57. I listened to this speech at the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago, Chile, but it is also available online at www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-america-latina-45458820.
58. Harmer, “Brazil’s Cold War,” 680.
59. La Segunda, September 21, 1973.
60. Ibid., 660.
61. Dinges, The Condor Years, 3.
62. Intelligence Note, State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, “Coup in Chile Reveals African Mistrust of US,” October 10, 1973, Box 2198, RG 59, NARA.
63. Dinges, The Condor Years, 158.
64. Spooner, Soldiers in a Narrow Land, 45–47.
65. Author interview with Luciano Martins Costa, São Paulo (2018) and by phone (2019).
66. Dinges, The Condor Years, 110–25.
67. For discussion of the strange rise of the “Chicago Boys” in Chile, see Spooner, Soldiers in a Narrow Land, 108–10.
68. Ibid., 12.
Chapter 10. Back Up North
1. Benny Widyono, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 25.
2. Short, Pol Pot, 216.
3. Sihanouk, My War with the CIA, 130.
4. Wieringa, Propaganda, 140.
5. From the film Sekeping Kenangan (Fragment of Memory), by Hadhi Kusuma, produced by Komunitas Taman 65 (Indonesia, 2018).
6. On US contingency planning in Portugal, including links to now-declassified government documents, see “Document Friday: The US Military Had ‘a Contingency Plan to Take Over’ Portuguese Islands!?,” Unredacted: The National Security Archive Blog, November 19, 2010, accessed October 2019, https://unredacted.com/2010/11/19/document-friday-the-us-military-had-a-contingincy-plan-to-take-over-portugal/.
7. Irena Cristalis, East Timor: A Nation’s Bitter Dawn (London: Zed Books, 2009), loc. 1582 of 8861, Kindle.
8. Cristalis, East Timor, loc. 1523–3162 of 8861, Kindle.
9. Westad, The Global Cold War, 283–84.
10. Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right, 107–15.
11. Mário Sérgio de Morães, O Ocaso da Ditadura (São Paulo: Barcarolla, 2006), 74.
12. “Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns: O Cardeal do Povo,” Historia Imediata, 1979. The report explains Operation Jakarta in the context of the military repression the cardinal fought.
13. Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War, 3 and chaps. 1, 2, and 6.
14. Ibid., 115 (on anti-Semitism), 124 (on Citibank and Ford), and 127 (on atheism).
15. J. Patrice McSherry, Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 188.
16. Greg Grandin, “Living in Revolutionary Time: Coming to Terms with the Violence of Latin America’s Long Cold War,” in Greg Grandin and Joseph M. Gilbert, eds., A Century of Revolution: Insurgent and Counterinsurgent Violence During Latin America’s Long Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 22.
17. Finchelstein, The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War, 127.
18. McSherry, Predatory States, chap. 2 (on the connection to “stay-behind” armies); Dinges, The Condor Years, 129, 220.
19. Dinges, The Condor Years, 11.
20. Ibid., chap. 7.
21. McSherry, Predatory States, 207–08. “Messianic,” used on page 213, describes both Argentine and US officials.
22. For a firsthand account of conditions for indigenous people forced to work on Guatemala’s fincas in the 1970s, see Rigoberta Menchú’s famous testimony. Rigoberta Menchú and Elizabeth Burgos, Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú y Así Me Nació La Conciencia (Siglo XXI Editores: Mexico, 2013).
23. McSherry, Predatory States, 210.
24. Henry Giniger, “Guatemala Reds Say They Slew Envoy,” New York Times, August 30, 1968.
25. Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre; Michael McClintock, The American Connection, Vol. 2: State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1985), 60; LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 171–72.
26. Author interview with Miguel Ángel Albizures, Guatemala City, November 2018.
27. James Dunkerley, Power in the Isthmus: A Political History of Modern Central America (London: Verso, 1988), 375. On the rise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, see chap. 6, “The Nicaraguan Revolution: Origins,” in the same volume.
28. Carlota McAllister, “A Headlong Rush into the Future: Violence and Revolution in a Guatemalan Indigenous Village,” in Grandin and Joseph, A Century of Revolution, 276–80.
