Answer to —

4. In which country did CIA counter-insurgency operations lead to horrific suffering for the masses of people?

May 17, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Answer: a, b, c, and d

All of these countries (along with many others) have been targets of CIA interventions that have caused immense suffering for the people:

Guatemala: In the early 1980s, following a U.S.-backed coup by General José Efraín Ríos Montt, the Guatemalan military systematically destroyed more than 600 indigenous Mayan villages in the highlands of the country. Seventy-five thousand people, overwhelmingly Mayans, were slaughtered in this small, impoverished country in Central America. Soldiers ripped the hearts out of children as their bodies were still warm and piled them on a table for their parents to see. The CIA advised, trained, and helped to run the Guatemalan forces who carried out these massacres and provided “technical assistance”—communications equipment, computers, and special firearms.

El Salvador: Throughout the 1980s into the early 1990s, the CIA and the U.S. government backed the reactionary government and military of the Central American country of El Salvador in its murderous counter-insurgency war that killed tens of thousands of workers, peasants, students, intellectuals, artists, and others and forced hundreds of thousands to flee into exile. The CIA and U.S. military built up, trained, funded, organized, and helped guide the Salvadoran military, police, and death squads. U.S. “advisers” even provided them with target lists.

Argentina, Paraguay (and other South American countries): In the 1970s and well into the 1980s, the CIA and the U.S. secretly organized, financed, and directed a multinational campaign of political repression, torture, disappearances, and assassinations code named Operation Condor. This was implemented by right-wing military dictatorships in the Southern Cone of Latin America—Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil (later joined by Ecuador and Peru). Operation Condor coordinated the intelligence operations between these countries; organized cross-border operations to detain and “disappear” dissidents and political opponents forced into exile; and, in its most secret “Phase III,” provided for the formation of special teams of assassins from member countries to travel anywhere in the world to carry out assassinations of “subversive enemies.” In 1974, the CIA helped train and organize DINA, Chile’s secret police (after the CIA engineered the 1973 coup that brought fascist Pinochet to power). DINA and its Argentine counterpart, SIDE, played leading roles in Operation Condor, along with the Colombian paramilitary, Triple A—Alianza Americana Anticomunista. Some estimates put the total number murdered as a result of Operation Condor at 60,000 or more.

And there have been a massive number of CIA counter-insurgency operations around the world. To note just two horrific examples:

Vietnam: As part of the U.S. invasion of and war against this country that resulted in two million Vietnamese civilians being killed, the CIA counter-insurgency operations included the notorious Phoenix program. The aim was to terrorize and brutally crush the liberation struggle through widespread assassinations—not just of liberation fighters and leaders but civilians suspected of aiding the struggle. The Vietnamese have estimated that the CIA teams killed some 40,000 people.

Afghanistan: Here, it was the U.S. that led a reactionary insurgency against a government in power. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. The Soviet Union at the time was a revisionist (that is, a phony “communist”) country, an imperialist superpower that was seriously contending with the U.S. for dominance in many parts of the world (socialism had been defeated in the Soviet Union in the mid-1950s and capitalism was restored). Then through the 1980s, the CIA, in partnership with the reactionary pro-U.S. regimes in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, carried out a massive covert war in Afghanistan by funneling more than $3 billion in arms and aid to reactionary Islamic fundamentalist fighters. The U.S. strategy was to make the war much longer and more violent, destructive, and costly for the Soviets. By the time the Soviets were forced to withdraw in 1989, more than a million Afghans had been killed and one-third of its population driven into refugee camps. This CIA-led insurgency against America’s imperialist rivals is where Osama bin Laden got his start and the seeds of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were first sown.

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Mayan men bury victims of a 1982 massacre in a mass grave in Chel, a remote village in northern Guatemala on July 4, 1998. Photo: AP

In December, 1981, a unit of the Salvadoran military carried out a horrendous massacre in the village of El Mozote intended to terrorize the population. After entering the village men, women, children, and the elderly were separated in groups around the town plaza. The men and women were tortured and shot. Young women were taken up a hill, raped, and murdered. One hundred forty-six children from ages three days to 14 years, were brutally killed.

From the late 1960s well into the 1980s, documents show that the U.S. secretly organized, financed, and directed a campaign of political repression, torture, disappearances, and assassinations code-named Operation Condor. Above, Mariana Zaffaroni Islas, front left, standing next to her grandmother, holds a picture of her mother during a protest in Montevideo, Uruguay in 2009. Mariana's mother and father were kidnapped and murdered by the military in Argentina during the U.S.-backed military dictatorship there. Then, as a newborn, Mariana was given to an Argentinian military family to be raised. She was protesting the 1986 law which prevents members of the military to be judged for crimes committed during Uruguay's 1973-1984 U.S.-backed dictatorship. The law has yet to be fully overturned. Photo: AP