Death squad

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A death squad is an armed group that carries out killing, often in secrecy, extrajudicial assassinations and forced disappearances of persons such as opposition groups, dissidents, suspected sympathizers or members of rebel groups, street children, land reformists, activists, thieves, and others perceived to be potentially or actively interfering with a social or political status quo.

Death squads are often, but not exclusively, associated with the violent political repression of dictatorships, totalitarian states and similar regimes. They typically have the tacit or express support of the state, as a whole or in part (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 may be distinguished from terrorist groups in that their violent actions are used to maintain the power of a local or national elite, rather than intending to disrupt their existing authority per se. Foreign powers may aid states where death squads are active, usually without the international criticism that would be involved when supporting states that support terrorism. Some death squads, including those with links with corrupt elites, have been classified as terrorist organizations.

Death squads can go out on patrol willing to kill and looking for trouble, or seeking to commit premeditated attacks against political opponents, alleged rebel sympathizers and any other people deemed "dangerous" or simply "undesirable" (e.g.. such as homeless and squatters) by authorities or local interest groups. They may also act to remove portions of the civilian populations whose existence is perceived as not serving the purposes of the ruling elite. Death squads have been used to kill whole classes of people who do not hold a specific ideology, religion or race, in opposition to that held by a real or perceived majority, one not considered as "acceptable" (see genocide).

Contents 1 History 2 Recent use 3 Argentina 4 Bolivia 5 Brazil 6 Cambodia 7 Central and South America 8 Chile 9 Colombia 10 Cuba 11 Dominican Republic 12 East Timor 13 El Salvador 14 France 15 Germany 16 Guatemala 17 Haiti 18 Honduras 19 Indonesia 20 Iran 21 Iraq 22 Ivory Coast 23 Jamaica 24 Japan 25 Korea 26 Mexico 27 Nicaragua 28 Peru 29 Philippines 30 Russia 31 Rwanda 32 South Africa 33 Spain 34 Syria 35 Thailand 36 Turkey 37 Uruguay 38 United Kingdom 39 United States of America 40 Yugoslavia 41 Venezuela 42 Vietnam 43 In popular culture 44 Footnotes 45 References 46 Further reading 47 External links

[edit] 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.

[edit] Recent use

As of 2006, death squads have continued to be active in several locations. They were on the rise through the 1960s and 1970s. However, they now appear to have been on the decline since about 1981. Some known recent centers of activity include Chechnya, Congo, Colombia, Iraq and Sudan, among others.

[edit] Argentina

Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, a far-right death squad mainly active the years before the "Dirty War".

[edit] Bolivia

In the late 1960s death squads killed several thousand people.

[edit] Brazil

In Brazil, death squads first appeared during the seventies. They were linked to the military police (the most famous one being the infamous "Scuderie LeCoq") or civilian police forces (including Mão Branca which meaning the "White Hand"). They targeted criminals who had become famous for their crimes and for evading the police or those involved in the killing of policemen (the most notorious case involved Lúcio Flávio, an infamous criminal known as "fair-haired devil").

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 fact 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 resurfaces, especially LeCoq. However, the phenomenon has become both more widespread and less organised. They still target petty criminals but also anyone 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 fuelled by corruption (in urban areas, shop owners pay death squads to carry out murders 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.

[edit] Cambodia

Assassinations and mass killings of Vietnamese in the late 1970s. 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.

[edit] Central and South America

Death squad activity became 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 Salvadorian death squads typically operated in full cooperation with the national FMLN and their sympathizers as well as undermine civilian president José Napoleón Duarte. In addition to murdering those labelled guerilla 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 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).

[edit] Chile

The Caravan of Death, an Army squad, roamed Chile in October 1973, following Augusto Pinochet's CIA backed coup which resulted in the murder of the regime's opponents. In particular, members of Chile's Socialist Party were targeted, including two infantrymen and several Army officers. Of these included: 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 mastermind behind the assassination of Orlando Letelier and others. 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 generals.

[edit] Colombia

In Colombia, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), as well as previous and later paramilitary groups, have been described as death squads due to aspects of their modus operandi and the support or tolerance that they have received from members of the Colombian security forces and of society in different circumstances. Links between paramilitaries and members of official security forces continue to exist. Several Colombian paramilitary groups began operating as death squads in the 1980s and later ones have often continued to do so, but there are disagreements among analysts as to the accuracy of such a classification in contemporary times. It has been argued that the AUC and newer groups have developed into more complex and autonomous entities than traditional death squads, partially because the fragmentation of the larger drug cartels (some of which sponsored or co-sponsored paramilitary groups) has allowed them to directly participate in the illegal drug trade. This has contributed to giving such groups greater degrees of economic, social and political autonomy. Death squad actions would be one part of their overall activities. Separately, private death squads also exist on a local level, unrelated to the AUC/paramilitary framework.

