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10. The Dark Side of the Alliance for Progress: Police Training and State Terror in Latin America during the Cold War
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Chapter 10 The Dark Side of the Alliance for Progress Police Training and State Terror in Latin America during the Cold War Only in an atmosphere of public order can the goals of the Alliance be achieved. - Public Safety Division briefing, Guatemala, 1962 They [police and state security agents] are "trained" to combat "Castrocommunist infiltration," as expressed by the hypocritical alienizing language made fashionable by the pro-imperialist dissemination media of the continent. -Chilean student, April 1965 Murder, torture and mutilation are alright so long as our side is doing it and the victims are communists. - VIRON VAKY, u.s.Deputy Chiefof Mission, Guatemala, 1968 In fall 1955 Lee Echols, a national pistol shooting champion and veteran of the police programs in Japan, received a call from his friend Byron Engle asking him to go to Bolivia as part of the 1290-d program. Without hesitation, the forty-nine-year-old customs officer from Calexito, California, accepted and began work setting up training schools and pistol ranges and instructing the secret police in advanced methods of surveillance, interrogation, and infiltration . Fluent in Spanish, Echols subsequently went on to Uruguay and Cuba, where he created a special "traffic squad" (evidently a cover for more secret police operations) under Hernando Hernandez Hernandez, Fulgencio Batista's chiefofpolice, who was later executed by Fidel Castro for alleged crimes against humanity. After a stint as sheriff ofYuma County, Arizona, Echols rounded out his Foreign Service career in the Dominican Republic with the OPS, where he coordinated an elite jungle warfare battalion that was thrust into action in the months preceding the 1965 marine invasion. Heir to "Chesty" Puller and other Banana War veterans, Echols provides a window into the secret history ofAmerican intervention in Latin America during the Cold War. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, police training programs emerged as a crucial dimension of the Alliance for Progress, a Marshall Plan208 type program designed to foster economic development and undercut support for the radical left. The architect of the Alliance, John F. Kennedy, criticized Eisenhower's backing of dictators, which, he said, left the continent ripe for social revolution. In practice, however, his policies displayed more continuity than discontinuity. Latin American nationalists recognized that an underlying goal of the Alliance was to advance the economic interests of the United States by subsidizing American contractors and improving local infrastructure and transportation to allow for the more efficient extraction of raw materials, while saddling their nations with debt.' Although the Alliance brought some benefits, poverty and inequality increased during the 1960s, the "decade of development:' Fears about the spread of Cuban-style socialism and an ardent desire to win the Cold War made Kennedy suspicious of even moderate leftist reformers.' The majority of Alliance funds were consequently channeled through the CIA to subvert democratic regimes and mount counter-guerrilla operations. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a Harvard historian and senior Kennedy aide, later lamented that "counterinsurgency was a ghastly illusion which was used cruelly in the hands ofits user and distorted and perverted the Alliance's goals:" The Office of Public Safety embodied the imperialistic character of the Alliance . Beneath the humanitarian rhetoric was a continued desire on the part of U.S. officials to mold Latin American societies to their liking and to control political developments. Policymakers saw as a technical problem the need to demilitarize and decentralize the police while at the same time mobilizing them to contain social unrest. They acknowledged that Latin American police forces were repressive but felt this could be overcome through advisory assistance and training. As Roger Hilsman noted in an internal study: "Police cadres [in many Latin American countries1come from the Army and operate as small armies. . . . They often function as a means ofcontrolling the populace in the interests of the ruling class. Suspects are addressed imperiously and brusquely. The police are kept in barracks with large numbers on alert status. When disturbances occur, they rush out in large squads. Crowds are met like military opponents with gunfire. Massive fatalities can result:" Hilsman and his colleagues viewed the task of the United States as one of curbing the overtly oppressive character of the police while maintaining their political orientation. Riot control and the suppression ofleftist movements were to be accomplished in a more organized and systematic yet humane way. These aims proved to be contradictory and untenable. Advisers could not control or monitor the way weapons and training were adopted. As in other areas, the emphasis placed on counterintelligence and stamping...