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).

1 History
2 See also
3 External links

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History

Template:Cleanup-date Template:Unsourced 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.

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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 are known to have killed poor people, such as homeless children, in Brazilian cities, simply to get rid of these 'undesirables', or as a form of extrajudicial policing (police are known to have been involved in death squads).

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.

In Nicaragua, the Contras could also be described as death squads. The Contras were considered terrorists by the Sandinistas because many of their attacks targeted civilians. The Contras, who initially received financial and other forms of support from the Argentine military regime and then U.S. CIA, mounted raids which targeted northern Nicaragua, particularly coffee plantations and farming cooperatives. They received sympathy and support from Nicaraguan peasants opposed to the Sandinistas' nationalization of their land, formation of large farming co-ops, and mistreatment of dissenters; however, they were also opposed by Nicaraguans and human rights groups who viewed their tactics as brutal and indiscriminate. According to human rights group Americas Watch, the Contras engaged in "violent abuses ... so prevalent that these may be said to be their principle means of waging war."

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 military officers - including a general - for their part in the Caravan of Death. The members of this squad are accused of travelling in the country in October 1973, shortly after Pinochet's coup, and killing more than 70 opponents of the military government.

In Colombia, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) and other paramilitary groups have often been referred to as death squads due to their modus operandi and the support that they have received from members of the Colombian security forces and of the state. Sometimes this interpretation has been disputed, and other times it has been considered as only partially accurate. Most analysts agree that many of Colombia's current paramilitary groups did begin operating as death squads in the 1980s, but some disagree as to the accuracy of such a classification in contemporary times, arguing that quite a few of these groups have later developed into more complex and autonomous entities than traditional death squads have usually been.

The analysts that consider that Colombian paramilitaries should continue to be classified as death squads also argue that they have been used to clear resource rich areas of alleged guerillas and their supporters in order to protect the interests of both private firms (including those in the mining and petroleum sectors) and of public officials. Some critics of the U.S. Plan Colombia have believed that paramilitary groups have been allegedly backed through this initiative, as there are reports that would evidence that part of the resources for this counternarcotics and military aid program have been diverted to paramilitary groups, whether by U.S. or Colombian personnel.

Some critics of this interpretation consider that the AUC and its constituent paramilitary groups in Colombia have grown to the point of, overall, being more autonomous than Central American death squads due to their increasing participation in the drug trade, which has progressively allowed them to achieve a considerable degree of self-financing, and that their existing links with both private and public officials do not make them as dependent on such support as they would previously have been, and has not prevented them from operating against the state when they deem it necessary. It has also been argued that Colombian paramilitary groups are not homogeneous. Some would be operating as death squads in the traditional sense of the word, and others would be possessing greater independence in their activities and less links with local authorities.

Paramilitary groups in the Departament of Puerto Boyacá, as confessed by a paramilitary chief known as "Black Vladimir" before a public prosecutor and in talks with human rights organizations, emerged as the result of the meetings held by local politicians, businessmen, military officials, ranchers, mafia bosses and representatives of the Texas Petroleum Company, which were concerned with both an increase in guerrilla activity in the area and with local political opposition activists. These sponsors and participants in the Puerto Boyacá paramilitary groups paid for training from U.S., Israeli and English mercenaries.

It is argued that the U.S. government would also be implicated in the support of Colombian paramilitary groups. In "Colombia's Killer Network", a report by Human Rights Watch, it is claimed that part of the U.S. funds destined for counternarcotics activities and for supporting an intelligence network for the Colombian Navy were diverted and used for paramilitary activities. The resulting paramilitary group ended up killing over 350 social and union leaders in the petroleum port of Barrancabermeja, among them Manuel Gustavo Chacón. In November 1999, the CIA was accused of allegedly being involved in an attempted robbery of a Panamanian helicopter by an active duty Colombian military officer, presumably with the intention of giving it to paramilitary groups.

According to human rights organizations, union member assassinations, which in 2005 would occur approximately every five days in Colombia on average, have often implicated paramilitary groups and their supporters. This rate would allegedly have gone down recently after the election of Alvaro Uribe's government, the previous rate being an union member assassination once every two days.

Some critics have argued that, in the Serranía de San Lucas, after assassinating a villager, the AUC would allegedly have said they were establishing a presence to guarantee the entrance of the transnationals which would create jobs, generate development and pay taxes to the state. On July 20th 1997, after a speech in Cartagena where these acts were denounced, the vice president of Asagromisbol, Orlando Camaño, was assassinated by paramilitaries in the city of Aguachica (Cesar Province). Afterwards, subsequent paramilitary operations in the area attacked ten Colombian mining towns, and would have looted and destroyed at least two city halls and a thousand homes, massacred over 400 people, as well as raping and torturing many of the villagers in front of their peers, displacing some 35,000 townspeople.

In Peru the Colina Group, a death squad allegedly controlled by former President/ Dictator Alberto Fujimori and Montesinos, are currently on trial in Lima. Fujimori has been charged in Peru with involvement in the Colina Group’s extrajudicial execution of 15 people at a barbecue in the Barrios Altos district of Lima in November 1991. He has also been charged in the forced disappearance and murder of nine students and a teacher from La Cantuta University in July 1992.

For years, prosecution of the Colina Group for these crimes was blocked by a sweeping amnesty law passed by the Fujimori-controlled Congress in 1995. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights subsequently found that the law violated the American Convention on Human Rights. Additional human rights charges against Fujimori include numerous homicides and forced disappearances allegedly committed in the basement of the Army’s Intelligence Service, as well as the torture of journalist Fabian Salazar after the latter obtained film footage implicating members of the Fujimori government in acts of corruption.

The U.S.-operated School of the Americas is often cited as having served as a training ground for members of death squads in Latin America by several human rights activists, most prominently SOA Watch (which terms it the "School of the Assassins"). Some graduates have gone on to commit atrocities as key military figures, though the School officially denies that any human rights abuses are taught in the curriculum (which it considers to have improved and modernized since the end of the Cold War) and claims that the majority of its graduates have not demonstrated such behaviour.

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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.

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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. As predicted, the bombing campaign, which targeted civilian infrastructure, including bridges, government buildings, and radio stations, caused huge flows of refugees. The administration defended its actions by claiming that the potential chaos resulting from ethnic conflict between Kosovar Albanians and Serbs would have been devastating had NATO not intervened.

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.

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