[edit] Cuba

Batista in the 1950s maintained BRAC secret police that conducted death squad activities.

[edit] Dominican Republic

Police operated the La Banda death squad in the mid-1960s

[edit] East Timor

The Indonesian government operated death squads throughout this territory.

[edit] El Salvador

Main articles: Ita Ford, Maura Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan, Oscar Romero.

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 by a military unit later found to have been acting on specific orders. Death squads were instrumental in killing hundreds of peasants and activists. 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 during the Reagan administration, these events prompted outrage in the U.S. and led to a temporary cutoff in military aid from the Carter administration.

[edit] France

The French military used death squads during the French-Algerian War from 1954 to 1962 BBC.

French counter-intelligence during the bombing of a Greenpeace sea vessel killed one of the members of Greenpeace. This was during the conflict between Greenpeace and France over the use of Pacific atolls for open air nuclear testing. The counter-intelligence members involved were never tried; however, the French secretary of defence Charles Hernu was sacked. [1] [2]

French arms companies with the tolerance of the French Government sold arms to the Rwandans which were later used by death squads during the genocide in that country. [3] [4]

[edit] Germany

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 persons from Romany. During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Army also employed death squads to scare remainder populations under their occupation into submission.

After the partition of Germany, the East German secret service Stasi used death squads within East Germany. [5] [6]

[edit] Guatemala

Guatemala has had death squads active since the 1950s up through the 1990s.

[edit] Haiti

In Haiti, the paramilitary death squad SIN was organized in the 1980s to use military force against narcotics smugglers, it became used as a death squad for political goals.

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 neighborhoods 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.

During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, candidate Bill Clinton had promised to restore democracy to Haiti if elected. Inaugurated in 1993, the administration had to deal with a continuing refugee problem in Florida. Condemning FRAPH and the military regime as nothing more than "armed thugs," the administration cooperated with a multinational force and dispatched 15,000 troops sent and a high-level negotiating team (Jimmy Carter, Sam Nunn, and Colin Powell) to force the military to step down, restoring Aristide to power in August 1994 after international sanctions and pressure had failed to produce any results. Although the presence of U.S. and UN peacekeepers helped restore calm and security, this success, claims researcher Lisa A. McGowan, was undermined by their refusal to disarm the disbanded Haitian military and paramilitaries. As McGowan wrote,

"USAID is providing funding and technical assistance to strengthen Haiti’s judicial system, yet the U.S. has refused Haïtian government requests to deport FRAPH leader Constant, who was imprisoned in the U.S. and wanted in Haïti on murder charges. Instead, the U.S. Justice Department released him from prison. Furthermore, the Clinton administration refuses to give the Haïtian government uncensored copies of the documents seized from FRAPH headquarters, raising suspicions that the documents contain incriminating information about CIA and other U.S. collaboration with Haïtian paramilitaries. Documents that were obtained revealed, for example, that the CIA knew that Constant was directly implicated in the 1993 murder of Justice Minister Guy Malory, yet kept him on their payroll until the return of Aristide in 1994. [2]"

It subsequently emerged that the US government had in fact played a significant role in establishing and funding FRAPH. The investigative journalist Allan Nairn broke the story in an article published in The Nation in 1994. [3] Nairn based his findings on interviews with military, paramilitary and intelligence officials in Haïti and the United States as well as Green Beret commanders and internal documents from the U.S. and Haïtian armies. Nairn spoke directly with Constant himself, then being held in a Maryland jail, shortly before he was due to be deported to Haïti. According to Constant, he started the group that became FRAPH at the urging of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and that even after the U.S. occupation got under way in September 1994, "other people from my organization were working with the DIA.", aiding in operations directed against "subversive activities". [4] When Nairn tried to follow up (Constant insisted on a face-to-face meeting), the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service denied him access, explaining that Constant had had a change of heart and no longer wanted to talk.[5]

Constant later confirmed in 1995 on CBS's "60 Minutes" that the CIA paid him about $700 a month and that he created FRAPH while on the CIA payroll. According to Constant, the FRAPH had been formed "with encouragement and financial backing from the DIA and the CIA." (Miami New Times, 26 February 2004) [6]

