By Jose Gutierrez
"What kind of a person would become a torturer? What kind of a person would become a member of the death squads?", journalist Superna Aggarwal asked former Treasury Police officer Rene Hurtado. "Anyone", he replied, "You can become a torturer, with the right training and the right frame of mind."
Rene Hurtado makes the point that this is something people don't understand. The reason is that we have in our minds the idea that death squads are just cold-blooded murderers, extremists and pathological killers. The first names that come to mind are the demons we know from the media, like Major Roberto D'Abuisson, who became the symbol for death squads in El Salvador.
We sometimes forget that behind people like D'Abuisson there are other, far more powerful, individuals. D'Abuisson was really just an intelligence officer following orders from the top. Behind him there were the high command of the armed forces, the oligarchy, the CIA, the US State Department and the Pentagon.
"Death squads" is popular terminology to refer to secret military units that carry out the dirty job of killing and terrorising people. But they just follow orders from oligarchs like Orlando De Sola and Roberto Hill, politicians like President Cristiani and Armando Calderon Sol, and the US intelligence advisers.
In Germany in the 1930s, death squads acted openly and wore their Nazi uniform. They would often come at night and take the victims away. Millions of people were driven away to die in concentration camps.
In the 1960s death squads emerged in Argentina and Uruguay. This time they acted clandestinely. In the early '70s, they waged a "dirty war" that wiped out all forms of opposition. Thousands of Argentineans and Uruguayans were exterminated.
Parallel to the emergence of death squads in South America, these secret units were also used in Vietnam. In the early 1960s, the CIA formed the "Civilian Irregular Defence Forces" (CIDF) who were in charge of "searching" for and "destroying" Vietnamese revolutionaries. Thousands of Vietnamese were slaughtered.
In 1963 some of these US military advisers left Vietnam for El Salvador to set up a replica of the monster they had created in South Vietnam. General Chele Medrano, the real founder of the death squads in El Salvador, was on the CIA payroll and had been to Vietnam in American uniform learning how the CIDF operated. Again, thousands of Salvadorans were slaughtered.
These counter-insurgency measures were part of a carefully planned US foreign and military policy. CIA analysts and US State Department and Pentagon officials planned, sanctioned and encouraged the use of secret death squad units throughout the Third World.
The fact that the US foreign policy makers did not carry out the killing themselves does not make them less responsible for the atrocities that took and still take place. In the final analysis, these politicians are the intellectual authors of military invasions, torture, murder, mutilations, kidnapping, indiscriminate bombings and genocide.
What kind of a person would become a torturer?
In Vietnam, Australian diplomats pressured the US to intervene militarily. For this successful lobbying, thousands of Vietnamese civilians were massacred from the skies: the legacy of Australian foreign diplomacy. This aggressive policy left millions of squandered lives. Many US citizens cried for their dead, but there were no kind words for the "evil" enemy, the 3 million Vietnamese who perished.
What kind of a person would become a torturer? All of us can become indirect torturers when, aware of what's going on, we become passive and remain silent before injustice, pretending not to know what's going on. The information is always there, but we don't want to know. It is easier to blame it on the death squads. Such is the force of ideology.
On November 8 another member of the FMLN was murdered by government death squads. Manuel de Jesus Acevedo, a member of the Central American Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRTC), and Humberto Antonio Lopez, a citizen with no political affiliation, were kidnapped, tortured and killed. Their broken bodies dumped on the garbage bins of Colonia Soyapango in San Salvador. Acevedo was the husband of PRTC leader Doris Elena Hernandez.
What we are now witnessing in El Salvador is a "dirty war" launched by the death squads against Salvadoran society. As the death squads are part of the armed forces, these assassinations should be considered a direct military aggression against the FMLN in contravention of the peace accords.
This death squad activity will intensify as the 1994 elections approach. ARENA is desperate, fearing a total defeat by the FMLN-Christian Democrat coalition in the electoral struggle. But as the murder of FMLN members continues, the question now is how long the FMLN can stand this pressure without a military response.
Another question is the true role of the United Nations. Until the release of the Truth Commission Report, the UN was very well respected by the Salvadoran people. No more. What made the UN lose credibility was its cover-up of the crimes and the names of the death squads leaders in the ARENA party and the Salvadoran and US military. Five thousand US military personnel served in El Salvador during the civil war, but none were implicated by the UN in human rights abuses.
We don't know what the FMLN's response will be, but last week some FMLN structures engaged in armed propaganda actions. If this crisis continues, the electoral campaign will start in the midst of a violent underground "dirty war". Already, a top leader of ARENA has appeared dead in the streets. This shows that state terror doesn't work; it only engenders more violence from the oppressed. Lies and cover-ups make it worse.