Death squad
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A death squad is an armed group that carries out, usually in secrecy, extrajudicial assassinations and forced disappearances of activists, dissidents and others perceived as interfering with a social or political status quo. Death squads are often associated with the violent political repression of dictatorships, totalitarian states and similar regimes, and typically have the tacit or express support of the state (see state terrorism). Death squads may comprise a secret police force, paramilitary group or official government units with members drawn from the military or the police.
Death squads can be distinguished from terrorist groups in that violence is used to maintain the status quo rather than disrupt an existing social order. Death squads may be used to eliminate political opponents or any other people deemed "undesirable" (eg. the homeless and squatters), or to retaliate against an insurgency by targeting an associated civilian population. Death squads have been used to kill whole classes of people who do not hold the ideology, religion or race of the ruling elite (see genocide).
History
Although the term "death squad" did not rise to notoriety until the activities of such groups in Central and South America during the 1970s and 1980s became widely known, death squads have been employed under different guises throughout history.
During the late 1930s, the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin used death squads in the secret police force, the NKVD, to hunt down and kill suspected political opponents during the Great Purge. Many were innocent bystanders caught by mistake or misidentified.
During the 1930s, the leader of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler made extensive use of death squads, starting with the infamous Night of the Long Knives and reaching a peak with the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Following the frontline units, the Nazis brought along four travelling death squads called Einsatzgruppen (Einsatzgruppe-A through D) to hunt down and kill Jews, Communists and other so-called undesirables in the occupied areas; this was the first of the massacres that made up the Holocaust. Typically the victims, who included many women and children, were forcibly marched from their homes to open graves or ravines before being shot. Many others suffocated in specially designed poison trucks called gas vans. Between 1941 and 1944, the Einsatzgruppen killed about 1.2 million Soviet Jews, as well as tens of thousands Soviet leaders, POWs, and Romany. During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Army also employed death squads to scare remainder populations under their occupation into submission.
Central and South America
Death squad activity was widespread in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s, where plain-clothes assassins would murder dissidents fingered as "subversives" under the pretext of counter-insurgency. The Guatemalan death squads typically operated in full cooperation with the national military, whereas those in El Salvador drew their support from prominent military figures whose aim was to both eliminate the FMLN and their sympathizers as well as undermine civilian president José Napoleón Duarte. In addition to murdering those labelled guerrilla sympathizers, death squads were also known to massacre whole villages suspected of harboring guerrillas, especially in Guatemala. One well-known death squad that still operates currently in Central America is the Salvadoran-based Sombra Negra ("Black Shadow" in Spanish,) which consists of vigilantes that hunt down suspected criminals and gang members (see MS-13.)During the Salvadoran civil war, death squads achieved notoriety when far-right vigilantes assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero for his social activism in March 1980. In December 1980, three American nuns and a lay worker were raped and murdered. Because the death squads involved were found to have been soldiers of the Salvadoran military, which was receiving U.S. funding and training from American advisors, these events prompted outrage in the U.S., and led to a temporary cutoff in military aid from the Carter administration.
In Brazil, death squads appeared first during the seventies and were linked to the military police (the most famous one being the infamous "Scuderie LeCoq") or civilian police (Mão Branca, the "White Hand"). They targeted criminals (like the "fair-haired devil", Lúcio Flávio) who had become famous for their crimes and for evading the police or those involved in the killing of policemen. Scuderie LeCoq, for instance, took its name from a deceased policeman whose death was connected to organised crime. A rather surprising (and uncommon) characteristic of both these death squads are their fondness for publicity: LeCoq's members were photographed (or appeared in public) wearing black ski masks and black jackets featuring an emblem composed of a skull, a rose and a revolver. Mão Branca's members used to leave notes detailing the crimes for which the victim had been murdered (the name came from the circunstance that no fingerprints could ever be found, suggesting that the murderers wore gloves). These death squads were tolerated (if not outright supported) by the military government and were employed to spread fear among the régime's opponents (often likened to common criminals). After the fall of the military regime they slowly faded into obscurity but sometimes resurface, especially LeCoq, but the phenomenon has become both more widespread and less organised. They still petty criminals, but also anyone that is homeless, including street children and beggars. While in the past they got their ideologic and logistic support from the military, they are now motivated by the corporativism within the police forces and fueled by corruption (in urban areas shop owners pay death squads to kill, while in rural areas it is farmers that pay to get rid of the landless). The Brazilian death squads are now more a criminal phenomenon than a type of illegal policing.
