Death Squads Research Articles

The Catholic Church, moral education and citizenship in Latin America

The Catholic Church, with deep roots in the history of Latin America, exercises considerable influence on all levels of society. Especially after the Second Vatican Council and the bishops’ conference at Medellín (1968) the Church took up the banner of human rights and the cause of the poor. During the dictatorships and in the midst of the different guerrilla movements the Church became the principle voice of opposition and mediator between the parties in conflict. At the same time, the Church helped organise the poor in their own defence. The Base Ecclesial Communities, which spread from Brazil to the rest of Latin America, combined biblical awareness with social consciousness. Paulo Freire’s concept of ‘conscientisation’ complemented the liberation theology movement, which inspired Christians to mobilise against dictatorships and death squads from Central America to Chile. On a formal educational level, the Church runs private schools for the wealthy, the middle class and the poor. In some schools for the wealthy, such as those run by Opus Dei, a pre‐Vatican II mindset prevails and emphasis is placed on individual advancement. But in others, especially those run by the Jesuits, solidarity with the poor is emphasised. On the popular level, the Fe y Alegría schools for the poor stress civic participation and commitment to building the local community. The same divisions may be found in Catholic universities: some incorporate the ideals of social responsibility in their programs, but others simply foster an individualism that is more in tune with neo‐liberalism.

Global capital, labor strategies, and the struggle for political alternatives

This is a book conceived on a large scale?covering more than a 100 years and two continents?dealing with dozens of corporations, unions, and governmental actors. It deals with textiles and looms, bananas and coffee, oil and coal; it is about the movement of money, factories and equipment, about workers from the United States, Europe, and Latin America, about businessmen and business unionists, about communist, socialist, and anarchist revolutionaries, about government military interventions, arms sales and mercenaries, about death squads and murder. Not surprisingly, given what it attempts to accomplish, it is a complicated book and a challenging one. Aviva Chomsky, Professor of History and coordinator of Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Salem, Massachusetts, discovers, describes, and analyzes in her book Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class the long and complex relationships between New England and Latin America, and among governments, capital, and labor. Examining the history of the textile industry, agriculture, and coal and oil production, she places at the center of her study the responses of corporations and organized labor, as well as the U.S. and foreign governments, to the vicissitudes of the capitalist system. Principally, this book is an attempt to understand this history through the dynamics of capital and labor. She is primarily interested here to understand and

The social, political, and economic causes of violence in Argentine soccer

In recent years, the changing character of Argentine political culture has influenced the ways in which groups of soccer fans organize themselves around political and economic goals. Argentine soccer clubs have always had strong ties to local and national politics. In this article, I examine the relationships between Argentine political culture and corruption in soccer since 1976, the year in which the last military regime took power. During the dictatorship, acts of violence were unregulated. The so-called Grupos de Tarea (death squads) found themselves in a position of absolute power, meaning that they had the freedom to act independently without having to justify their actions in front of a centralized authority. Present-day barrabravas (Argentine hooligans) have copied the behaviour of the death squads. Contrary to what happens in other national contexts, the spread of violence in Argentine soccer is encouraged by social leaders through corrupt political and economic arrangements that benefit all parties involved. Being a barrabrava is a full time job based on the use of violence. By using a comparative approach, I emphasize the need to understand local specificities when examining soccer violence in different national contexts. The structure of Argentine soccer allows fans to penetrate the political sphere of soccer clubs. This, in turn, creates an environment where organized groups of fans develop strong ties to club officials. By contrast, soccer violence in Italy and Holland remains apolitical. Soccer hooliganism has no universal causes and no universal solutions.

Crimes Against Humanity in Iraq: The Case Against Iran

Sectarian violence in Iraq has decreased significantly, but a lack of justice for the victims could rekindle pas- sions. Particularly grave are those violations of human rights and humanitarian law committed by Shia militias sponsored by Iran. This paper finds that there is significant evidence supporting Iranian culpability as an accessory for facilitating, aiding and assisting Shia death squads in their commission of crimes against humanity in Iraq. However, there is insuffi- cient data to determine if Iran exercised the level of control necessary to demonstrate state liability. These are facts that should be determined. To increase the chances of justice and long-term reconciliation, the United Nations Security Coun- cil should act now and refer Iran to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court for investigation of these alleged crimes.