29. For example, see the two volumes by Michael McClintock on this subject. Michael McClintock, The American Connection, Volume I: State Terror and Popular Resistance in El Salvador (London: Zed Books, 1985) and The American Connection, Volume II: State Terror and Popular Resistance in Guatemala (London: Zed Books, 1985).
30. Ben Kiernan, “The Demography of Genocide in Southeast Asia: The Death Tolls in Cambodia, 1975–79, and East Timor, 1975–80,” Critical Asian Studies 35, no. 4 (2003): 585–597.
31. Westad, The Cold War, 490–92.
32. Goscha, Vietnam, 395–96.
33. Widyono, Dancing in Shadows, 5; Author interview.
34. Ibid., 28.
35. Marlise Simons, “Army Killings in Indian Village Shock Guatemala,” Washington Post, June 24, 1978.
36. On Taiwanese and Israeli support for Guatemala’s military in this period, see Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 136–37; and Milton Jamail and Margo Gutierrez, “Guatemala: The Paragon,” in NACLA Report on the Americas 21, no. 2 (1987): 31–39.
37. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 110.
38. “Washington Bullets,” from Sandinista!, the Clash, 1980.
39. Eline van Ommen, “Sandinistas Go Global: Nicaragua and Western Europe, 1977–1990” (PhD diss., London School of Economics and Political Science, 2019), 37–38.
40. Westad, The Global Cold War, 339–43.
41. McSherry, Predatory States, 207–11.
42. As the perceived revolutionary threat in Central America grew from 1978 onward, the Pinochet dictatorship increased the number of scholarships offered to members of the Salvadoran and Guatemalan armed forces, with a particular focus on counterinsurgent police training provided by Chile’s carabineros (armed police). The Chilean and Argentine dictatorships’ involvement in the armed conflicts in Guatemala and El Salvador is the subject of ongoing PhD research by Molly Avery in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics.
43. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 146–47, 206–07.
44. McSherry, Predatory States, 207–11.
45. By 1983, the CIA had concluded the Contras could never actually win a military victory. See LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 301.
46. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 305–07.
47. McSherry, Predatory States, 218.
48. Ignácio Gonzalez Janzen, La Triple A (Buenos Aires: Contrapunto, 1986), 95–100. These passages are also cited by Juan Pablo Csipka in Los 49 Dias de Campora (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 2013), 115–16.
49. Biographic Sketch, Roberto D’Aubuisson, November 1980, Folder El Salvador (01201981-05301981) [5], Box 30, Exec Sec, NSC Country File, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
50. Anderson and Anderson, Inside the League, 135–37.
51. Ibid., 194.
52. Raymond Bonner, “What Did Elliott Abrams Have to Do With the El Mozote Massacre?” The Atlantic, February 15, 2019.
53. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions.
54. Author interview with Josefa Sanchez Del Barrio, Ilom, November 2018.
55. Author interviews with Antonio Caba Caba, Guatemala City and Ilom, November 2018.
56. For a complete summary of the genocide committed by the Guatemalan military against the Ixil, see the testimonies recorded during Efraín Ríos Montt’s trial in 2013. Sentencia por Genocidio y Delitos Contra los Deberes de Humanidad Contra el Pueblo Maya Ixil, dictada por el Tribunal Primero de Sentencia Penal, Narcoactivida
d y Delitos contra el Ambiente “A,” Guatemala, May 10, 2013.
57. Author interview with Clara Arenas, from AVANCSO, Guatemala City, 2018.
58. John Otis, “Efraín Ríos Montt, Former Guatemalan Military Dictator Charged with Genocide, Dies at 91,” Washington Post, April 1, 2018.
59. Guatemala: Memory of Silence—Report of the Commission for the Historical Clarification, Conclusions and Recommendations. La Comisión para el Esclarecimiento Histórico (CEH) found that “over 200,000” people were killed, with 93 percent victims of military violence; AVANCSO, La Asociación para el Avance de Las Ciencias Sociales en Guatemala, estimates the total number of victims at 250,000, with the majority indigenous people killed en masse, in the countryside, and 45,000 of the total number of “disappearances,” which more often took the lives of targeted individuals in the cities.
