As the Cold War warmed up, one of the tactics with which the U.S. government fought communism was through foreign aid programs. They were the Central Intelligence Agency’s favorite cars and other American interference. Dan Mitrione, a Navy veteran and former police chief of a small town in Indiana, joined one of those agencies, the International Cooperation Administration, in 1960. The following year, ACI was absorbed through the United States Agency for International Development, which in addition to its stated project to manage assistance to emerging countries gained international notoriety for its role in assisting in the repression, torture and killing of blameless men, women and youth through brutal dictatorships around the world.
Brazilian brutality
Mitrione’s first assignment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he worked in the police assistance program for USAID’s Office of Public Security. PAHO trained and armed friendly – anti-communist read – Latin American police and security agents. Apparently, he intended to teach the police to be less corrupt and more professional. In practice, it worked as a ClA proxy. As for her parent organization, a former USAID director, John Gilligan, later admitted that she had been “infiltrated from the most sensible to the back of the CIA people.” Gilligan explained that “the concept of putting agents into force in all kinds of activities that we had abroad; government, voluntary, religious, of all kinds.”
Before Mitrione’s arrival, the popular procedure of Brazilian police was to beat a suspect almost to death; if he spoke, he lived, otherwise, well … Under Mitrione’s tutelage, the officers brought complicated torture techniques from the pages of KUBARK, a CIA instruction manual describing various physical and mental strategies to break a prisoner’s preference to resist interrogation. Many of the abuses in KUBARK would later become familiar to the world in the form of “enhanced interrogation” techniques used in the American war on terror: coercation or extended effort, contactless torture (stress positions), heat extremes, lack of blood or moisture, and drastic deprivation or relief of food or sleep. KUBARK also covers the use of electrocution torture, a favorite tool of the Brazilian and Uruguayan police under Mitrione’s instructions.
One of the most infamous Brazilian torture tools of the Mitrione era known as the refrigerator, a small square box slightly giant enough to contain a huddled human. The “refrigerator” is supplied with a heating and air conditioning unit, speakers and strobe lights; its use has driven many men crazy. Under Mitrione, Brazilian police developed a new torture strategy they called the “Statue of Liberty,” in which hooded prisoners were forced to stand on a box of sharp-edged sardines and hold heavy objects over their heads until they began to collapse from exhaustion. . strong electric shocks would force them to recover.
Mitrione was transferred to Rio de Janeiro in 1962, where he trained the dreaded surprise troops of the Department of Political and Social Order to suppress dissent and democracy. In that role, he was executing the U.S.-backed army coup in 1964 that overthrew democratically elected and anti-communist President Joo Goulart, who had committed the fatal sin of resurging redistributive economic policies sparingly. The coup marked the beginning of two decades of brutal military dictatorship. By the end of the decade, USAID had trained more than 100,000 Brazilian policemen. During this period, the army dictatorship murdered piles of dissidents and tortured thousands more, adding a Marxist student named Dilma Rousseff, who a century later was elected Brazil’s first female president.
Moving to Montevideo
In 1969, Mitrione was appointed CHIEF PAHO public safety adviser in Montevideo, Uruguay, replacing Adolph Sáenz, a quintessential outrulent warrior who in the past led the operation that pursued and murdered Che Guevara in Bolivia. Mitrione has come in the midst of a collapsing economy, labor movements and student protests in a country formerly known as South American Switzerland for its highest point of economic development, freedom and stability. Mitrione’s mandate in Montevideo saw the militarization of the Uruguayan police, the increasingly annoying state repression and the force and brutality of the fearsome National Directorate of Information and Intelligence, the national security firm guilty of death squads, temporarily operated with impunity.
On the far left, the rebels of the National Liberation Movement, better known as Tupamaros, were gaining strength and popularity and shamed the government with its audacious urban abductions and other attacks. The name of the Inca revolutionary T-pac Amaru II, who led a primary uprising in the 18th century opposite the Spanish genocidal empire in Peru, and encouraged through the Cuban revolution, the Tupamaros were led by agricultural work organizer Rael Sendic. Unlike other Latin American guerrilla groups, they have moved away from bloodshed as much as you can imagine and until August 1970 had never killed any of their prisoners.
First, the relatively small insurgency of Tupamaros generated broad popular support. But as the government’s hand grew, insurgent attacks became the same. A few years earlier, the U.S. ambassador deplored the Uruguayan government’s “relaxed attitude” toward the Communists. That would replace under Mitrione. PAHO imported surveillance technologies and firearms while sending “penetration agents” to infiltrate the Tupamaros and collect data on their leaders, members and supporters, adding José Mujica, who, like Rousseff in Brazil, endured imprisonment and torture before all in spite of everything. elected president of her country decades later.