Modernizing Repression: Police Training, Political Violence, and Nation-Building in the “American Century”

Our police training program is a vital part of our effort to help less developed countries achieve internal security, which is essential if economic development is to help create viable free nations. For the first three days, the police beat me continuously. When I regained consciousness they beat me again. I hope we teach these guys more than just how to direct traffic. During the 2004 presidential election campaign, Vice President Richard Cheney called for the “Salvador option” in Iraq, implying the training of local paramilitary and police forces to “pacify” the insurgency and restore public order.4 As in El Salvador in the 1980s, where the CIA was implicated in the training of death squads, the results so far have been catastrophic. American-trained police have been infiltrated by insurgents and found responsible for a litany of human rights abuses, including participation in sectarian warfare, torture, and revenge killings. They have only added to the nation's growing anarchy and the suffering of its people, but further tarnished America's reputation.5 Though neglected in public debates and commentary, American strategy in Iraq—and its pitfalls—represents a stark continuity from the Cold War and imperial eras when the United States provided technical aid to local police and built up the penal apparatus of client regimes in order to promote social stability and export Western administrative systems.6 Presented to the public as humanitarian initiatives to strengthen democratic development, these programs fulfilled a less explicit agenda in securing the power base of local elites amenable to U.S. economic and political interests and contributed to extensive human rights violations. They also often backfired politically, breeding animosity and resistance and fuelling vicious cycles of violence.

Fatal imaginations: death squads in Davao City and Medellín compared

This article examines the role social imaginations play in legitimizing extrajudicial killings by death squads in the era of globalization. The role of popular imagining has expanded into a widespread social practice as people increasingly draw on images from all over the world via modern communication technologies. Drawing on Mary Douglas’ concept ‘matter out of place’ and Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ ‘symbolic apartheid’ we argue that to a certain extent, dehumanizing imaginations about socially excluded groups legitimize death squad killings. The article compares two case studies on death squads in the cities of Medellin, Colombia and Davao City, Philippines. We conclude that social imaginations in the era of globalization may be a driving force behind death squads in these and other major cities in the world.

Private Political Violence and Boss-Rule in the Philippines

Despite its rather strong and venerable democratic credentials the Philippines is still marred by political violence. Targeted killings and physical harassment by vigilantes, death squads, private armed groups, para-military militias, the police or members of the armed forces as well as violent competition for political jobs cost hundreds of lives every year. One central anchor point of this broad range of violent actors and forms are the locally embedded political bosses. (Defective) democracy provides an ideal frame for the continuing competition between various segments of the highly fragmented elite. The paper shows how the bosses succeeded in controlling most means of political violence employed and were thereby able to advance their interests to an extraordinary extent. Upholding private control over means of violence furthered their interests as a political class even though it weakened the state.

The Structure of Negotiation: Lessons from El Salvador for Contemporary Conflict Resolution

During more than a decade of violent conflict (1980–1992) involving the military, rebel forces, and paramilitary “death squads,” El Salvador suffered some 75,000 casualties, mostly civilians. After three years of negotiations, the government and the largest rebel group signed a historic comprehensive peace accord that brought an end to the war and instituted wide‐reaching political and social reforms. This agreement, and the peace process that produced it, has been widely hailed as a successful example of a negotiated end to civil war. In order to understand the conditions that led to the 1992 Chapultepec Peace Accords ending the war, this article tests ripeness theory in the context of the Salvadoran peace process.This article affirms the validity of theories of ripeness and the mutually hurting stalemate as structural explanations for the initiation of dialogue and notes the role of “indicators of ripeness” in forcing the parties to recognize a hurting stalemate that may already exist. It also proposes several hypothesized explanations for the effectiveness of the Salvadoran negotiations themselves. These explanations include the presence of strong, empowered policy entrepreneurs on both sides with the political will and capability to make credible commitments; the combination of internal and external pressure for a negotiated solution that raised the cost of defection; and the active involvement, based on consent of both parties, of a neutral, empowered, and credible mediator who provided both technical assistance and vigilance to move the process forward. After analyzing the Salvadoran case through this theoretical lens, the article applies the same concepts to contemporary conflict cases such as Iraq and Colombia, discussing how the lessons learned in El Salvador do and do not provide instructive guidance for managing civil conflicts today.