In February 1996, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) announced that it had obtained thousands of pages of newly declassified U.S. documents, which they claim revealed that the U.S. government recognized the brutal nature of FRAPH but denied it in public. Describing the attitude of US government officials, CCR lawyer Michael Ratner said

they were talking out of both sides of their mouth. They were talking about restoring democracy to Haïti, but at the same time, they were undermining democracy in the coup period -- at times supporting a group that committed terrorist acts against the Haïtian people. [7]

According to Ratner, U.S. suspicions of Aristide’s leftist populism prodded them to seek support from even the most brutal anti-Aristide elements. Observers such as Ratner, Nairn and Lisa McGowan have argued that covert assistance to antidemocratic forces such as FRAPH was used to pressure Ariside into abandoning his ambitious program for social reform and adopt harsh economic reforms when the U.S. returned him to power.

According to Bill O'Neil, consultant for the New York-based National Coalition for Haïtian Rights, though the CIA and the Pentagon encouraged FRAPH early on, "within a few weeks or a few months, [U.S. support] was largely jettisoned." O'Neil, though, expressed concern that the U.S.'s reluctance to completely sever relations with FRAPH until 1995 (when Constant was arrested) may have allowed several high-profile figures to go into hiding. [8]

Although Aristide was indeed restored to the presidency through U.S. military intervention in 1994, he was again removed from the presidency, this time 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.

[edit] Honduras

Honduras had death squads active through the 1980s. Battalion 316 was one of these death squads. Hundreds of people, teachers, politicians, and union bosses were killed.

[edit] Indonesia

Indonesia used death squads to rub out the PKI the Indonesian Communist Party in the 1960s. The use of death squads continued through the 1980s.

[edit] Iran

During the 1950s a relatively moderate regime was put in power through the efforts of the CIA. Regardless, this regime of the Shah used SAVAK death squads to kill thousands. After the revolution death squads were used by the new regime. In 1983 the CIA gave one of the leaders of Iran Khomeni information on KGB agents in Iran. This information was probably used.

The Iranian regime later used death squads occasionally throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s however by the 2000s it has appeared to almost entirely if not all cease their operation. This partial Westernization of the country can be seen paralleling similar events in Lebanon , United Arab Emirates, and Northern Iraq beginning in the late 1990s.

See also: Chain Murders of Iran

[edit] Iraq

Iraq was formed by British partitioning and domination of various tribal land in the early 20th century. The British later departed. They left behind a national government led from Baghdad that was mostly comprised of Sunni ethnicity in key positions of power that ruled over an ad-hoc nation splintered by tribal affiliations.

This leadership used death squads and committed massacres in Iraq throughout the 20th century, culuminating in the dictatorship of Saddam Hussien. [7]

The country has since become increasingly partitioned following the Iraq War into three zones: a Kurdish ethnic zone to the north, a Sunni center and the Shia ethnic zone to the south.

The secular socialist Baathist leadership were replaced with a provisional and later constitutional government that included leadership roles for the Shia and Kurdish peoples of this nation. This paralleled the development of ethnic militias by the Shia, Sunni, and the Kurdish Peshmerga.

There were death squads formed by members of every ethnicity. [8].

In the national capital of Baghdad some members of the now Shia police department and army formed unofficial, unsanctioned, but long tolerated death squads [9]. They possibly have links to the Interior Ministry and are popularly known as the 'black crows'. These groups operated night or day. They usually arrested people, then either tortured [10] or killed them. [11]

The victims of these attacks were predominantly young males who had probably been suspected of being members of the Sunni insurgency. Agitators such as Abdul Razaq al-Na’as, Dr. Abdullateef al-Mayah, and Dr. Wissam Al-Hashimi have also been killed. These killings are not limited to only men. Women and children have at times have also been arrested and or killed. BBC Some of these killings have also been simple robberies or other criminal activities.

A feature in a May 2005 issue of the magazine of The New York Times claimed that the U.S. military had modelled 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 ^[1].

Western news organizations such as Time and People disassembled this by focusing on the aspects such as probable militia membership, religious ethnicity, as well as uniforms worn by these squads rather than the fact that the United States backed Iraqi government had death squads active in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad.

[edit] Ivory Coast

Death squads are active in this country [12]

This has been condemned by the US [13] but appears to be difficult to stop. Washington Post

[edit] Jamaica

There are death squads that have been active in this country [14] [15] [16]

[edit] Japan

During the Second World War, the Imperial Japanese Army also employed death squads to scare remainder populations under their occupation into submission.

[edit] Korea

Any news reports of the use of death squads in Korea originates around the middle of the 20th century such as the Jeju Massacre [17] and Taejon [18]. There was also the multiple deaths that made the news 1980 in Kwangju [19]. This was supported by the most major supporter of South Korea the USA.