Teaching torture
The expired American journalist and A.J. Langguth attributed the advent of “scientific torture strategies” to U.S. advisers led through Mitrione in Uruguay. These included mental torture, such as reading recordings of women and young people screaming and telling prisoners that their loved ones were being tortured, more classical torture techniques such as electric shocks implemented under their fingernails and genitalia. According to Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a cuban double agent who infiltrated the CIA and spent years at the Montevideo firm station, Mitrione said the key to a successful interrogation was to apply “exact pain, in the exact place, in the exact amount to be achieved. desired effect. »
“An untimely death means the failure of the technician,” Mitrione told Hevia. “You have to act with the power and cleanliness of a surgeon and with the perfection of an artist.” Mitrione drew a very fine line between surgical and sadistic when he added: “When you get what you want, and I do, it would possibly be wise to enlarge the query a little to apply some other smoothing, not to extract data now, but only as a political measure, to create a healthy fear.
In order to build the best underground classroom to teach his Uruguayan scholars the equipment and techniques of his tortuous craftsmanship, Mitrione sounded the basement of his house in Montevideo. He tested his integrity by betting on Hawaiian music or asking an assistant to fire a gun from the room while listening to various outdoor themes of the house. Hevia claimed that this is where Mitrione trained the Uruguayan police in torture using “beggars from the outskirts of Montevideo”, a practice that far exceeded to overcome his position in Brazil. “There was no interrogation, just a demonstration of the other tensions in other parts of the human body,” Hevia said.
The Cuban claimed that Mitrione had tortured four beggars to death in his traditional dungeon. This fits with an old model: at the well-known U.S. Army School (SOA), then located in Panama, American doctors oversaw torture categories in which other homeless people were abducted from the streets of Panama City and used as human guinea pigs. According to a former SOA instructor interviewed in the award-winning documentary Inside the School of the Assassins, “they brought other people from the street to the base, and experts were training us to get data through torture… an American doctor … that would teach students … [about] the nerve endings of the body. He showed them where to torture, where and where not, where the individual is not killed.”
“The specific horror of the course is its academic atmosphere, almost clinical,” said Hevia, who described Mitrione as “perfectionist” and “coldly effective.” To further electrocute the victims, Mitrione experimented with thin wires that can slip between his teeth and into his gums. While some of the torture he oversaw were in fact innovative, others were still clinical, such as the time he put a water industry trade unionist at a disadvantage for 3 days before giving him a container of water combined with urine.
Hevia told the New York Times that Mitrione was not a dishonest agent. Instead, it “represented the program of the U.S. mission” in Uruguay. “Mitrione was just implementing a policy,” the Cuban insisted. For the United States, the Cold War, torture was not a deviation from the norm, it was the norm, peoples in South Vietnam where tens of thousands of civilians were “neutralized” the Phoenix program to the highest prestige. hospitals and think-how in North America, where perhaps thousands of men, women and children, many of whom were accidental victims, underwent tortuous reports on MK-ULTRA assignment and other brain and behavioral control programs.
For Uruguay, wild torture was a departure from the norm in a country that was once regarded as a style of democracy. But such outrages happened that the Uruguayan Senate was forced to investigate. It concluded that torture had become “normal, common and habitual” and that techniques commonly used to torture prisoners, adding pregnant women, included electric discharges to the genitals, slow compression of the testicles, electrical needles under the nails and burns with cigarettes. Filmmaker Eduardo Terra described being subjected to the “submarine” daily, in which a prisoner nearly drowns in an electrified water tank full of urine, vomit or faeces. Victor Paulo Laborde Baffico, a former Uruguayan naval intelligence officer, later revealed that the “submarine”, electroshock torture and what would later be called the submarine were taught to Uruguayan army officers from the pages of american torture manuals.
Kidnapped, murdered
Years later, Sendic told the New York Times that Mitrione was targeted for torture and reprisals for his direct role in educational police for the murder of student protesters. The burly Midwesterner was abducted while leaving his home in the suburb of Carrasco on July 31, 1970. Some time or shortly after his abduction, Mitrione was shot in the shoulder. His captors tried and apologized for the wound. The Tupamaros demanded the release of 150 of their imprisoned comrades in exchange for The Safe Release of Mitrione. Although the public position of Richard Nixon’s administration was not to negotiate with the terrorists, U.S. President Jorge Pacheco Areco suggested that “spare no effort” to ensure the safe return of Mitrione and Dr. Claude Fly, a kidnapped American. agricultural adviser. Tupamaros on August 7. Fly suffered a fit at the centre while still in captivity in March 1971 and was rushed first to a surgeon from the centre, then to the local British hospital and freedom.
