Examines the tragic development and resolution of Latin America's human rights crisis of the 1970s and 1980s. Focusing on state terrorism in Chile under General Augusto Pinochet and in Argentina during the Dirty War (1976-1983), this book offers an exploration of the reciprocal relationship between Argentina and Chile and human rights movements.
Since the early twentieth century, technological transfers from the United States to Latin American countries have involved technologies of violence for social control. As the chapters in this book illustrate, these technological transfers have taken various forms, including the training of Latin American military personnel in surveillance and torture and the provision of political and logistic support for campaigns of state terror. The human cost for Latin America has been enormous—thousands of Latin Americans have been murdered, disappeared, or tortured, and whole communities have been terrorized into silence. Organized by region, the essays in this book address the topic of state-sponsored terrorism in a variety of ways. Most take the perspective that state-directed political violence is a modern development of a regional political structure in which U.S. political interests weigh heavily. Others acknowledge that Latin American states enthusiastically received U.S. support for their campaigns of terror. A few see local culture and history as key factors in the implementation of state campaigns of political violence. Together, all the essays exemplify how technologies of terror have been transferred among various Latin American countries, with particular attention to the role that the United States, as a "strong" state, has played in such transfers.
This book examines the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories of the dictatorship in the aftermath of the two first decades since the Uruguayan dictatorship of 1973-1984 in the broader context of public policies of denial and institutionalized impunity. Transitional justice studies have tended to focus on countries like Argentina or Chile in the Southern Cone of Latin America. However, not much research has been conducted on the "silent" cases of transitions as a result of negotiated pacts. The literature on memory trauma and impunity has much to offer to studies of transition and post-authoritarianism. This book situates the human and cultural experience of state terrorism from the perspective of the experiences of Uruguayan families, through an in-depth ethnographic, cultural, psycho-social, and political interdisciplinary study. It will be a valuable resource to students, scholars, and practitioners who are interested in substantive questions of memory, democratization, and transitional justice, set in Uruguay's scenario, as well as to human rights policy-makers, advocates and educators and social and political scientists, cultural analysts, politicians, social psychologists, psychotherapists, and activists. It will also appeal to the general public who are interested in the problem of how to transmit the stories and meaning of traumatic experiences as a result of gross human rights violations, the cultural and generational effects of state terror, and the politics of impunity. This book is essential for collections in Latin American studies, political science, and sociology.
This edited volume explores political violence and genocide in Latin America during the Cold War, examining this in light of the United States’ hegemonic position on the continent. Using case studies based on the regimes of Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Peru and Uruguay, this book shows how U.S foreign policy – far from promoting long term political stability and democratic institutions – has actually undermined them. The first part of the book is an inquiry into the larger historical context in which the development of an unequal power relationship between the United States and Latin American and Caribbean nations evolved after the proliferation of the Monroe Doctrine. The region came to be seen as a contested terrain in the East-West conflict of the Cold War, and a new US-inspired ideology, the ‘National Security Doctrine’, was used to justify military operations and the hunting down of individuals and groups labelled as ‘communists’. Following on from this historical context, the book then provides an analysis of the mechanisms of state and genocidal violence is offered, demonstrating how in order to get to know the internal enemy, national armies relied on US intelligence training and economic aid to carry out their surveillance campaigns. This book will be of interest to students of Latin American politics, US foreign policy, human rights and terrorism and political violence in general. Marcia Esparza is an Assistant Professor in Criminal Justice Department at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Henry R. Huttenbach is the Founder and Chairman of the International Academy for Genocide Prevention and Professor Emeritus of City College of the City University of New York. Daniel Feierstein is the Director of the Center for Genocide Studies at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Argentina, and is a Professor in the Faculty of Genocide at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This powerful study makes a compelling case about the key U.S. role in state terrorism in Latin America during the Cold War. Long hidden from public view, Operation Condor was a military network created in the 1970s to eliminate political opponents of Latin American regimes. Its key members were the anticommunist dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil, later joined by Peru and Ecuador, with covert support from the U.S. government. Drawing on a wealth of testimonies, declassified files, and Latin American primary sources, J. Patrice McSherry examines Operation Condor from numerous vantage points: its secret structures, intelligence networks, covert operations against dissidents, political assassinations worldwide, commanders and operatives, links to the Pentagon and the CIA, and extension to Central America in the 1980s. The author convincingly shows how, using extralegal and terrorist methods, Operation Condor hunted down, seized, and executed political opponents across borders. McSherry argues that Condor functioned within, or parallel to, the structures of the larger inter-American military system led by the United States, and that declassified U.S. documents make clear that U.S. security officers saw Condor as a legitimate and useful 'counterterror' organization. Revealing new details of Condor operations and fresh evidence of links to the U.S. security establishment, this controversial work offers an original analysis of the use of secret, parallel armies in Western counterinsurgency strategies. It will be a clarion call to all readers to consider the long-term consequences of clandestine operations in the name of 'democracy.'