60. John H. Coatsworth, “The Cold War in Central America,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Vol. 3, eds. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 221.
61. Widyono, Dancing in Shadows, Part I.
62. LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions, 309.
63. Micah Zenko and Jennifer Wilson, “How Many Bombs Did the United States Drop in 2016?” Council on Foreign Relations blog post, January 5, 2017.
64. Westad, The Global Cold War, 396, 405.
65. Tom Burgis, The Looting Machine (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
66. Report for Selected Countries and Subjects, International Monetary Fund.
Chapter 11. We Are the Champions
1. Wright, Color Curtain, 206.
2. I wrote a dissertation on the effects of Federal Reserve interest rate policy in the early 1980s on debt burden and development programs. I know how complicated this is, and we’re not going to resolve it now.
3. Gautam Nair, “Most Americans Vastly Underestimate How Rich They Are Compared with the Rest of the World. Does It Matter?” Washington Post, August 23, 2018.
4. Branko Milanovic, “Income, Inequality, and Poverty during the Transition from Planned to Market Economy,” World Bank Regional and Sectoral Studies, chap. 3, www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/Income_ineq_poverty_book.pdf.
5. Branko Milanovic, “For Whom the Wall Fell?” The Globalist, November 7, 2014.
6. Westad, The Global Cold War, 387.
7. On the “strong and widespread global trend toward neoliberalism since the 1980s,” see Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” an IMF paper questioning the effectiveness of that policy trend, at www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ostry.htm.
8. Robert Wade, “Escaping the Periphery: The East Asian ‘Mystery’ Solved,” United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research, September 2018.
Chapter 12. Where Are They Now? And Where Are We?
1. Prison Songs Nyannyian Yang Dibunkam (Bali: Taman 65, 2015).
2. This story was first told in Steph Vaessen’s excellent short documentary Indonesia’s Killing Fields for Al-Jazeera.
3. I cited this quote in this format in “Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s Would-be Dictator,” The New York Review of Books, October 12, 2018. The original 1999 interview was with TV Bandeirantes and is widely available on YouTube.
4. Celso Rocha de Barros, “Bolsonaro representa facção das Forças Armadas que ganhou poder com a tortura,” Folha de S.Paulo, October 22, 2018.
5. Gerlach, Extremely Violent Societies, 28.
6. Ibid., 74
7. Ibid., 41.
8. Melvin, The Army and the Indonesian Genocide, 6.
9. Wieringa, Propaganda, 2.
10. Part of this is adapted from my article “Stuck in the Shopping,” Popula, December 18, 2018.
11. “Foreign Researchers’ Access to TNI Museums Restricted,” Jakarta Post, February 9, 2018.
12. Recently she was raving to me about Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism.
Map Citations
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay: Estimates vary, with a low number of at least 50,000 offered in 1992 by Archivos del Terror. See National Geographic Resource Library, “Archives of Terror Discovered;” A higher number of 90,000 is offered by La Federación Latinoamericana de Asociaciones de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos (FEDEFAM), but that includes other countries, such as Colombia, not a party to Condor. I have gone with the estimate offered by Víctor Flores Olea, “Operation Cóndor,” El Universal, April 10, 2006. Argentina was the most violent offender, with an estimated 30,000 dead.
Colombia: The violence was carried out against the Patriotic Union (UP), the leftist political party founded as part of 1985 peace negotiations with guerrillas. See Deutsche Welle, “In Colombia, It’s Dangerous to Be Left Wing,” www.dw.com/en/in-colombia-its-dangerous-to-be-left-wing/a-44131086—DW reports at least 3,000 dead, whereas groups and analysts closer to the UP, the victims of the violence, estimate 5,000 dead; For fuller treatment see Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, “Todo pasó frente a nuestros ojos. Genocidio de la Unión Patriótica 1984–2002.”
East Timor: See page 213 of this volume.