“Spare no effort” included the risk of Pacheco’s regime of executing the 150 prisoners and their families. However, 10 days passed, adding Mitrione’s 50th birthday on August 4, with no progress. An recorded verbal exchange between Mitrione and his captors shows that both were uncertain, but hopeful, about the fate of the former. When Mitrione asks how long it will take to be released, one of his captors says the government will push. “We think you’re very important,” he says on the tape. “I hope someone believes it,” Mitrione replies.
The Tupamaros issued seven press releases before executing Mitrione. His body was discovered on August 10 at 4:15 a.m. at the back of this Buick. He was shot twice in the head and one in the middle and in the back. Sendic, a former Tupamaro leader, has insisted that the rebels did not need to kill Mitrione and that his death was the unfortunate result of a communication failure after the government captured Tupamaro’s leaders who could not tell their captors what to do with him. . On the other hand, Eladio Moll, a former Uruguayan rear admiral and head of the intelligence facilities during the dictatorship, later revealed that U.S. officials had told state security forces to execute Tupamaro prisoners after interrogations because they “did not deserve to live.”
Back in the United States, Dan Mitrione was hailed as a hero. White House spokesman Ron Ziegler praised his “service dedicated to the cause of nonviolent progress” as “an example for loose men around the world,” and called him a guy who “embodied the highest principles of the police profession.” To his wife, he was “the best guy.” His daughter called him a “great huguyitarist.” Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis even organized a benefit concert for their grieving family circle (Mitrione had nine children) in his hometown of Richmond, Indiana, on August 29.
Deadly decade
In the days and weeks of Mitrione’s murder, U.S. officials denied torturing Uruguayan prisoners. Alejandro Otero, the ambitious head of the police intelligence services, vehemently refuted America’s claim. Otero resigned after learning that Mitrione had tortured his friend, a woman who allegedly sympathized with the rebels. A few days after Mitrione’s death, Otero blamed the American and his violent strategies to feed the flames of the Tupamaros uprising. “Before that, they used violence as a last resort,” he said.
The new decade was the violent repression of dissent through the state in Uruguay. In 1972, a new president, Juan María Bordaberry, declared a state of “internal war,” and the Tupamaros were temporarily destroyed when the government intensified their repression and torture. Congress was dissolved, general censorship was implemented, and political parties, trade unions and student teams were banned. During this period, right-wing army dictatorships in many South American countries expanded Operation Condor, a U.S.-backed state terrorism crusade, and a coordinated “dirty war” crackdown in which tens of thousands of people were killed and thousands more imprisoned. for their actual or presumed political beliefs.
According to Amnesty International, by the mid-1970s, at least 6,000 others were being held as political prisoners in Uruguay, a country of fewer than 3 million people. That’s the equivalent of another 728,000 people in the United States today. “All Uruguayans were prisoners, unless they were jailers and exiles,” said Eduardo Galeano, the world-famous Uruguayan writer who fled his country in the worst of oppressions. It will be another ten years before democracy is restored, political prisoners like Mujica are released and exiles like Galeano return home. Most human rights violators in the dictatorship now enjoy codified immunity, although Bordaberry died in 2011 while serving a 30-year sentence for the murder and enforced disappearance of dissidents Operation Condor.
Mitrione’s tortured legacy
Although Congress canceled the OPS program in 1974, its missions were simply transferred to other agencies, adding the Drug Control Administration and the FBI. USAID, which has helped fund opium traffickers in Laos, the forced sterilization of some 300,000 Peruvian indigenous women, Salvadoran death squads and Guatemala’s Genocidal Army, continues to operate and underwest to this day.
Although Dan Mitrione has been dead for part of a century, his legacy is still alive in the words and deeds of a new generation of American torturers. Many of the mental and “contactless” tortures he developed and practiced led to the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of the US war on terror, Guantanamo Bay, and the CIA’s “black sites.” Mitrione’s methodical torture-like methodical to torture – “an untimely death from the failure of the technician” – echoes the words of unrepentant Bush-era torturers and his apologists such as John Yoo, Bruce Jessen, James Mitchell, Gina Haspel and CIA anti-terrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman, who with memorial coldness ordered the army “if the detainee dies, he does.”
Many detainees have died in custody in the United States, and dozens of their deaths are or attempted as criminal killings through U.S. army officers. Dan Mitrione wouldn’t have approved. The sheer negligence of their deaths would have actually angered their clinical sensitivity.