Terror as an Integral Feature of the National Security State

excerpted from the book

The Real Terror Network

by Edward S. Herman

South End Press

It cannot be too strongly emphasized that terror is a built-in feature of the NSS, firmly grounded in its ends and in the objective situation with which it was designed to cope. ... its objectives are those of a small elite minority, who need and use the NSS to implement a system of permanent class warfare. The economic model of Third World development favored by the west does not say "use terror," but the policies that are favored, which would encourage foreign investment and keep wages and welfare outlays under close control, could often not be put into place without it. Privilege cannot be maintained and enlarged from already high levels if "the people" are allowed to organize, vote, and exercise any substantial power. As was pointed out by Martinez de Hoz, the top financial minister of the Argentine military government, in arguing for his 1976-1977 economic plan, "We enjoy the economic stability that the Armed Forces guarantee us. This plan can be fulfilled despite its lack of popular support. It has sufficient political support...that provided by the Armed Forces."

With undeviating regularity, the imposition of a NSS is accompanied by a rapid dismantling, or other mode of neutralization-frequently by killing, imprisoning or exiling the leadership-of working class and peasant organizations, like unions, cooperatives, leagues, and political groupings. The heart of NSS economics is wage control, and the introduction of each NSS has been followed by a sharp fall in real wages and dramatic increase in the rate of unemployment. This is one of those special Freedoms brought by machine guns, which has its own Orwellian Chicago School designation in the NSS: Thus in explaining the shooting of a trade union leader speaking in favor of a strike, an Argentine army communiqué of 1977 stated that "the legal forces acted in accordance with orders designed to guarantee freedom of employment." In addition to Freedom of Employment there is also a rapid transformation of the government budget, enlarging "security" expenditures, tax incentives and infrastructure investments that serve the joint venture partners, and a contraction of public outlays for the majority. This could not be accomplished without force and violence.

A primary characteristic of the NSS is, therefore, exceptional numbers, activities, power and rewards of the military and police establishments. The Brazilian military tripled its real budgetary allocations in the decade following the coup of 1964, and the Brazilian generals live well, with butlers, chalets, expense accounts, and substantial returns from their public salaries and private business participations. In Uruguay, the coming of the NSS resulted in a fall in educational outlays from 21% of the national budget in the early 1960s to little more than 13% in 1980. Military expenditures jumped sharply to over half the national budget, and by 1980 one of every 30 citizens of Montevideo was employed in the National Security apparatus.

With the coming into power of forces that explicitly set aside the rule of law in favor of a "state of siege," the potential for serious terror is high. The military-security presence is felt by the population of the NSSs in a pervasive use of informers and by the application of violence that has gone beyond the traditional brutalities of Latin America in both scope and quality. It varies partly in accordance with the level of violence needed for the proper degree of intimidation. But this level is often exceeded by the fanaticism and self-interested bureaucratic desires of the newly dominant "security" forces. In Chile, where class conflict was sharp, and ideological frenzy in the military was deliberately intensified by extreme right factions and the CIA, exceptional violence was unleashed. In Argentina and Uruguay, also, fanaticism and self-interest give NSS violence special momentum. The security forces of the NSSs are given a dirty job, and it frequently grows on them.

In performing their function of returning the majority to a state of apathy, and keeping them there, it is possible that once the leadership of popular organizations is decimated and an environment of fear and hopelessness is created through years of direct violence, that tacit threats alone will suffice. If, however, the very logic of the system is to depress the masses-politically and economically-to allow unconstrained pursuit of elite benefits, to protect an increasing income gap, and to keep costs down in a competitive world, permanent immiseration and permanent repression may be required. This would seem to be implicit in a development model which "creates a revolution that did not previously exist;" that is, which has a special capacity to generate misery and protest which will necessitate repression. Furthermore, where the NSS managers are ideologically conditioned to regard all dissent, protests and lower class (majority) organizational efforts as Communist subversion, a self-perpetuating mechanism of permanent terror is built-in.

... the scope and quality of intimidation under NSS conditions ... quickly overwhelms the reader by the horror of the multitudinous details of pain or the incomprehensibility of the aggregates of numbers tortured, killed and frightened into silence. It is important to understand that the NSS unleashed more sophisticated forms of violence, beyond traditional bloodbaths and intimidation, based on more modern technologies and theories and ideologies of counterinsurgency and Communist omnipresence and total evil, that made for uglier and more ruthless forms of terrorization.

Human torture, for example, only came into widespread and institutionalized use as the NSSs emerged and matured in the 1960s and 1970s. By institutionalized I mean employed as standard operating procedure in multiple detention centers (as many as 60 in Argentina, 33 in Colombia), applicable to hundreds of detainees, and used with the approval and intent of the highest authorities. ... 14 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a dozen other countries in the U.S. sphere of influence, were using torture as a mode of governance, on an institutionalized and administrative basis, in the early 1970s. The extent of concentration of this violence in the NSSs of Latin America is evidenced by the fact that 80% of Amnesty International's "urgent cases" of torture by the mid-1970s were coming out of these states. As torture spread through the NSS system a fairly standardized core of electronic and medical technology was used that allowed the victims to be carried to a more severe state of pain and dehumanization just short of death. The fearfulness of the violence imposed on the tortured thousands in the NSSs has been documented extensively, although, ... this evidence has been muted by the Free Press.