El Salvador: The truth commission gives a total number of 85,000, with 85% of the cases consisting of extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances. “Those giving testimony attributed almost 85 per cent of cases to agents of the State, paramilitary groups allied to them, and the death squads.” See United States Institute of Peace, From Madness to Hope: the 12-year war in El Salvador: Report of the Commission on the Truth for El Salvador, page 36.
Guatemala: See page 228 of this volume.
Honduras: Comisionado Nacional de los Derechos Humanos, “‘Los hechos hablan por si mismos’: lnforme preliminar sobre los desaparecidos en Honduras 1980–1993”
Iran: The Islamic Republic executed supporters of the leftist People’s Mujahedin of Iran, as well as the Tudeh and Fedaian Organization. Amnesty International gives a range of 4,672–4,969. See “Blood-Soaked Secrets: Why Iran’s 1988 Prison Massacres are Ongoing Crimes Against Humanity.”
Indonesia: See page 155 of this volume.
Iraq: For 1963 numbers, see Patrick Cockburn, “Revealed: how the West set Saddam on the bloody road to power,” The Independent, June 29, 1997; The renewed crackdown in 1978 helped increase Saddam’s popularity in Washington before he invaded Iraq (1980) and re-formed an alliance with the US. Prashad, Darker Nations, 160.
Mexico: During Mexico’s “Dirty War,” security forces and the military eliminated individuals accused of being part of one of the dozens of groups of armed leftists operating in the country, and massacred protesters at Tlatelolco in 1968. Security forces collaborated with US officials, as well as with the Brazilian dictatorship. See Adela Cedillo and Fernando Herrera Calderón, “Introduction: The Unknown Mexican Dirty War” in Cedillo and Herrera Calderón, eds., Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964–1982 (London: Routledge, 2012), 8; Gladys McCormick, “The Last Door: Political Prisoners and the Use of Torture in Mexico’s Dirty War,” The Americas 74:1 (January 2017), 57–81; and Alexander Aviña, Specters of Revolution, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 151–55, 176–80.
Nicaragua: Loose estimates are 10,000 for 1979–1981, and 40,000 more for 1981–1989. Bethany Lacina. “The PRIO Battle Deaths Dataset, 1946–2008, Version 3.0: Documentation of Coding Decisions,” Peace Research Institute Oslo.
The Philippines: Amnesty International, “Statement on Ferdinand Marcos’ Burial at LNMB,” November 18, 2016. www.amnesty.org.ph/news/statement-on-ferdinand-marcos-burial-at-lnmb/.
South Korea: This estimate includes the Jeju massacre (1948) as well as the communists and members of the Bodo League executed in 1950. Đô˜ Khiem and Kim Sung-soo, “Crimes, Concealment and South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Japan Focus: The Asia-Pacific Journal, August 1, 2008.
Sudan: The SCP itself recorded 37
state executions of Party members, but allows for more deaths from causes other than hanging, including among the 5,000 people detained, and those harmed outside the official legal structure.
Taiwan: Burke, Revolutionaries for the Right, 14.
Thailand: Jularat Damrongviteetham, “Narratives of the ‘Red Barrel’ Incident: Collective and Individual Memories in Lamsin, Southern Thailand” in Seng Loh, Dobbs and Koh eds., Oral History in Southeast Asia, p. 101.
Venezuela: Records of extrajudicial killings start in 1959, for example with Manuel Cabieses Donoso, Venezuela, okey! (Caracas: Ediciones del Litoral, 1963), 269, and La desaparición forzada en Venezuela, 1960–1969 by Agustín J. Arzola Castellanos should have fuller treatment. At the launch of that book, José Vicente Rangel said that “disappearances” started in Venezuela during the presidency of Raul Leoni (1964–1969). Notably, John P. Longan, the US official discussed on page 164 of this volume, was active in both Guatemala and Venezuela. For Rangel’s remarks, see “Rangel asegura que desapariciones forzosas de América Latina comenzaron en Venezuela” in Chamosaurio.
The Jakarta Method Page 37