When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror (review)

Mainstream U.S. liberalism has always displayed a significant blind spot when it comes to Latin America. Looking back at the hey-day of post-war liberal strength in the United States, today's liberal champions distinguish between Washington's exercise of power and Moscow's, arguing that the United States resisted the "imperialist temptation" while the Soviets fell prey to it. (This analogy is offered to provide guidance to today's Democrats as they take on George W. Bush's Republicans.) To be sure, Uruguay isn't Hungary. But this valuable collection of essays provides data and insight as to why Chile would become Washington's "Czechoslovakia," and why Guatemala, Nicaragua and, yes, Uruguay cannot be understood without reference to Washington's informal empire in Latin America.

The essential historical argument that connects these articles is that since the early decades of the twentieth century, policymakers in Washington have placed U.S. "security" ahead of concerns for either human rights or democracy in Latin America. "Security," is placed in quotes as, more often than not, it has either meant the protection of U.S. corporate interests or a classical sphere-of-interest approach: we are free to neglect our neighborhood, but it is ours, you keep out.

While these themes have been explored before, and are now reappearing in a number of excellent monographs (e.g., Greg Grandin's Empire's Workshop [2006] and Stephen Kinzer's Overthrow [2006]), the value of this collection is that it focuses on the specific mechanisms ("technologies of terror") that the United States has employed to work with and through Latin American governments to counter its perceived threats. Importantly, the authors also recognize that this involves complex negotiations with sovereign states, not the simple yanking on puppet strings.

Much public discussion in the United States today focuses on charges that Washington has been directly involved in torturing "terrorism" suspects or in rendition programs that dispatch U.S.-held prisoners to be tortured in other countries. For those who see these practices as a break with honored traditions of championing human rights protections, a careful reading of these articles is in order. A number of the essays provide important information on U.S. programs that trained Latin American agents to torture or "disappear" their citizens (e.g., Jeffrey Ryan's article on Uruguay, or Joan Kruckewitt's study of Honduras). Nearly every article traces the connection between human rights abusers in Latin America and the (recently-renamed) School of the Americas. Richard Grossman's valuable study of Nicaragua's National Guard notes that in 1976, of the 26 Guardia officers accused of human rights abuses in Nicaragua, 25 had been trained at the School of the Americas. Nor is this case unusual. Kristin Norget's disturbing study of state violence in Oaxaca, Mexico, notes many of the security personnel involved in brutal raids on civilian homes in Loxicha, Oaxaca, in 1996, had been trained in the United States. By 2001, more than 850 Mexican officials were receiving military security training at multiple sites in the United States.

Equally significant if less well known is the fact that Latin American countries, often with U.S. support, have long been engaged in the practice of rendition, sending sensitive prisoners captured in one country for questioning, torture, and ultimately murder, in second countries. J. Patrice McSherry focuses on Operation Condor, the most notorious of these exchanges, which involved six core countries that swapped intelligence, tactical advice, and prisoners in the 1970s and 1980s, and relied on the "intimate" involvement of the U.S. government (p. 41). His article raises the case of a Chilean sociologist accused of working for a revolutionary group who was seized by Paraguayan police acting on information from Argentine intelligence services and the U.S. embassy in Buenos Aires, who was transferred...