BEHIND THE DEATH SQUADS
Nairn, Allan
An exclusive report on the U.S. role in El Salvador's official terror BEHIND THE DEATH SQUADS BY ALLAN NAIRN PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL KIENITZ (Copyright © 1984, The Progressive, Inc.) (Continued...
...intelligence officials "have collaborated with us in a certain technical manner, providing us with advice," says Carranza...
...You make friends with him...
...We created these specialized agencies to fight the plans and actions of international communism...
...Former Ambassador Castro says Mano Blanco "was an offshoot of ORDEN, and the same people in ORDEN were to some extent the same people in the Mano Blanco...
...Santivanez charged that former DeA WAR PHOTOGRAPHS WITTHOUT FROM EL SALVADOR 1 A FRONT BY MICHAEL KIENITZ (Copyright © 1984, The Progressive, Inc...
...If our commanders have captured people like this, they are committing no fault...
...You might say: "Who are the com-paneros in your organization and why do they kill us...
...When the actual physical torture begins, there are a lot of different methods: cutting off pieces of his skin, burning him with cigarettes...
...Having established the principle, D'Aubuisson got down to specifics, marshaling charts, photos, videotapes, and computer graphics for an intricately detailed, name-by-name, face-by-face tirade against "El Salvador's terrorist conspiracy...
...You learn how to give electric shocks, shocks to the brain, shocks to the stomach...
...It has a tremendous impact when he knows his kids have been captured but doesn't know where they are...
...officials provide the security forces with information...
...Up to the early 1960s, El Salvador's security forces had been little more than loosely coordinated barracks units in the service of local land owners and political caudillos...
...The CIA provided such information, Lopez says...
...Another American closely associated with D'Aubuisson, Billy Murphy, complains of the treatment ARENA received at the hands of the U.S...
...And as in the 1960s and 1970s, when U.S...
...Beat him, and beat him, and beat him...
...Spain...
...If by chance the army arrived and happened to shoot one of these people in a battle, then everybody threw the blame on us...
...Unfortunately, when we mentioned a person, poom, they'd shoot them," says Alberto Bondanza, a D'Aubuisson intimate and one of the founders of ARENA...
...He said he also needed investigation and interrogation equipment, and was unruffled by the fact that U.S...
...He said D'Aubuisson made copies of the ANSESAL material shortly before the agency was dissolved and its archives transferred to the general staff...
...When D'Aubuisson officially left the army after the 1979 coup, he launched his political movement with a series of tele-vison speeches...
...Individual subjects are interrogated, says Colonel Montes, first at the local post and then, if the case warrants it, at the intelligence section of the security force...
...Here, the first thing you have to do is grab them by the neck...
...State Department officials in El Salvador during the 1970s say that although D'Aubuisson had "a disturbingly close relationship" with one U.S...
...Medrano refuses to discuss the particular service he performed, though he recalls Johnson's words as the President presented him with the medal: " T know all about you, Medrano...
...He and other D'Aubuisson aides met regularly with "good friends" from the U.S...
...We couldn't let them be deceived by the guerrillas...
...The instructors were sometimes in military uniform, sometimes in civilian dress...
...If there's lots of pressure—like from Amnesty International or some foreign countries-then we might pass them on to a judge, but if there's no pressure, then they're dead...
...You discover the communist by the way he talks," says Medrano...
...Communism is the chief obstacle to economic development in the Central American region," proclaimed President Kennedy, who had chaired the meeting...
...You offer him a soda and some food...
...armed forces have: If conceived and organized ORDEN, the rural paramilitary and intelligence network described by Amnesty International as a movement designed "to use clandestine terror against government opponents...
...At the meetings, you'd say to them, 'Well, if I had this sort of equipment, I'd do this and this,'—sort of ease them along...
...insulting authority...
...During the Carter Administration, their disagreements were often clear and pronounced...
...official, relied on Death Squads as "the operative arm of intelligence gathering...
...You do it with different wires...
...The Americans would directly receive all the information on a case even before we had developed the activity, before we had decided how we would terminate a case," Carranza says, referring to the procedure in effect before 1983...
...D'Aubuisson openly defended the security forces for their role in the spate of disappearances and assassinations in late 1979 and early 1980...
...In an interview in late March, he said that the Treasury Police, a branch of El Salvador's security forces, would routinely kidnap, interrogate, torture, and then kill political suspects...