[edit] Mexico

The land currently known as Mexico was the territory of the Aztec empire which openly practised human sacrifice of thousands of people openly up until around the middle of the 1500s [20]. The prisoners which included both men and women were held prisoners for several months then were later killed by Aztec shamans. See also ritual murder. Death squads in Mexico are traditionally led by some supporters of the elite against some members of the non-elite.

National non-religious authorities began death squad activity aimed at religious authorities early in the 20th century. In 1917 a death squad committed an execution in Chalchihuites [21] and by the late 1920s death squads were used by the authorities in a civil conflict. [22]

In 1968 the Mexican Army killed hundreds of people in the Tlatelolco massacre. Through the 1970s and 1980s death squads were used against students, leftists, and activists. One of these squads was the Brigada Blanca. In 1997 about forty-five people were killed by a death squad in Chenalho [23].

The territory known as Chihuahua has openly been the location where more than four hundred women have been 'disappeared' since 1994. [24] While a few perpetrators have been found, the majority of the members of the organization committing these 'disappearances' has remained underground.

The disappearances continue as of 2004.

[edit] Nicaragua

Death squads were active in this country throughout the 1970s

The Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua have also been described as death squads.^[2][3][4] The Contras were considered terrorists by the Sandinista government, which alleged that their attacks targeted civilians. The Contras, who initially received financial and other forms of support from the Argentine military regime and then the U.S. CIA, mounted raids which targeted northern Nicaragua, frequently killing or kidnapping Sandinista officials. A CIA training manual instructed the Contras, under the heading "Selective Use of Violence", to "neutralise carefully selected and planned targets such as court judges, police or state security officials, etc." ^[5]

[edit] Peru

During the internal conflict in Peru, several death squads operated in the country. These included the state-sponsored Rodrigo Franco Command and Grupo Colina. Shining Path, the Maoist guerrilla organization, also had special groups to carry out "selective annihilations" of both military and civilian targets.

[edit] Philippines

Death squads were especially active in this country during the American invasion of the 1950s and the fascist regime in the 1980s. There continue to be activities as of 2005.

NPA groups known as "Sparrow Units" were active in the mid-1980s, killing government officials, police personnel, military members, and anyone targeted for elimination. They were also supposedly part of an NPA operation called "Agaw Armas"(Filipino for "Stealing Weapons"), where they raided government armories as well as stealing weapons from slain military and police personnel.

In Davao City, there is currently a vigilante group called the "Davao Death Squad," or simply "DDS," which is well-known throughout the nation. Criminals such as robbers, rapists, drug dealers, murderers, and thieves are often targets of the DDS.

[edit] Russia

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.^{[citation needed]}

The more well known activities of Russian death squads in the 20th century begins with the Katyn massacre in 1940 of several thousand Polish officers by the NKVD who were transferred from Russian concentration camps to be killed at Goat Hill near Katyn Woods. The transportation vehicles for this were given the nickname 'Black Ravens' by the local natives. [25] This phrase echoes other nicknames given to other death squads.

After the invasion of Afghanistan by the Russian military in the late 1970s and through the 1980s they continued to use death squads. The occasional massacre using rifles in a district here [26], the use of aerodynamic scatterable land mines (which appeared vaguely toy-like) to kill civilians in another.^{[citation needed]} The use of this strategy to conquer Afghanistan was rendered ineffective through the clandestine influence and support of the ISI the Pakistani secret service and the American CIA.

The Russian security apparatus continued to exist after the technical dissolution of the USSR in 1991.

The internal chaos during the transition from Communism to a mixture of Open Market democratic oligarchy allowed criminal gangs to flourish during the 1990s. They were known to have death squads, however they have subsequently become much lower profile.

The FSB [27] is as of 2006 the primary arm used by the authorities for wet work in non-war zones. [28] [29] [30] Ibn al-Khattab [31]. 'Disappearances' are not unknown in the capital Moscow. [32] Pravda

The Russian military continued to use death squads in war zones [33] [34] [35] however after the cessation of official hostilities there were be less reports of their activities. [36] NPR

[edit] Rwanda

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. There were less Tutsis death squads in operation around their single stronghold during this event. The "Interahamwe" typically chopped up their victims with machetes or shot them at close range. Many of these weapons were of French manufacture.

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. The Rwandese Patriotic Front appeared to have stopped a genocide but they are not without guilt as well. In the following years many murderers were imprisoned but the sheer number of perpetrators prevented any fair judicial proceedings from taking place. In most cases most of the perpetrators were only imprisoned for a time or simply allowed their freedom under the principles of 'truth and reconciliation'.