Reply: solidarity

When I first began to read about El Salvador in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was easy, given events there, to at least feel in solidarity with the rebel Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN). The military and security forces and associated death squads assassinated workers, teachers, trade union leaders and others; they fired on public protests; they even killed the archbishop. The FMLN sought a quick ending to the war in a January 1981 "Final Offensive" intended to present Ronald Reagan with a fait acompli and two, as opposed to one, radical governments in the United States' "backyard." The offensive demonstrated the strength of the rebels and the poor training and morale of the military, but it failed to achieve its principal goal. Reagan entered office, and money for arms and military training entered El Salvador, at first gradually and later in a torrent, despite a rapidly deteriorating human rights situation. Reagan's first big crisis occurred early in 1982 when Raymond Bonner in the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto in the Washington Post published articles accusing the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion of having massacred hundreds of civilians in and around the rural hamlet of El Mozote in the northern reaches of Moraz?n department (see Binford 1996). Reagan had the U.S. Embassy investigate the reports, albeit in a manner that assured that they would be unable to "prove" that a massacre had even taken place. Shortly thereafter he dutifully certified that the human rights situation was improving in El Salvador and that the Salvadoran government was bringing the military under control. The flow of military aid continued undisrupted. A few years later I accompanied a labor delegation from Boston, Massachusetts to El Salvador and heard testimony from university professors, mothers of the disappeared, union leaders, and others of killings, torture, arbitrary arrests, threats,

Iraq’s Prescription for Violent Barriers to Health Care: Cell Phones and E-mail

CHICAGO—Two small tools taken for granted in much of the industrialized world—e-mail and the ubiquitous cell phone—could play major roles in helping Iraqi physicians fly over the radar of wartime violence to treat patients more effectively and help restore the country’s once-robust health care system. Since the 2003 US invasion, Iraqi medical professionals have been stretched to their limits. They are called on to treat casualties from explosions and car bombings so massive that patients in some cases outnumber hospital beds by 2 to 1. Physicians in Iraq also have become targets themselves, killed by death squads or kidnapped and held for ransom. Basic security needs compete daily with Iraqis’ medical and public health needs. These threatening conditions make it difficult or impossible for physicians in other parts of the world to volunteer in Iraq, and the country’s damaged infrastructure may not support sophisticated electronic communications technologies. So a diverse group of experts has joined forces to explore just how much support may be available to Iraqi health professionals through relatively simple electronic communications technologies and a global aid network. During a daylong conference here last May, these experts met in brainstorming sessions to develop new options for Iraq’s Ministry of Health to use to strengthen the country’s health system now and in the coming years. “We are here to establish bridges between the Iraq Ministry of Health and our colleagues in the United States,” said Iraqi Health Minister Salih Al Hasnawi, MD. “We are working for the future, to see our country again positioned . . . as it was before . . . one of the most important countries in the Middle East.”

Martyrdom, Sacrifice, and Political Memory in El Salvador

A mont before his death, Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, El Salvador told an interviewer, “If they kill me, I will rise again in the Salvadoran people. . . . May my blood be the seed of free dom and the signal that hope will soon be a reality” (Romero, 1987: 461). Romero was shot through the heart as he said Mass, killed on the orders of a Salvadoran military colonel who organized both clan destine death squads and the farright political party that has ruled the country since 1989. The archbishop became a martyr for Catholics and other believers throughout the world. Romero died in the early days of the conflict between the Salvadoran government and the revo lutionary FMLN (the Spanish abbreviation for the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front), a conflict that eventually consumed about 80,000 lives. The vast majority of the dead were civilian victims of the Salvadoran army, whose brutal counterinsurgency war was heavily supported by the United States

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BIM and FAS: the ultimate death squad

BIM and FAS: the ultimate death squad

Threshold of Human Touch

Editor's Note In the fall of 1997, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela was a clinical psychologist serving on the Human Rights Violations Committee of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In her book A Human Being Died that Night: A South African Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid, she recounts her interviews, conducted in the maximum-security Pretoria Central Prison, with Eugene de Kock, the commanding officer of the state sanctioned death squads. Nicknamed Prime Evil, de Kock acknowledged his crimes to the com mission and was ultimately granted amnesty for all but two; for these he was given a two hundred twelve-year sentence for crimes against human ity. At one point early in the series of interviews, de Kock breaks down as he recounts meeting the widows of two black policemen he murdered. As he weeps with remorse, Gobodo-Madikizela instinctively reaches across the table between them and touches his hand to comfort him. Later, this act of compassion launches Gobodo-Madikizela into a profound meditation about her emotions and motives: she wonders whether she has crossed the