...Where would you like to go...
...A Salvadoran who served as an aide to a senior intelligence official in the 1970s says he was shown CIA photographic and electronic surveillance reports on many dissidents...
...carrying notebooks, papers, or symbols related to subversive organizations, [or] traveling in cars destined for points of concentration of the subversive delinquents—unauthorized demonstrations and rallies, etc., especially if the attitude is suspicious...
...These forces "would meet every three months under the supervision of the State Department and exchange information and methods of operation," says Medrano...
...11 conceived and organized ANSESAL, the elite presidential intelligence service that gathered files on Salvadoran dissidents and, in the words of one U.S...
...In a recent series of interviews spanning some twelve hours, he spoke freely about the origins and growth of the security system...
...He did his best, but he couldn't do anything...
...In El Salvador, he organized an intricate, many-tiered intelligence and paramilitary network that extended from the remotest mountain hamlets to the presidential palace...
...Continued from Page 25) fense Minister General Jose Guillermo Garcia and Colonel Carranza, director of the Treasury Police, helped organize and operate D'Aubuisson's Death Squad network...
...If provided American technical and intelligence advisers who often worked directly with ANSESAL at its headquarters in the Casa Presidential...
...The soldiers went to the countryside to instruct civilian ORDEN leaders, who in turn established the organization's local chapters...
...Government was sustained over the next twenty years...
...According to Hurtado, U.S...
...These meetings—organized and run by the U.S...
...He said he would obtain them through "outside channels," adding, "I don't know whether it would be wise to put this out for the knowledge of the American people...
...Carranza says he processes the information with "a small computer, and we also work with the general staffs computer for developing a workable inventory and index...
...agencies continues to this day...
...ambassador to El Salvador from 1964 to 1968...
...It's evident in the things they say...
...an investigative capability for detecting criminal and/or subversive individuals and organizations and neutralizing their activities," wrote Byron Engle, director of the AID Public Safety Program, in a 1967 memo to his staff...
...Rank-and-file National Guardsmen still revere him as a fearsome jefe and the hero of the 1969 war with Honduras...
...embassy official who studied the Death Squads...
...Public and Congressional pressures, however, have compelled the Administration to voice public criticism of the Death Squads even as it secretly funnels aid and intelligence to the military and security forces that run them...
...Colonel Simons sent me ten men to begin training us," recalls Medrano...
...In no moment should you feel culpable for fighting these terrorists," he said...
...When it's over, you just throw him in the alleys with a sign saying Mano Blanco, ESA (Secret Anticommunist Army), or Maximiliano Hernandez Brigade [three names commonly used by Salvadoran Death Squads...
...We got names and addresses and were told to pick them up, get information, and kill them later...
...In El Salvador, the U.S...
...ORDEN and ANSESAL-the Salvadoran National Security Agency—grew out of the State Department, the CIA, and the Green Berets during the time of Kennedy," Medrano told me...
...Generally, he speaks against Yankee imperialism, he speaks against the oligarchy, he speaks against military men...
...But Murphy adds that ARENA enjoyed amiable relations with one political officer at the embassy who "would always let us know in advance what was going to happen in the junta...
...Santivanez was "Romero's black man," says the U.S...
...The U.S...
...To his supporters, he is "the founder of Salvadoran nationalism...
...complicity in the dark and brutal work of El Salvador's Death Squads is not an aberration...
...they're small...
...Even today, some of the same people are in the Death Squads...
...He had everything—photos and complete personal histories—direct from the ANSESAL files," says Major Serrato, who participated in the planning meetings out of which the broadcasts grew...
...According to a U.S...
...funds "to provide training or advice or provide any financial support for police, prisons, or other law enforcement forces for any foreign government or any program of internal intelligence or surveillance on behalf of any foreign government...
...ORDEN has ceased to function with that name," he said, "but its principles live and are newly serving the fatherland with the Frente Democratica Na-cionalista [Democratic Nationalist Front, D'Aubuisson's new political organization...
...Though the evidence is less conclusive about Major Roberto D'Au-buisson, presidential candidate of the right-wing ARENA party, some of his close associates describe him as a former recipient of CIA funding...
...At one time, Hurtado held a sensitive position for which he was carefully screened...