In Haiti, the paramilitary death squad Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti (FRAPH), organized in mid-1993, terrorized the supporters of Jean-Bertrand Aristide by murder, massacres, public beatings, arson raids on poor neighbourhoods, and severing limbs by machete. Its goal was to destroy popular support for Aristide and his Lavalas political movement through indiscriminate terror. Aristide had been elected in a landslide victory in 1991, enjoying great popularity among the Haitian poor, but served only eight months before being deposed in a military coup. The junta that ruled from 1991 to 1994 gave free reign to both military and FRAPH repression. Several thousand Haitians either fled to the Dominican Republic or Florida, where the U.S. was forced to deal with a severe refugee problem. Aristide was later restored to the presidency through U.S. military intervention in 1994, and once again removed from the presidency, and the country, through U.S. military intervention in 2004. At this point the death squads were quickly reconstituted, and resumed their usual operations against the organizations of the poor majority.
The Caravan of Death was an Army squad that roamed Chile in October 1973, following Augusto Pinochet's CIA backed coup, murdering the regime's opponents. Members of Chile's Socialist Party in particular were targeted. Members of the group included two infantrymen and several Army officers, among them: Brigade General Sergio Arellano Stark; Lieutenant Colonel Sergio Arredondo Gonzalez, later director of the Infantry School; Mayor Pedro Espinoza Bravo, an Army Intelligence officer, later operations chief of the DINA secret police; Captain Marcelo Moren Brito, later commander of Villa Grimaldi, the torture camp; Lieutenant Armando Fernandez Lario, later a DINA operative and involved in the assassination of Orlando Letelier and others. (from Memoria y Justicia) The group traveled from prison to prison in a Puma helicopter, executing political prisoners with small arms and bladed weapons. The victims were then buried in unmarked graves. In June 1999, judge Juan Guzmán Tapia ordered the arrest of five retired
Use in genocides
The Khmer Rouge began employing death squads to purge Cambodia of non-communists after taking over the country in 1975. They rounded up their victims, questioned them, and then took them out to killing fields to be shot or beaten to death. More than 1.6 million Cambodians fell victim before the Khmer Rouge were overthrown.The Rwandan Genocide of 1994 was carried out by numerous death squads called the Interahamwe (see History of Rwanda). Members of these killing squads hunted down Tutsis and moderate Hutus in many towns and villages. The Interahamwe typically chopped up their victims with machetes or shot them at close range. The Rwandan Hutu armed forces often helped in these massacres, which killed from 650,000 to 800,000 before the Rwandese Patriotic Front took over the country in July of that year.
Recent use
In the late 1990s, the use of paramilitary death squads by Serb warlords and President Slobodan Milošević against Albanian separatists in Kosovo caused the Clinton administration to retaliate, with NATO cooperation, by launching a bombing campaign against Serbian forces in the area.
A feature in a May 2005 issue of the magazine of the New York Times claimed that the U.S. military had modeled the "Wolf Brigade", the Iraqi interior ministry police commandos, on the death squads used in the 1980s to crush the left-wing insurgency in El Salvador. [The Way of the Commandos], New York Times, May 1 2005
References
External links
- [Haiti under the Gun], 1996 article by Allan Nairn, first published in The Nation
- [CIA linked to FRAPH, coup] — from Green Left Weekly
- [CIA Support of Death Squads], by Ralph McGehee, ex-CIA
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