The Mean Streets of the Global Village: Crimes of Exclusion in the United States and Darfur

This paper considers similarities as well as differences in state‐based systems of selective exclusion found in the United States and Sudan. Albeit in different ways and to different degrees, large numbers of homeless adults and children are denied the basic human right to secure shelter in the nations of both the Global North and the Global South. Homelessness and imprisonment are pervasive forms of social exclusion in the late modern Global North, while forced migration and mortality are persistent forms of social exclusion in the contemporary Global South. The domestic policies of exclusion in the North—with their legalized use of arrest, due process, conviction, incarceration and homelessness—are a world apart from the policies of criminal exclusion in the Global South—with their death squads, militias, disappearances and displacements. Yet both depend on repression rather than restoration. Mass incarceration and genocidal death and displacement display an awkward symmetry along the mean streets of the global village, and the fragile and disrupted families of the North parallel the destroyed and displaced families of the South. They are parallel faces of vulnerability. The mean streets of the United States and Sudan are not the same, but their risks and vulnerabilities involve parallel and failed policies of punishment, repression, and exclusion.

Democracy and Dirty Wars in Spain

This essay examines the rise of government-sponsored anti-terrorist death squads in Spain that accompanied the return to power of the Left since the interwar Second Republic. It locates the roots of this disturbing and puzzling development in the institutional culture of the military inherited from the Franco regime as shaped by its history of counter-terrorism policies. This argument challenges widespread assumptions about a clean break in authoritarian practices in Spain following the democratic transition of 1977. It also calls into question the claim that civilian supremacy over the military was established in Spain by the time democracy was deemed to have reached "consolidation" in 1982. The conclusion culls the lessons of the Spanish experience of battling terrorism with terror for the comparative study of democratization. It suggests that dirty wars intended to eradicate terrorist organizations can erode the legitimacy of a nascent democracy and, paradoxically, prolong the fight against terrorism.

Anthropology and Militarism

Anthropologists’ selections of topics and field sites have often been shaped by militarism, but they have been slow to make militarism, especially American militarism, an object of study. In the high Cold War years concerns about human survival were refracted into debates about innate human proclivities for violence or peace. As “new wars” with high civilian casualty rates emerged in Africa, Central America, the former Eastern bloc, and South Asia, beginning in the 1980s anthropologists increasingly wrote about terror, torture, death squads, ethnic cleansing, guerilla movements, and the memory work inherent in making war and peace. Anthropologists have also begun to write about nuclear weapons and American militarism. The “war on terror” has disturbed settled norms that anthropologists should not assist counterinsurgency campaigns, and for the first time since Vietnam, anthropologists are debating the merits of military anthropology versus critical ethnography of the military.

The unpast: elite violence and social control in Brazil, 1954-2000

Portuguese and Brazilian slave-traders shipped an estimated four million slaves to Brazil, in contrast to the 500,000 slaves that English vessels brought to America. With such a vast number in servitude in Brazil, controlling them became of primary importance. The Unpast: Elite Violence and Social Control in Brazil, 1954-2000 documents that the brutal methods used on plantations led directly to the phenomenon of Brazilian death squads. The Unpast examines how and why, after the abolition of slavery, elites in Brazil imported new methods to kill, torture, or disfigure dissidents and the poor to maintain dominance. Bringing a critical-historical analysis to events following the 1954 suicide of President Getulio Vargas, R.S. Rose takes the reader along a fifty-year path that shaped a nation's morals. He covers the misunderstood presidency of Joao Goulart; the overthrow of his government by a U.S. assisted military; the appalling dictatorship that followed; the efforts to rid the countryside of troublemakers; and the ongoing attempt to cleanse the urban environment of the needy, an endeavor that produced 32,675 victims in just two Brazilian states. The Unpast is the largest and most comprehensive study of suspected death-squad victims ever undertaken. It concludes with the sobering observation that nothing has really changed in present-day Brazil since the end of slavery in 1888. The Unpast is an expose of practices and attitudes in Latin America's largest country toward the poor, who - like slaves before them - are considered human rubbish worthy of anything to keep them under control. R.S. Rose is a visiting professor in history at the Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

South Africa’s Project Coast: “Death Squads,” Covert State-Sponsored Poisonings, and the Dangers of CBW Proliferation

On 11 April 2002, approximately seven months after the devastating terrorist attack launched by al-Qāida operatives on United States soil, a South African judge acquitted Dr. Wouter Basson, the Pro...