...He resides in the United States without legal immigration status and is being sheltered by the religious sanctuary movement...
...Many of the individuals D'Aubuisson named in his television speeches were subsequently assassinated...
...The rural component of this network was ORDEN (Spanish for "Order"), a group founded, in Medrano's words, to "indoctrinate the peasants regarding the advantages of the democratic system and the disadvantages of the communist system...
...personnel remain at the center of the system...
...According to his service record, Simons had recently completed a stint as commander of the White Star Mobile Training Team, a Green Beret unit that had been sent to Laos to work with indigenous troops...
...The United States was "developing within the civil security forces...
...Names enter the archive through surveillance reports from officers and informants or through reports from troops who have detained an individual for questioning...
...His hands are as bloody as anybody's...
...Since then, the Salvadoran military have continued to maintain and expand their surveillance and record-keeping activities...
...Because of a commitment to protect Santivanez's anonymity, the story identified him as a source with "personal knowledge of these crimes because his government post had put him in direct contact with top military leaders...
...It was almost like a religion," Medrano recalls...
...The Americans sacrificed them to avoid their own problems...
...This intelligence system serves as the nerve center of Death Squad operations...
...Under Reagan, the State Department has been brought back into line...
...The room stinks horribly because of the urine and excrement of former prisoners, and you keep him there for a week without sleep so that his nerves will be shot when you start to torture him...
...Nixon says he is uncertain of the current relationship...
...law prohibits such aid...
...personnel conducted an intelligence course for Treasury officers that included training "in methods of physical and psychological torture...
...For El Salvador, Washington assigned a central role to General Medrano, then a senior officer of the National Guard and the army general staff...
...Those bastards want to fuck you over, they're using you...
...They can walk at night, see in the dark, see among the trees...
...And I don't want those bastards to think I'm screwing up...
...In fact, Santivanez was the director of ANSESAL and D'Aubuisson's immediate superior from 1977 to 1979, a period of mounting government repression that culminated in the fall of the Carlos Humberto Romero government and the aboliton of ANSESAL for its role in the Death Squad killings...
...When the Reagan Administration launched a publicity campaign against the Death Squads last December, it pointed a finger at individual officers, leaking their names to the press and demanding their removal...
...In this revolutionary war, the enemy comes from our people," Medrano says...
...The course would cover investigation, surveillance, weapons, and interrogation, Martinez said...
...I know your pedigree'—like I was a bull...
...You learn how to torture, how to cut the balls off a person when he's still alive...
...This March, Francis Stanley Martinez, a corporal in the National Police intelligence department, said he and nine colleagues in the security forces—three from the Treasury Police, three from the National Guard, and three from the National Police—were about to depart for an in-depth CIA training course in the United States...
...only the intelligence section can enter, no uniformed men are allowed...
...Asked why the Administration chose to blame those specific individuals while leaving the institutions untouched, the U.S...
...He kept the files and took care of people when there was dirty work to be done...
...In general, you will kill the prisoners because there's an assumption they shouldn't live...
...These are the things that happen in war...
...Over the past twenty years, officials of the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the U.S...
...It's a little machine...
...military attache (who could not be reached for comment), they did not know whether he had received payments...
...instructors...
...As he recalls it, Medrano "studied every aspect of warfare from primitive jungle fighting to psychological civic action to strategic bombing...
...Evidence of U.S...
...Medrano gave Washington ample return on its investment...
...We'll send you to one of those countries...
...Once identified, they would be reported to ORDEN's central office, where a staff of eighty would record the information and relay it to ANSESAL...
...Medrano is something of a legend in Salvadoran politics...
...The curriculum, says Artiga, included "anti-communism, democracy, detection and identification, and self-defense...
...To qualify for a place in the files, an individual may commit such diverse offenses as "carrying or moving subversive propaganda of whatever type...
...It's very helpful...
...According to the Salvadoran armed forces Guide to Normal Operative Procedures, a confidential policy manual, each army and security force outpost is required to maintain a "Special Archive of S-2 Intelligence...
...In July 1968, he received a silver Presidential medal from Lyndon Johnson "in recognition of exceptionally meritorious service...
...American intelligence services have actually furnished the names, photographs, and whereabouts of suspected dissidents, say Salvadoran security officials...
...Following a fight with a superior officer, he was expelled from the military in 1981, he says...
