation of the insurgents
or their sympathizers.
f. A growing hostility against governmental
agencies and agencies of public order.
Subversion, according to Course 0-47,
is not limited to armed insurrection; it can also take the form
of nonviolent action, such as consciousness-raising work (as promoted
by the Catholic Church), demonstrations, strikes, "compromised
social sciences," and so on, that "attract the discontented
among the populace, at though those who protest are not the people
themselves but an atomized group of malcontents and adventurers."
Anyone who differs with the established order must be obeying
foreign, communist influences. Such is the case of intellectuals
or students who are "manipulated by insurgent theses"
that "deform" history and speak of imperialism. Any
attempt to get at the real historical, sociological, or economic
causes of poverty and injustice in Latin America is judged "subversive."
A number of methods are suggested to deal with such `'subversion,"
as in the Pentagon's course on "Utilization and Containment
of Rumors," which teaches the student how to use white or
black propaganda.
More than 64,000 Latin-American soldiers
and officers, including 170 heads of state, ministers, commanding
officers, and directors of intelligence, were exposed to such
methods and ideas between 1950 and 1973 in the School of the Americas,
better known as the "School of Coups." Similar ideas
were drummed into the heads of Latin-American police agents during
psychological operations courses (PSYOPS) at the U. S. Army Institute
for Military Assistance at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. In one
symposium euphemistically described as "Population Protection
and Resources Management," the Latin Americans were taught
such techniques as a national identity card system, search operations,
checkpoints, curfews, and block controls to monitor the movement
of people and goods. The semester concluded with a discussion
of the role of the mass media and propaganda in building support
for the government, "since by their nature most [of these]
measures are rather harsh . . . [and] they should be coordinated
with an intense PSYOPS campaign to convince the population that
these harsh methods are for their own good."
p185
In the School of the Americas and other U. S. Army training centers
[General Carlos Prats, who was commander-in-chief of the Chilean
Army under the Allende government] wrote, Chilean officers have
learned to respond "to the stereotypes and reflexes of those
courses." "While thinking they were liberating the nation
from 'the enemy within,"' Prats added, "they have committed
a crime that can be explained only in terms of their ingenuousness,
ignorance, and political shortsightedness." Proof of the
"simplicity" of Chile's military mentality, he said,
was its exclusive concern with "activities and terrorism
of the left, while the right was just as dangerous and stockpiling
more arms."
p185
In Central America ... the Defense Department brought the armies
of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama and
the Costa Rican police force together under the umbrella of the
Defense Council of Central America (CONDECA). It had fourteen
thousand soldiers, trained in the Panama Canal Zone, and served
as a mutual-aid society for the region's dictators.
p185
"A real good, close relationship"
While Nicaragua's Somoza was the most
infamous case of a Central American dictator set up and financed
by the U. S. Government, plenty of lesser-known strongmen came
to power because of U.S. support. Such a one was Colonel Carlos
Arana of Guatemala, who was tapped by the U. S. Military Mission
to head the country's counterinsurgency program. A former military
attaché in Washington, [Colonel of Guatemala] Arana had
"a real good, close relationship" with U.S. military
personnel, according to a Special Forces adviser. He soon revealed
his abilities by organizing the slaughter of eight thousand Guatemalans
between 1966 and 1968.48 Some one thousand Green Berets were on
hand to help him, accompanying Guatemalan patrols on counterinsurgency
raids. Official denials notwithstanding, U.S. pilots flew U.S.
planes to drop napalm on the peasants, and under the leadership
of the U.S. military attaché, Colonel John Webber, paramilitary
groups composed of large landowners were encouraged to collaborate
with the Army in hunting down "subversive" peasants.
These groups were the forerunner of the White Hand, a right-wing
vigilante group responsible for thousands of deaths. According
to Amnesty International, most of the bodies were so severely
mutilated that identification was impossible.
When Arana became President in 1970, a
second reign of terror was unleashed, this time with the help
of thirty-two thousand Guatemalan policemen trained by AlD's public
safety program. Some seven thousand people were murdered or "disappeared"
between 1970 and 1971, most of them killed by the White Hand.
In all, fifteen thousand people died during the first three years
of the Arana government. For every Guatemalan murdered by the
extreme left, fifteen were killed by the extreme right.
p187
Guatemala is but one example of U.S. involvement with repressive
police and military agencies. In the Dominican Republic, Kennedy's
ambassador, John Bartlow Martin, strongly encouraged the police
and military to adopt terror tactics. "I found myself urging
. . . methods once used by the police in Chicago," he said.
"There, if a policeman saw an ex-convict or a known hoodlum
on the street, he picked him up 'on suspicion,' took him to the
station, held him the legal limit, then released him only to raid
his fiat that night, rout him out of bed, and start all over;
time after time harassing him, hoping finally to drive him out
of town. It was illegal detention, and often worse-prisoners were
sometimes beaten." After the 1965 Marine invasion of the
Dominican Republic, Martin's suggestions were enthusiastically
adopted by the local police, who had the benefit of an eighteen-man
public safety program, one third of whom were CIA agents, according
to David Fairchild, an AID official who worked in the Dominican
Republic in 1966 and 1967. The police organized the Dominican
Republic's equivalent of the White Hand, called "La Banda,"
whose victims were averaging fifteen to twenty a month by 1971,
most of them inconspicuous, apolitical people, including five
young men who were brutally murdered although they had no known
political connections. When six members of La Banda sought asylum
in the Mexican Embassy, they claimed to have worked with the police
and been threatened with death by high-ranking police officers
when they refused to carry out orders. They named Lieutenant Oscar
Nunez, chief bodyguard of Police Chief Enrique Perez y Perez,
as the leader of the gang.
Police officers also used terror to ensure
the reelection of the country's perennial President, Joaquin Balaguer,
who had run the Dominican Republic with U.S. support ever since
the 1965 invasion. As Balaguer assured the American Chamber of
Commerce in Santo Domingo, "We cannot allow ourselves the
luxury taken by other countries in Latin America, of shaking off
the so-called yoke of North American imperialism to accept others
that are, indeed, ignominious." Activities by opposition
parties, such as street meetings, were violently suppressed by
the police; opposition leaders were beaten up, arrested, and,
in a number of documented cases, killed or kidnapped and never
seen again. Particularly vulnerable were members of the Dominican
Revolutionary Party of Juan Bosch, who was overthrown in 1963
for attempting a few mild reforms. According to a Wall Street
Journal report, "The U.S. embassy has done nothing publicly
to dissociate itself from the terror. The United States continues
to provide substantial aid, including training, equipment, and
arms, to the Dominican police and Army."
U.S. public safety advisers and CIA agents
were also instrumental in the formation of Uruguay's para-police
and military organizations.
p189
I stood there watching the flames consume the bus. It was, I guess,
the moment of truth. What did a busload of burning people have
to do with freedom? What right did I have, in the name of democracy
and the CIA, to decide that random victims should die?" (As
quoted in Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the
Cult of Intelligence [New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1974], p.
125.)
p191
As a result of mounting evidence linking the public safety program
to such terror squads, the U. S. Congress voted to phase out the
program in 1974. Military grants to purchase arms met a similar
fate, but the training programs were continued. By this time,
however, there was less need for such assistance, because Brazil
had taken over many of the United States' functions as regional
policeman in training and arming its neighbors.
p202
A Brazilian bishop
"Were it not for the guns, for the torture, and the terror,
Brazil's military regime could not survive. And were it not for
this regime, foreign corporations could not continue to make enormous
profits at the expense of the people. The government has all the
legal instruments necessary to control these companies, and so
has the United States, but the military ignores them."
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