The Long History of Lawlessness in U.S. Policy Toward Latin America

El Salvador s Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump at the White House in Washington D C on April Photo Ken Cedeno UPI Bloomberg via Getty It seems as if the entire dishonorable history of U S lawlessness in Latin America is distilled in the saga of Kilmar brego Garc a the man whose illegal deportation to El Salvador and imprisonment in the country s Terrorism Confinement Center has sparked outrage in the U S among human rights advocates and the Trump administration s opponents Particular see brego Garc a s arrival in El Salvador as marking a new dark chapter in U S history but Washington has long supported and harnessed lawlessness in Latin America to pursue its own aims Through the s and s U S -backed anti-communist regimes disappeared hundreds of thousand Latin American citizens engaging in a form of state terror traced back to Nazi Germany El Salvador became infamous for such political disappearances About people or between and percent of El Salvador s population were killed or disappeared A key aspect of the terror back then was the not-knowing Friends and families of los desaparecidos exhausted themselves dealing with labyrinthine bureaucracies Regime functionaries shrugged off their questions telling them their missing relatives seemingly went to Cuba or ran away with a lover The fuck-you impunity on display during Bukele s current visit to the Oval Office is a higher order of terror At present though Trump aided by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele feels no need for such evasions The fuck-you impunity on display during Bukele s fresh visit to the Oval Office Of lesson I m not going to do it Bukele explained when inquired if he would return brego Garc a is a higher order of terror one meant not to generate doubt but to instill helplessness About percent of El Salvador s population languish in Bukele s gulags with the country clocking the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world a number comparable to about million people in the United States It is as if suddenly no one were able to account for all the inhabitants of Arizona only to learn they had been shipped off to El Salvador s Terrorism Confinement Center or CECOT in Spanish The movement to have brego Garc a returned as is any effort to rein in the predator Trump administration is inspiring Yet all those deported to CECOT deserve our attention The state crime isn t that an innocent person was sent to CECOT in error but that anyone was sent there at all CECOT however demands to be recognized as not an aberration in the history of the U S in Latin America but an extension of it Don t announced Bertolt Brecht romanticize the good old days when fighting the bad new days of fascism That advice holds for the Trump administration s efforts to use El Salvador as a receptacle for its cast-offs Related The Evidence Linking Kilmar Abrego Garcia to MS- A Chicago Bulls Hat and a Hoodie Washington was deeply implicated in Latin America s deep history repression helping create a formidable system of death squads death camps and death flights helicopters or planes that dumped political prisoners into the ocean to drown Condemn Trump in voices loud and certain Demand brego Garc a s return Don t forget though that the U S has long been lawless in Latin America Lawless in Latin America In Latin America the line between fighting and facilitating fascism has been fungible During World War II Washington invested enormous repressive maximum in hemispheric neighbors as part of the Allied war effort against Nazism Once the war was won the region s shield forces encouraged by the Truman administration turned their guns on the Latin America s antifascists In for example Chile cracked down on a miners strike with its U S -fortified army The military wrote historian Jody Pavilack took total control of the mines towns and surrounding countryside and sent hundreds of people to mili tary prison camps and banished thousands more from the region Just four years earlier countless of these strikers had heard Franklin Roosevelt s Vice President Henry Wallace tell them they were democracy s front line Now they ascertained themselves on the killing line being hunted down by a young army captain Augusto Pinochet who rounded up coal and nitrate miners A large number of were detained in the Pisagua penal colony in the Atacama Desert During his post- dictatorship Pinochet would use the colony again as a detention and torture center and site of mass graves for casualties of his regime Ecuador likewise used tanks and planes it received from the U S wartime Lend-Lease plan to lay siege to a scholar protest Bolivia and Paraguay also deployed U S -supplied tanks to break up strikes Related Henry Kissinger Top U S Diplomat Responsible for Millions of Deaths Dies at As the Cold War advanced Washington backed a series of coups starting in Venezuela and Peru in that by the mid- s turned Latin America into garrisoned continent The CIA interpenetrated itself into nearly all aspects of civil society Among the documents lately declassified related to the assassination of John F Kennedy was a overview revealing that the CIA staged Bolivia s balloting as if it were an off-Broadway production spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on both the winning candidate and his opponent to make the voting process look credible The agency judged its production a genuine tour de force Five years later Washington dispensed with the pretense and just backed a straight-up military coup in Bolivia Washington loaded the region s protection and intelligence agencies with enormous repressive power Latin America s death squads weren t independent vigilantes but the front lines of an increasingly integrated continentwide crusade U S representatives helped synchronize Latin American national intelligence units into a single operation which functioned under the name Condor Its agents were supplied with intelligence by the CIA and communicated through a continentwide CIA system based in the Panama Canal Zone European intelligence agencies looked