...In turn, U.S...
...And the Catholic organization, Socorro Juridico (legal assistance), "we know to be organized precisely by the guerrillas," says Lopez Nuilla...
...The landmark event in the formation of the national security apparatus in El Salvador and the rest of Central America was the Declaration of San Jose, issued on March 19, 1963, at the conclusion of a meeting of six Central American presidents...
...The official, heavily involved in the publicity campaign, considered it a success...
...There are some very sophisticated methods for this kind of torture...
...H instructed Salvadoran intelligence operatives in the use of investigative techniques, combat weapons, explosives, and interrogation methods that included, according to a former Treasury Police agent, "instruction in methods of physical and psychological torture," 11 and, in the last decade, violated the Foreign Assistance Act of 1974, which prohibits spending U.S...
...military and civilian personnel helped train members of the security forces as bodyguards in 1980...
...involvement covers a broad spectrum of activity...
...it's about fifteen centimeters across, with connecting wires...
...State Department with assistance from the CIA, AID, the Customs Bureau, the Immigration Service, and the Justice Department—"were designed to develop ways of dealing with subversion," recalls William Bowdler, who represented the State Department at the sessions...
...Things like that...
...Government...
...install the teletype system, known as the Central American Communications Network, it was part of a broader plan "to reorganize the intelligence effort and get Central Americans to work together against subversion...
...We could kill you right here and now, but we're not killers, we're not your enemy...
...You pull him out, then shove his head in again...
...There's a special torture room in the Treasury Police...
...That began to change with the Kennedy Administration's Alliance for Progress, founded on the assumption that national security systems working side by side with capitalist development would preempt communist revolution in Latin America...
...The CIA agent claimed to have seen the dossier on Father Grande, which reportedly included photos and accounts of his visits to other Central American countries as well as his activities in his home parish of Aguilares...
...We'll give you money, but you have to talk to us, because if you don't, we're going to fuck you over...
...That was the origin...
...Colonel Carranza confirmed this relationship...
...The proofs he presented were concrete and irrefutable: photos and documents that were prepared by the CIA, documents from the archives of the CIA...
...agents and technicians invented and oiled the intelligence machine, U.S...
...They are good in the mountains...
...He came to my house regularly...
...So if you don't talk, I'm going to turn you over to those fuckers and they're going to beat the piss out of you...
...It's like if you have a stereo and you don't know how to use it, you learn: This generates twenty volts, this forty volts, this will give a serious blow, this less so, this one will kill a person...
...You're doing good work...
...He was contacted directly and independently after another former member of the Salvadoran military provided his home telephone number...
...official in San Salvador who studied the Death Squads last year...
...According to Colonel Nicolas Carranza, director of the Salvadoran Treasury Allan Nairn is a free-lance writer who specializes in coverage of Central America...
...intelligence sources...
...Well, of course, they may hit him at some time, but after that, when he's taken to one of the interrogation rooms, you start by talking to him as a friend, you try to convince him that you understand his idealism...
...A former Treasury Police officer who goes by the name of Rene Hurtado (see Page 22) says he was told by ANSESAL members that their agency was responsible for killing Grande...
...Government money, one saying it came from the CIA, the other from either the CIA or the Defense Intelligence Agency...
...Colonel Adolfo Blandon, the armed forces chief of staff, says "six or seven" U.S...
...But after using these methods for a few days or a week or two, you start getting tough...
...We were preparing the team to stop communism...
...It says General Electric on it...
...Then you wash him and take him to the electric shock room...
...They had very, very limited political orientation, if any," says Robert Eugene Whedbee, who served as CIA station chief in El Salvador from 1962 to 1964...
...The broadcasts launched D'Aubuisson's political career and marked the emergence of the paramilitary front which later became ARENA...
...official in San Salvador responded: "Things generated in Washington create certain necessities that don't necessarily reflect the true problems here, but are done for political purposes up there, and this is a good example...
...And he was a good friend of the United States...
...They reported that Carranza had received $90,000 per year for the past five or six years...
...Roberto was an officer of ANSESAL, which is affiliated with the CIA," says Major Oscar Serrato, one of a small group of Salvadorans who began secretly collaborating with D'Aubuisson soon after the reformist junta came to power in October 1979...
