Jimmy Carter And The 'Torture Chamber Of Latin America': Examining A Human Rights Legacy - Analysis
March 16, 2023
Published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute
By Debbie Sharnak*
(FPRI) — On February 18, 2023, the Carter Center announced that former President Jimmy Carter would receive hospice care. In the days that followed, a flood of articles appeared that praised his core decency, highlighted his post-presidential global health and humanitarian work, and offered reassessments of his oft-criticized legacy during his four years in the White House.
Carter’s foreign policy record is perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of his administration. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis produced twin crises that structured much of the initial perception of his weakness on the international stage, an image that Ronald Reagan successfully capitalized on during the 1980 presidential election that sent Carter home to Georgia as a one-term president. Even Carter’s most visible contribution to foreign policy, elevating human rights concerns in US foreign policy, has endured vehement criticism over the years for its supposed hypocrisy regarding support for authoritarian regimes such as the Shah of Iran, as well as its mixed results over four years in office.
Yet, news of his decision to forgo any further medical interventions in favor of receiving end of life care offers an opportunity to reevaluate Carter’s human rights legacy, which can perhaps structure how to analyze the role of human rights in US foreign policy more broadly. Specifically, examining Carter’s bilateral relations with Uruguay—an authoritarian regime that was once considered the “torture chamber of Latin America”—reveals vital tools to advance human rights, such as cutting aid, public condemnation of abuses, and support of opposition groups. Furthermore, American policy toward Uruguay during the Carter administration demonstrates the importance of small states in the global system as a testing ground for innovative presidential policies.
Championing, then Defining, Human Rights
Carter’s election in November 1976 placed human rights concerns at the highest levels of US foreign policy. Yet, Carter did not lead this charge; he was actually quite late to the fight. In the early to mid-1970s, Congress dragged the executive branch into the human rights “explosion.” The legislative body’s move to pass legislation tying foreign aid to human rights and hold hearings to elevate concern over violations abroad constituted a reaction to the growing transnational human rights movement and the abuses of the Nixon administration.
Indeed, when Carter began to incorporate human rights into his presidential platform in the latter part of his campaign, the focus offered a fundamental change from the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger realist approach to foreign policy. Carter, by contrast, hoped he could convince the country to move past the legacy of Vietnam and the American “struggle for the soul of the country” that had followed. By the time of his inauguration and his claim that America’s “commitment to human rights must be absolute,” he championed a larger refocusing of American foreign policy beyond the bipolarity of the Cold War. Carter saw human rights as a way to organize a new, comprehensive, and long-term strategy that would reflect stronger North-South ties and move beyond what Carter called America’s “inordinate fear of communism.”
More:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/16032023-jimmy-carter-and-the-torture-chamber-of-latin-america-examining-a-human-rights-legacy-analysis/
= new reply since forum marked as read
From the documents at the National Security Archives:
TO SAVE DAN MITRIONE NIXON ADMINISTRATION URGED
DEATH THREATS FOR URUGUAYAN PRISONERS
In Response Uruguayan Security Forces Launched Death Squads to Hunt and Kill Insurgents
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 324
By Carlos Osorio and Marianna Enamoneta
With the Collaboration of Clara Aldrighi
Posted – August 11, 2010
For more information contact:
Carlos Osorio: cosorio@gwu.edu, (202) 994-7061
Clara Aldrighi: clara.aldrighi@gmail.com
Dan Mitrione
Washington, D.C., August 11, 2010 - Documents posted by the National Security Archive on the 40th anniversary of the death of U.S. advisor Dan Mitrione in Uruguay show the Nixon administration recommended a “threat to kill [detained insurgent] Sendic and other key [leftist insurgent] MLN prisoners if Mitrione is killed.” The secret cable from U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers, made public here for the first time, instructed U.S. Ambassador Charles Adair: “If this has not been considered, you should raise it with the Government of Uruguay at once.”
The message to the Uruguayan government, received by the U.S. Embassy at 11:30 am on August 9, 1970, was an attempt to deter Tupamaro insurgents from killing Mitrione at noon on that day. A few minutes later, Ambassador Adair reported back, in another newly-released cable, that “a threat was made to these prisoners that members of the ‘Escuadrón de la Muerte’ [death squad] would take action against the prisoners’ relatives if Mitrione were killed.”
Dan Mitrione, Director of the U.S. AID Office of Public Safety (OPS) in Uruguay and the main American advisor to the Uruguayan police at the time, had been held for ten days by MLN-Tupamaro insurgents demanding the release of some 150 guerrilla prisoners held by the Uruguayan government. Mitrione was found dead the morning of August 10, 1970, killed by the Tupamaros after their demands were not met.
“The documents reveal the U.S. went to the edge of ethics in an effort to save Mitrione—an aspect of the case that remained hidden in secret documents for years,” said Carlos Osorio, who directs the National Security Archive’s Southern Cone project. “There should be a full declassification to set the record straight on U.S. policy to Uruguay in the 1960’s and 1970’s.”
“In the aftermath of Dan Mitrione’s death, the Uruguayan government unleashed the illegal death squads to hunt and kill insurgents,” said Clara Aldrighi, professor of history at Uruguay’s Universidad de la República, and author of “El Caso Mitrione” (Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 2007). “The U.S. documents are irrefutable proof that the death squads were a policy of the Uruguayan government, and will serve as key evidence in the death squads cases open now in Uruguay’s courts,” Osorio added. "It is a shame that the U.S. documents are writing Uruguayan history. There should be declassification in Uruguay as well,” stated Aldrighi, who collaborated in the production of this briefing book.
More:
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB324/index.htm
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.
More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/08/13/teaching-torture-the-death-and-legacy-of-dan-mitrione/
Just wish he could have ended the US standoff against Cuba.
Also, he enraged the US Republicans when he accepted Fidel Castro's invitation to visit Cuba, after they were both pall bearers for Canada's Pierre Trudeau, a friend to Fidel Castro. You'll probably remember it drove them nuts, during Dubya Bush's Presidency, when Carter announced he planned to tour Cuba's medical research laboratory. John Bolton went to one of those powerful Republican organizations, like the Heritage Association, and claimed Cuba cooks up dual use substances to use in terrorism, etc. the very night before Carter left to go to Havana.
Carter toured the lab anyway, while Bolton worked hard to get the country to believe Carter was courting "commies." Castro told Carter to visit Cuba any time, and drop in spontaneously with experts to evaluate the work they were doing. Sounds righteous to me!
Wayne Smith was the man who made the public statement that saying Cuba to politicians had the same effect as a full moon on werewolves.
When I saw the Uruguay article, I knew I had to add the other stuff, as I've never forgotten it!
Thank you, so much, for looking through it, Marcus IM!