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The numbers that have been subjected to torture in the NSSs is, of course, impossible to determine with even approximate accuracy, and it varies in severity. Detainees have been subjected to torture ranging from brief and slight to a long and intense use that is continued till death. Frequently torture has been applied automatically to virtually all political prisoners (as in Argentina and Chile immediately after their military coupe), but this is not always the case. Al describes it as used in "the majority of interrogations" in post-1964 Brazil; Zelmar Michelini estimated that of 40,000 political prisoners in Uruguay up to 1974, only 5000 were tortured (although he may have meant tortured severely). A more recent witness, Victor LaBorda Baffico, a defecting military officer, reported in 1981 that everyone detained in Uruguay regardless of age, sex, or crime is routinely tortured. (Baffico, the fourth such defector-witness from Uruguay in the last year or two, has not yet attracted the attention of the Free Press.)

The numbers imprisoned for political reasons in the NSSs of Latin America, if we include all who are picked up and taken to police stations for "questioning," probably greatly exceeded a million for the period 1960-1980. In Sao Paulo, Brazil, 28,000 were picked up for questioning as possible subversives in the year 1977 alone. Over 100,000 were detained for political reasons in Chile during the post-coup period of 1973- 1976. Of these, a large fraction were killed (over 20,000), and a still larger fraction were subjected to torture. Given the high rates of torture of political prisoners in the larger states like Brazil, Argentina and Chile, the numbers tortured in the NSSs, 1960-1980, run into the hundreds of thousands.

This is terrorism in a form that retail terrorists cannot duplicate. Applicable as a mode of governance in more than a dozen NSSs, it is an important part of a real terror network that the Free Press pretends does not exist.

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The "death squad" has been an equally noteworthy aspect of NSS terror, complementing the seizure, torture and killing activities by the regular police, army and security forces(As can be seen on Table 3-3,)death squads came into existence in ten separate states of Latin America during the past two decades. Usually they are composed of regular military, police and intelligence personnel working in "off-duty" functions. According to AI, in Argentina:

Each sector of the armed forces has established a small operational force for this specific purpose [the eradication of "subversion"]. To carry out the kidnappings, they use stolen vehicles; to evade detection they have false identity papers; and although they can act with autonomy, they have to make daily reports to their superiors about the prisoners they have taken. At times these groups indulge, for personal gain, in kidnappings for ransom.

In other NSSs, while the death squads are often official personnel working secretly, sometimes they are made up of former police or military personnel; or they may be mainly civilian paramilitary right-wing groups who kill people the NSS wants, or doesn't mind being, killed. In almost all cases the activities of death squads are under the direct supervision of the authorities in their political kidnapping and murder activities. In Central America, paramilitary groups of the extreme right are more common than in South America, but even here they are often organized by the official forces (as with Orden in El Salvador) and, "Despite protests to the contrary by the governments concerned, they operate with impunity, outside the law but fully integrated into the regular security network."

The idea that the "death squads" are "out of control" is, of course, part of the NSS apologetics and part of the reason for the very existence of the death squad. Its separation from the regular forces allows systematic murder to be carried out for which the state may wish to deny knowledge and responsibility. A corollary is that its allies abroad who like the NSS, and their mass media parrots, will also be able to use "plausible denial" as a defense. It is not very plausible, but Jeane Kirkpatrick waxes indignant at the outrageous notion that the governments of the NSSs condone the nasty doings of the death squads!

The NSSs exterminate a great many dissident guerrillas; i.e., a left "out of control." That right-wing killers out of control could not be similarly exterminated if they were felt detrimental seems unlikely. That they have emerged "out of control" so regularly is also remarkable. That they are composed of people who, either right now or in the past were "under control," that they kill the same kind of people as the official forces of the NSSs, that they operate in broad daylight and are never apprehended-all suggest a simpler hypothesis-that the death squads are under good control and do what the leaders of the NSSs want done. As indicated above, there is a great deal of evidence that they are usually quite definite parts of the organized military forces; where they are not, they are usually still under official control.

Death squad murders in Latin America have been a daily occurrence now for several decades. In the Dominican Republic where the La Banda death squad was "openly tolerated and supported by the National Police" in the early 1970s, there was an average of one disappearance per day. In Argentina, after the 1976 coup the daily average of disappearances was five or more for an extended period. In Guatemala death squad murders averaged almost ten a day through the first half of the 1970s. The total numbers kidnapped and murdered by NSS death squads over the past two decades is not known, and is somewhat ambiguous as the distinction between regular force/death squad abductions and murders is vague, possibly untenable. A sizable fraction of the "disappeared" have been victims of death squads but many death squad victims have not disappeared. The estimate of numbers of disappeared in Latin America given at the First Congress of Relatives of the Disappeared, 90,000, is nevertheless a rough order of magnitude figure for death squad victims, comparable to estimates that can be built up from individual country values.

Important characteristics of death squad activities in Latin America, which bear on the nature and purposes of the NSS have been their sadism and their tie-in with ordinary illegal activities like theft, kidnappings for ransom and the drug trade. They are serviced by thugs. In Argentina, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala death squads rarely just kill; they rape, torture and mutilate. Al mentions the fact that the security operations of Paraguay are "carried out by teams whose members include the mentally deficient and the sexually disturbed." And fanaticism and pathology are evident throughout the NSS system in the cigarette burnings, amputations, and sexual violence and mutilations. Al notes, for example, that "It is invariably reported in the Guatemalan press that [death squad victims] show signs of having been tortured and mutilated before death. Raids by death squads, and for that matter regular security forces, are very often looting expeditions in the NSSs, and there have been numerous cases of kidnappings quite plainly for pure ransom. Lernoux quotes the head of a large U.S. subsidiary in Buenos Aires, acquainted with a jeweler whose daughter was abducted while the "security forces" ransacked his apartment for money and jewels, who told Penny Lernoux that "stealing is officially approved as a means of encouraging these thugs.''

The thugs have a role to play in the NSS-they eliminate "subversives" and intimidate and create anxiety in the rest of the population, all potential subversives.

Real Terror Network