...The intelligence course was given for one month in 1980 at the headquarters of the Salvadoran army general staff, Hurtado says...
...Sometimes the killings were carried out by ORDEN itself, other times by the army, the National Guard, or the Mano Blanco Death Squad...
...We organized ORDEN, ANSESAL, and counterinsurgency courses, and we bought special arms'—G3 automatic rifles—to detain the communist movement...
...The National Guard now concentrates on monitoring "unions and strikes and the penetration of the education system, where they are brainwashing our students," says Colonel Aristedes Napoleon Montes, director of the National Guard...
...Or sometimes you just beat his hands and beat him in the stomach, either with fists or with heavy sticks...
...The CIA would work with us and give us reports...
...Edgar Artiga, a civilian leader of ORDEN, says he and eighty other ORDEN officials participated in a two-month CIA course in 1969...
...All this comes out of a military intelligence function...
...National Guardsman Luis Alonso Bonilla claims that U.S...
...Europe...
...Yes," he remarked, "but by means of other ways, by let's say friendship with some members of the American embassy, I think I can get not only equipment but training...
...The use of the term "Death Squad" has, in some respects, fostered a profound misunderstanding of El Salvador's official terror apparatus...
...D'Aubuisson denounced union leaders, priests, academics, peasant organizers, students, professionals, government officials, and Christian Democrats...
...In 1963, Simons, then commander of the 8th Special Forces Group in Panama, dispatched a team of counterinsurgency trainers to El Salvador...
...He also attacked Mario Zamora, a leading Christian Democrat and member of the government, who—like others identified in the broadcasts—was assassinated in a matter of weeks...
...You do this over and over...
...What can the troops do...
...embassy, who brought along movies about life in the Soviet Union...
...He drives through the countryside armed only with a .45-cal-iber pistol and a glove compartment stocked with hand grenades...
...In important cases, the CIA supplied photographs and tapes of conversations...
...He was a close friend," recalls Raul Castro, U.S...
...He assailed the junta for abolishing ORDEN—"born in the bosom of the armed forces," D'Aubuisson declared...
...He was speaking the truth...
...After these sessions, the physical torture begins...
...He, too, cites unions as an area of concentration, but also mentions the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission (the nongovernmental one, that is...
...policy in El Salvador, began circulating to the mass media a detailed account of Death Squad operations...
...Hurtado, who gave his real name but asked that it not be used, showed documents and photographs verifying his military and Treasury Police service...
...Engle, himself a former CIA official, referred to thirty-three countries, including El Salvador, in which the Public Safety Program was operating...
...The U.S...
...Among those he named was Archbishop Oscar Romero, whom he told, "You still have time to change your ways...
...When a reformist junta briefly came to power in El Salvador in 1979, it abolished ORDEN and ANSESAL and condemned the organizations for committing human rights abuses...
...You have to know all aspects to work in intelligence here," he said...
...We worked with written orders," recalls one former National Guardsman, a fifteen-year veteran who says he went on Death Squad missions while stationed in the province of La Libertad...
...In important cases, he adds, special troops or security force agents would come from San Salvador with the lists...
...contribution extends far beyond training...
...The army can easily annihilate guerrillas in the urban zone," says Medrano, "but the peasants are tough...
...Indeed, Medrano himself says he was on the CIA payroll, a fact confirmed by ORDEN colleagues...
...Over time, changing political conditions opened something of a rift between the State Department professionals and their Pentagon and CIA colleagues...
...Then they started linking us with the Death Squads...
...Previously, he had served as chief of staff at the Army Special Warfare Center in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which was originally called the Psychological Warfare Center and was later renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for Military Assistance...
...If he's a Marxist or a revolutionary, it's not easy to make him talk, so you have to psychologically harm the prisoner...
...He claims to have met with the U.S...
...The State Department and AID's Public Safety office in El Salvador had administrative responsibility for establishing the ANSESAL network, Medrano says, but the substantive day-to-day intelligence work was coordinated by the CIA: "The CIA was already participating in connections with us...
...The course, held at the headquarters of the Salvadoran National Guard, was taught jointly by General Medrano and three CIA instructors from the U.S...
...In March, Roberto Eulalio Santivanez, a former colonel who had been paid $50,000 by critics of U.S...
...ties with the Salvadoran security apparatus remain firm, and appear to have been strengthened in the 1980s...
