The U.S. Has Been Complicit with Torture in Vietnam and Latin America

Stephen Kinzer, in the Wash Post (June 11, 2004):

Not everyone was shocked by the revelations of the ways American soldiers have abused Iraqi prisoners. Those who have studied techniques that American interrogators taught and used in Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere during past decades felt only a grim sense of recognition.

"We are living an illusion if we think these practices are unique," said Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador to Paraguay and El Salvador. "What is unique is the graphic pictorial evidence that drives it home. But that the United States has been complicit with torture in Vietnam and Latin America, there can be no doubt. It may be sinking into the public consciousness for the first time, but expressions of shock from people whose business is foreign policy are quite hypocritical."

In Vietnam, some American intelligence officers were taught techniques of torture developed by France and other countries that had waged counterinsurgency wars. The best-known of the programs in which the techniques were used, called Operation Phoenix, was aimed at eliminating enemy spies and informers and resulted in the deaths of thousands of Vietnamese, some of whom died during torture.

Many of the most prominent officers accused of promoting torture in Latin America during the 1970s and '80s were graduates of the U.S. Army School of the Americas, where U.S. trainers instruct officers from Latin American countries. Since the school's founding in 1946, more than 60,000 Latin American officers have attended its courses, among them General Leopoldo Galtieri, who headed Argentina's military junta in the early 1980s; Colonel Roberto D'Aubuisson, leader of a death squad in El Salvador during the same period; and former Guatemalan President Efrain Rios Montt, during whose presidency thousands of Guatemalan civilians were tortured and murdered. ...