This abandonment of due process is similar to the post-Shoah regimes in west Germany and east Germany following World War 2.

[edit] South Africa

Death squads were used by the preceding Colonial regime against the ethnic Africans. Agents of these groups were known as 'Vultures'.

[edit] Spain

Spain is the location where the Nazi Germany trained their military in the Spanish Civil War prior to World War 2. There were death squads used by the fascists and the loyalists during this conflict. Hemingway later romanticized the loyalist side of the conflict in his writings.

In the modern era, G.A.L.(Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación) terrorist group were death squads illegally set up by officials within the Spanish government to fight ETA. They were active from 1983 until 1987, under PSOE's cabinets.

[edit] Syria

Syrian death squads were active during its occupation of Lebanon during the civil war from 1975 to 1990. The number of the 'disappeared' is put around 17,000 [37] [38].

The Syrian death squads causing 'disappearances' in Lebanon continued after the end of the civil war into at least the mid-1990s. [39]

As recently as of 2005 there have been reports [40] of death squad activity in Syria. The death squads exist even while the number of their executions are apparently far less than their counter-parts in Iraq.

[edit] Thailand

During the 1970s, the Krathin Daeng or Red Guard was one of the more well known death squads active in this country. Assassination of political and economic opponents took place including massacres.

[edit] Turkey

Death squads were used by the Turkish regime during the Armenian Genocide as well as occasionally against the Kurds.

[edit] Uruguay

The DII has been used as a cover by death squads in this country since the late 1970s.

[edit] United Kingdom

During the Irish war of independence in 1916-21, the British forces organised several secret assassination squads. In 1920 alone the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force murdered the mayors of Limerick and Cork cities. In Limerick, the replacement mayor was also murdered, while in Cork, the new mayor died after a 74 day hunger strike.

During the 30 years of the The Troubles in Northern Ireland, both nationalist and loyalist paramilitary forces organised assassination squads. Notable cases include Brian Nelson a Ulster Defence Association member convicted of sectarian murders revealed that he was also a British Army agent.

[edit] United States of America

From 1865 until about the 1960s and 1970s the Ku Klux Klan carried out 'lynchings' of African-American leaders and civil rights proponents. This was often with the unofficial support of some local and state level leaders in the American south.

The US has been accused of training Death Squads for use in South and Central American countries. The School of the Americas, run by the US Army in Georgia has been accused by the UN of having trained "500 of the worst human rights abusers in the hemisphere"^[6]

[edit] Yugoslavia

In the late 1990s, the alleged use of paramilitary death squads by Serb forces and President Slobodan Milošević against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo was cited by the Clinton administration as part of its rationale for its bombing campaign against Serbia. However the use of death squads by all sides in this conflict did take place. Only token highly placed perpetrators were ever charged, and of all of the national leaders guilty of this only Slobodan Milošević was held accountable.

[edit] Venezuela

In its 2003 and 2002 world reports, Human Rights Watch reported the existence of death squads in several Venezuelan states, involving members of the local police, the DISIP and the National Guard. These groups were responsible for the extrajudicial killings of civilians and wanted or alleged criminals, including street criminals, looters and drug users. [41][42]

[edit] Vietnam

During the 1960s throughout the 1970s death squads were used against the Viet Cong cadre as well as supporters in neighbouring countries notably Cambodia. See also Phoenix Program (also known as Phung Hoang). The Viet Cong also used death squads of their own against civilians for political reasons. ^{[citations needed]}

The use of computers by the American forces to compile lists of 'suspects' as well as the indefinite detention of 'suspects' in 'black' locations as well as their detention, torture, and execution without judicial oversight or protection is typical of American black ops in the Post World War II era.

[edit] In popular culture

• Gunslinger Girl

[edit] Footnotes

1. ^ The Way of the Commandos, The New York Times, May 1, 2005
2. ^ Negroponte's Time In Honduras at Issue: Focus Renewed on Intelligence Pick's Knowledge of Death Squads in 1980s, Washington Post, March 21, 2005
3. ^ Lost History: CIA-Contra Plan -- Kill Cubans , Consortium News
4. ^ Death Squad Ambassador: Senate Hearings Begin on Negroponte Iraq Appointment, Democracy Now, April 27, 2004
5. ^ CIA Manual: Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, CNN
6. ^ Gareau, Frederick H., "State Terrorism and the United States", Zed Books, 2004

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• 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

[edit] 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