...At its peak, ORDEN membership reached an estimated 100,000...
...II supplied ANSESAL, the security forces, and the general staff with electronic, photographic, and personal surveillance of individuals who were later assassinated by Death Squads...
...State Department, the CIA, the Green Berets, and the Agency for International Development (AID) all participated in the effort to suppress dissent...
...I've been visited by some members of the embassy with whom I've always maintained good relations," Carranza told me last September, "and I have the promise that they are going to help us train our personnel...
...According to a Salvadoran colonel involved in the process, the United States routinely receives copies of all major political surveillance reports compiled by Salvadoran security officers...
...We can spot them easily...
...Continued from Cover) building and managing the Salvadoran security apparatus that relies on Death Squad assassinations as its principal means of enforcement...
...In the 1960s, when the United States was building a Salvadoran security system based on surveillance and assassination, the enterprise enjoyed unified support within the U.S...
...you use a cord like a telephone, like an old phone with a crank and you start turning the crank...
...We talked about how we had to indoctrinate the people, because he who has the population wins the war...
...You place him, naked and handcuffed, on a bed frame...
...A National Police detective and member of the elite explosives unit established by AID's Public Safety Program says four of his associates visited the United States for an explosives course in November 1983...
...Police, such intelligence sharing by U.S...
...These men were done an injustice," says Colonel Blandon, the chief of staff...
...With State Department officials and CIA operatives presiding, General Medrano and his counterparts from Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua and Peralta Azurdia's Guatemala would gather around a table and give speeches about "who the communists were," as Medrano puts it, "what they were up to, and what we should do about them...
...D'Aubuisson, a Medrano protege whom the General remembers as "a fine officer who was loved by the people," made his mark in the ORDEN-ANSESAL network, organizing ORDEN chapters as a National Guard officer and rising to second in command of ANSESAL under Santivanez...
...Speaking as an unnamed source from "the highest level of the security police," Santivanez told The New York Times that D'Aubuisson was "the man who organized and continues to direct the Death Squads...
...He worked with the CIA for years, and that's how he was able learn all the machinations, the people, national as well as international, that were working to establish the communist scheme...
...And he quoted from Napoleon: "Nothing done to defend your country is against the law...
...AID Public Safety advisers, Captain Rafael Lopez Davila, the investigations chief, showed me a special section on unions and their members...
...You try to trap the person psychologically...
...Government also sent Medrano on a three-month tour of Vietnam, where he traveled with Army units, the Green Berets, and CIA operatives...
...H furnished intelligence files that D'Au-buisson used for a series of 1980 television broadcasts in which he denounced dozens of academics, trade unionists, peasant leaders, Christian Democrats, and members of the clergy as communists or guerrilla collaborators...
...Clandestine U.S...
...You put the wires on the prisoner's vital parts...
...Now when you have a prisoner, you have to put pressure on him, questioning him again and again, day and night...
...You ask him where his mom and dad live, you talk about his wife and kids...
...If you collaborate with us, we're going to get you out of the country...
...But in the classroom, he says, they discussed such techniques as psychological torture, manual beating, and electric shock, occasionally supplementing the lectures with Spanish-language written material that was more generalized than the oral presentations...
...The Declaration of San Jose triggered a series of follow-up meetings among Central American ministers of the interior, who held jurisdiction over police and internal security...
...Medrano flew frequently to Washington for consultations at CIA headquarters...
...You will say: "Look, those bastards are giving me a lot of shit...
...In a CBS News interview with Walter Cronkite, Santivanez said Carranza had been on the CIA payroll...
...Though he refuses to say whether he himself received training from them, he asserts that some of his associates did...
...Every garrison of any size had Death Squads...
...The meetings of the interior ministers resulted in the formation of ANSESAL and parallel domestic security agencies in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, and Costa Rica...
...With this information, we knew exactly what we were doing, who was who," he says, adding that many of the subjects were later assassinated by Death Squads...
...They receive information from everywhere in the world, and they have sophisticated equipment that enables them to have better information or at least confirm the information we have...
...ORDEN had the dual mission of teaching anticommunism and gathering information on individuals deemed suspicious...
...All the students were paid daily in cash, according to Artiga...
...How many people have you killed...
...It's very different from the United States...
...All of the material was passed back and forth constantly...