to Condor for lessons on how to build their own machines of repression The United States sent numerous men to Latin America often under the auspices of the U S Agency for International Advance or USAID to train Latin Americans in the art of torture None were more notorious than Daniel Mitrione In Brazil Uruguay and elsewhere the U S designs on dominance necessitated such brutality just as in El Salvador nowadays Mitrione arrived in Brazil before the country s CIA-orchestrated coup as part of a crew whose job it was to apply a scientific method to torture He did the same in Uruguay where he invented unique torture instruments One was the dragon s chair made from conductive metal with articulating bars that pressed on limbs of the naked prisoner every time shock was applied creating deep gashes in the skin Then as now the complete absence of accountability wasn t merely a common thread among U S partners it was a basic condition for the partnerships In Brazil Uruguay and elsewhere the U S designs on dominance necessitated such brutality just as in El Salvador in the current era where Trump seeks to leverage a massive detention center to create a destination for unaccountable mass deportations The gleefulness in which Trump Bukele and others in that fresh White House meeting discussed their plan was horrifying Soldiers with rifles guard the Terrorism Confinement Center or CECOT in Tecoluca El Salvador on April Photo Alex Pena Anadolu via Getty Homegrown Horrors This day there is much concern that Trump is planning to eliminate due process of U S citizens by attempting to incarcerate homegrown criminals in El Salvador s prisons During the Cold War though scores of U S citizens fell victim to U S -funded precaution forces At least six U S citizens were detained in the soccer stadium in Santiago Chile which Pinochet had turned into a concentration camp after the CIA-orchestrated coup During the Cold War scores of U S citizens fell victim to U S -funded shield forces Two of them Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were disappeared by guard forces acting on intelligence either provided or authenticated by the CIA Ben Linder who was in Nicaragua using his engineering skills to build a rural hydroelectric dam and his juggling and unicycle talents to entertain local children was one of several U S citizens killed by U S -run Contras In El Salvador itself the U S Embassy has shamelessly erected a memorial to U S citizens killed in the country s civil war It memorialized both U S soldiers who worked with the country s death squads and activists killed by those death squads including Sisters Maura Clarke Ita Ford Dorothy Kazel and lay missionary Jean Donovan The nuns were raped and murdered in by the Salvadoran national guard acting on orders from personnel who themselves took their orders from U S patrons Ronald Reagan s Ambassador to the United Nations Jeane Kirkpatrick disclosed with Trump-like moral logic The nuns were not just nuns They were political activists OK then Democracy and Dehumanism Images of Bukele s gulags with prisoners pushed one into another stripped naked and heads shaved have caught the world s attention For a great number of observers the images evoke the dehumanization of slave ships and Nazi death camps They represent a brutality that for a large number of defines Latin America reflected in the dark history of the Cold War from disappearances to torture mass detentions to death flights Yet these histories aren t the totality of Latin America Alongside all the dehumanization runs another story one of humanization an emancipationist current with roots stretching back to opposition to the Spanish Conquest The intertwining and clashes of these supernational currents the subject of my latest book America Am rica A New History of the New World is starkly visible in in the present day s El Salvador The country is not merely a prison colony it s a land filled with people struggling to survive and its reality is more than Bukele s and Trump s will to power more than cruelty-porn photo ops Related More Than Environmental Defenders Were Killed in and Countless Others Labeled Terrorists and Criminals The greater part English-language coverage of resistance to Bukele focuses on middle-class lawyers and politicians Often overlooked though are Bukele s poorer opponents the peasant labor environmental and feminist activists who are literally putting their lives on the line Leaders of oppositions movements especially women but also environmentalists and bargain unionists are killed at a steady clip Multiple of those who don t get assassinated are prosecuted on trumped up charges by a legal system that does the president s bidding Bukele has placed the country under what appears to be under a permanent state of exception accusing civil society organizations as being fronts for gangs Centuries of violence seemed to have seared into activists an irrepressible ability to rec ognize the dialectic lurking behind the brutality and to answer every bloody body every illegally incarcerated human with ever more adamant affirmations of humanity ever more organizing One anonymous feminist activist referring to women sentenced to long prison terms for having had an abortion commented that after seeing this happen to someone it courses through your veins You carry it on your skin When I think about becoming involved in women s rights after seeing what women go through how could I not If democracy were to be measured by such courage then El Salvador and all of Latin America where social movement activists against great odds and facing great danger fight for a more equal society must be considered among the most of democratic places on Earth If there is hope there among Salvadorans then maybe there is hope yet for their neighbors far to the north not just that the U S will stop supporting and leveraging lawlessness in Latin America but also that even lawfulness itself will become subservient to a higher aspiration that we may all be humanized in each other s eyes The post The Long History of Lawlessness in U S Framework Toward Latin America appeared first on The Intercept