On 25 November 1975, representatives of five South American intelligence services held a secret meeting in the city of Santiago, Chile. At the end of the gathering, the participating delegations agreed to launch Operation Condor under the pretext of coordinating counterinsurgency activities, sharing information to combat leftist guerrillas and stopping an alleged advance of Marxism in the region. Condor, however, went much further than mere exchanges of information between neighbours. It was a plan to transnationalize state terrorism beyond South America. This book identifies the reasons why the South American military regimes chose this strategic path at a time when most revolutionary movements in the region were defeated, in the process of leaving behind armed struggle and resuming the political path. One of Condor’s most intriguing features was the level of cooperation achieved by these governments considering the distrust, animosity and historical rivalries between these countries’ armed forces. This book explores these differences and goes further than previous lines of inquiry, which have focused predominantly on the conflict between Latin American leftist guerrillas and the armed forces, to study the contribution made by other actors such as civilian anticommunist figures and organizations, and the activities conducted by politically active exiles and their supporters in numerous countries. This broader approach confirms that the South American dictatorships launched the Condor Plan to systematically eliminate any kind of opposition, especially key figures and groups involved in the denunciation of the regimes’ human rights violations.
In this succinct text, Jonathan D. Rosen and Hanna Samir Kassab explore the linkage between weak institutions and government policies designed to combat drug trafficking, organized crime, and violence in Latin America. Using quantitative analysis to examine criminal violence and publicly available survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) to conduct regression analysis, individual case studies on Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, and Nicaragua highlight the major challenges that governments face and how they have responded to various security issues. Rosen and Kassab later turn their attention to the role of external criminal actors in the region and offer policy recommendations and lessons learned. Questions explored include: What are the major trends in organized crime in this country? How has organized crime evolved over time? Who are the major criminal actors? How has state fragility contributed to organized crime and violence (and vice versa)? What has been the government’s response to drug trafficking and organized crime? Have such policies contributed to violence? Crime, Violence and the State in Latin America is suitable to both undergraduate and graduate courses in criminal justice, international relations, political science, comparative politics, international political economy, organized crime, drug trafficking, and violence.
After decades of bloodshed and political terror, many lament the rise of the left in Latin America. Since the triumph of Castro, politicians and historians have accused the left there of rejecting democracy, embracing communist totalitarianism, and prompting both revolutionary violence and a right-wing backlash. Through unprecedented archival research and gripping personal testimonies, Greg Grandin powerfully challenges these views in this classic work. In doing so, he uncovers the hidden history of the Latin American Cold War: of hidebound reactionaries holding on to their power and privilege; of Mayan Marxists blending indigenous notions of justice with universal ideas of equality; and of a United States supporting new styles of state terror throughout the region. With Guatemala as his case study, Grandin argues that the Latin American Cold War was a struggle not between political liberalism and Soviet communism but two visions of democracy—one vibrant and egalitarian, the other tepid and unequal—and that the conflict’s main effect was to eliminate homegrown notions of social democracy. Updated with a new preface by the author and an interview with Naomi Klein, The Last Colonial Massacre is history of the highest order—a work that will dramatically recast our understanding of Latin American politics and the role of the United States in the Cold War and beyond. “This work admirably explains the process in which hopes of democracy were brutally repressed in Guatemala and its people experienced a civil war lasting for half a century.”—International History Review “A richly detailed, humane, and passionately subversive portrait of inspiring reformers tragically redefined by the Cold War as enemies of the state.”—Journal of American History