...styles of action and mobilization)," lists "militants and sympathizers," and carries a miscellaneous "register of personalities of the enemy...
...Sosa has trained dozens of army and security force members in "techniques for secretly placing bombs in houses, cars, and individuals' personal belongings," according to a National Police intelligence officer who studied under Sosa...
...You say you are not a bastard like the other interrogators...
...Out of ORDEN grew the notorious Mano Blanco, the White Hand, which a former U.S...
...According to Santivanez's version as reported in The Times, the Death Squads did not exist before D'Aubuisson rose to prominence in the wake of the 1979 reformist coup...
...the government maintains its own "human rights commission," of which Lopez Nuilla is a member...
...After that, if he still doesn't talk, you take him to a toilet filled with excrement...
...When they find them, they kill them...
...Military Group and the embassy's military attache, he says...
...After "talking among ourselves and with Simons, the idea occurred to us to catechize the people...
...Once the Treasury Police received the lie detection, fingerprinting, and ballistic equipment he requested, "we would have a better way of doing an investigation than putting pressure on the victim," Carranza said...
...A.N...
...It's that simple," says a U.S...
...But to Christian Democrat Jose Napoleon Duarte, Medrano is something else—"the father of the Death Squads, the chief assassin of them all...
...What follows is Hurtado's account of the interrogation and torture methods used by the Treasury Police: First, you try to torture him psychologically...
...Green Beret Colonel Arthur Simons was instrumental in the development of ORDEN, says Medrano...
...military advisers—several of them specialists in intelligence and psychological warfare—are currently working with the general staff...
...D'Aubuisson was pointing out the communists so the troops could kill them," Medrano says...
...A former staff member of the Casa Presidencial reports that an American CIA officer told him the CIA and the Salvadoran security forces kept Rutilio Grande, a prominent Jesuit priest, under surveillance before his March 1977 assassination...
...Rather, it represents a basic, bipartisan, institutional commitment on the part of six American Administrations—a commitment to guard the Salvadoran regime against the prospect that its people might organize in ways unfriendly to that regime or to the United States...
...If we pass them to the judge, they'll go free and we'll maybe have to pick them up again...
...Two years later, Serrato helped found ARENA, the rightist political party D'Aubuisson heads...
...There's a more sophisticated one that looks like a radio, like a transformer...
...In the National Police political intelligence archive, originally organized by U.S...
...There, "we would study it and pass it on to the president, who would take appropriate action," says Medrano...
...Training was also conducted in the United States...
...Here, intelligence is hard to get, and the delinquent is very different...
...Now we give everything—in relation to captures that the Treasury Police have made—to the general staff and they give it to the embassy...
...A number of Artiga's classmates continued on the CIA payroll after the course was completed, he says...
...In fact, the term more meaningfully applies to a system that can dispatch a soldier at any time to kill a selected victim...
...Three of those officers were the directors of the intelligence departments of the Treasury Police, the National Guard, and the National Police...
...The dossiers included entries reporting on their travels to foreign cities, specifying what flights they took, whom they visited, and where they stayed...
...The prisoners feel it more if their feet are in water, and they're seated on iron so the blow is stronger...
...Two of D'Aubuisson's former associates from the National Guard and ANSESAL claim he received U.S...
...Reynaldo Lopez Nuilla, director of the National Police, says he has an intelligence staff of200, including a thirty-man "operations group...
...officials who want to shield the Salvadoran government from culpability in the Death Squads, as well as some liberals who want to undermine D'Aubuisson's electoral prospects, have promoted the mistaken notion that the Death Squad phenomenon—this sprawling institution with a twenty-year history and tens of thousands of victims—is the personal instrument of one diabolical man...
...According to U.S...
...According to General Medrano, the CIA regularly kept ANSESAL posted on the activities of Salvadorans working or studying abroad...
...embassy under the Carter Administration and its last ambassador, Robert White...
...The official nonetheless confirms that Santivanez's account of involvement in the Death Squads by Carranza and the high command was "substantially correct," though he says it exaggerated D'Aubuisson's personal role...
...The file covers "the disposition of the subversive delinquents (their location...
...Two colleagues of Carranza had said he was a CIA agent weeks before Santivanez did...
...The instructors did not observe or participate in actual torture sessions, nor did they visit Treasury Police headquarters, he explains...
