Latin America

AUGUST 13, 2020

BY BRETT WILKINS



In the pre-dawn darkness of Monday, August 10, 1970, Dan Mitrione’s bullet-ridden body was discovered in the back seat of a stolen Buick convertible in a quiet residential neighborhood of Montevideo, the Uruguayan capital. He had just turned 50, and he had recently started a new dream job, although it was thousands of miles from his home in Richmond, Indiana. Who was Dan Mitrione, and what work was he doing in Uruguay that led him to such an early and violent end?

As the Cold War heated up, one of the ways in which the United States government fought communism abroad was through foreign assistance programs. These were favorite vehicles for Central Intelligence Agency and other US meddling. Dan Mitrione, a Navy veteran and former small-town police chief from Indiana, joined one such agency, the International Cooperation Administration, in 1960. The following year, ICA was absorbed by the United States Agency for International Development, which in addition to its stated mission of administering assistance to developing nations, gained global notoriety for its role in helping brutal dictatorships repress, torture and murder innocent men, women and children around the world.

Brazil Brutality

Mitrione’s first posting was in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, where he worked on the police aid program for USAID’s Office of Public Safety. OPS trained and armed friendly — read anti-communist — Latin American police and security officers. Ostensibly, it was meant to teach police how to be less corrupt and more professional. In practice, it operated as a CIA proxy. As for its parent organization, one former USAID director, John Gilligan, later admitted it was “infiltrated from top to bottom with CIA people.” Gilligan explained that “the idea was to plant operatives in every kind of activity we had overseas; government, volunteer, religious, every kind.”

Before Mitrione’s arrival, standard operating procedure for Brazilian police was to beat a suspect nearly to death; if he talked he lived, if not, well… Under Mitrione’s tutelage, officers introduced refined torture techniques drawn from the pages of KUBARK, a CIA instruction manual describing various physical and psychological methods of breaking a prisoner’s will to resist interrogation. Many of the abuses in KUBARK would later become familiar to the world as the “enhanced interrogation” techniques used during the US war against terrorism: prolonged constraint or exertion, ‘no-touch’ torture (stress positions), extremes of heat, cold or moisture and deprivation or drastic reduction of food or sleep. KUBARK also covers the use of electric shock torture, a favorite tool of both the Brazilian and Uruguayan police under Mitrione’s instruction.

One of the most notorious Brazilian torture devices during Mitrione’s tenure was known as the refrigerator, a small square box barely big enough to hold a hunched-up human being. The “fridge” was equipped with a heating and cooling unit, speakers and strobe lights; its use drove many men mad. Under Mitrione, Brazilian police devised a new torture technique they called the “Statue of Liberty,” in which hooded prisoners were forced to stand on a sharp-edged sardine tin and hold heavy objects above their heads until they began collapsing from exhaustion, at which point powerful electric shocks would force them upright.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/13/teaching-torture-the-death-and-legacy-of-dan-mitrione/