...The New York Times confirmed the CIA connection, citing U.S...
...All of this information is then turned over to the general staff, with whom we retain a very close coordination," Montes says...
...If the person is important—if he's, let's say, a journalist or a teacher or a labor or student leader, or if he's a person with some leadership or has something to offer—he isn't treated cruelly at the beginning...
...You'll say: "Don't be a fool...
...If enlisted General Jose Alberto "Chele" Medrano, the founder of ORDEN and ANSESAL, as a CIA agent...
...Another misunderstanding about the Death Squads arises from the fact that they came to public notice in the United States in connection with the spectacular emergence of Roberto D'Aubuisson as a powerful political figure...
...H kept key security officials—including Carranza, Medrano, and others—on the, CIA payroll...
...This requires a carefully integrated effort between the investigative element and the regular police, paramilitary or military force, operating separately or in conjunction with each other...
...He subsequently said the departure date had been postponed until some time in April...
...It conjures up images of discrete bands of gangsters randomly cruising the countryside in search of opportunities to kill...
...ambassador to El Salvador, Raul H. Castro, has called "nothing less than the birth of the Death Squads...
...Because they want you to talk, they're going to beat the shit out of you...
...Government and the D'Aubuisson branch of the contemporary Death Squads is complex, paradoxical, and far from complete...
...Medrano was the CIA's boy," says one current State Department official...
...You place the wires between the prisoner's teeth, on the penis, in the vagina...
...Trainees were instructed in the use of 9-millimeter revolvers and such weapons as the M-16 rifle, which was not yet generally available...
...We kept asking the embassy for proof against them but they never gave it...
...It's soundproof so they don't hear anything outside...
...See the Editor's Memo, Page 4.) Associate Editor Matthew Rothschild assisted with research for this article...
...They had direct radio teletypes from office to office...
...They teach you how to hit a person in the stomach, but in a sophisticated way so the person suffers a lot of pain but you don't see signs on the outside...
...This March, during a tour of the political intelligence archives of the National Police Center for Analysis and Investigations, I spoke with Captain Rafael Lopez Davila, who displayed files on leftist political leaders...
...Bonilla, who says he took a similar course in 1975, says it included instruction in combat and ambush techniques...
...You put on gloves and shove his head in the toilet for thirty seconds or so...
...He claims to have participated in torture sessions and provides a detailed account of the methods employed...
...They don't have the rights of Geneva...
...D'Aubuisson maintained CIA contacts in 1980 and 1981, according to Jimmy Nixon, an American citizen and ARENA activist who ferried visitors and private messages to D'Aubuisson while he was staying in Guatemala during that period...
...Among those who received such schooling was Carlos Sosa Santos, the leading explosives expert for the Salvadoran armed forces, who was instructed by the AID Public Safety Program...
...Surveillance reports compiled by local intelligence units are retained for their own files while a copy is forwarded to the central archives of the service involved...
...adviser who helped *You Learn How to Torture • • / Rene Hurtado is the pseudonym of a former member of the Salvadoran Treasury Police who now lives in a Minneapolis suburb...
...and Salvadoran officials, the close relationship between the security forces and the U.S...
...England...
...The three-story filing room also contained a "library of subversive literature," which, along with Karl Marx's Das Kapital and Lenin's collected works, held the publications of UCA, El Salvador's Catholic University...
...First, you put the prisoner in a small, completely dark room, and you don't let him sleep...
...When you are trying to interrogate for the first time, you try to come across as a sensitive, decent person—not as a killer...
...The story of the relationship between the U.S...
...Those sons of bitches were doing everything they could against us," he says...
...They are traitors to the country...
...He had good information...
...If you put mineral water on them and then do the shock, it's agonizing...
...Medrano, now retired, prides himself on moving about El Salvador unaccompanied by bodyguards...
...Medrano says the Green Berets helped him plan the structure and ideology of ORDEN, and then stayed on to train a team of Salvadoran soldiers—among them Colonel Carranza, who now heads the Treasury Police, and Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, currently chief of the Third Brigade and El Salvador's star combat commander...
...You had a wonderful man here" in the Military Group, says Murphy...
...11 trained leaders of ORDEN in surveillance techniques and use of automatic weapons, and carried some of these leaders on the CIA payroll...
Vol. 48 • May 1984 • No. 5
