For South Americans, War on Terror Looks Like 'Dirty War'

[struggle4progress]

Commentary, Marcelo Ballvé,
Pacific News Service, Aug 12, 2005
<snip>

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina--The recent turns in the war on terror look, to South American eyes, eerily like the Dirty Wars of the 1970s, when thousands of dissidents and rebels were imprisoned, tortured and often "disappeared."

Plan Condor was the name South America's allied military dictatorships gave to their policy of sharing intelligence and access to detainees during the Dirty Wars. Now, via indefinite detentions, summary deportations, "renderings" and the creation of extralegal gulags, the West is institutionalizing a similar system. <snip>

Britain's decision to expel civilians to countries with repressive regimes represents another step in the morphing of the anti-terror campaign into a global Dirty War. In the 1970s, South American leaders who didn't want to bloody their hands further would tip off more brutal neighboring regimes about the movements of suspected subversives. This helps explain why some 30 Uruguayans disappeared in their own country, but over 100 were disappeared in neighboring Argentina, according to human rights organizations. <snip>

Other recent events evoke chilling similarities with the activities of death and kidnapping squads in 1970s South America: the killing of an innocent Brazilian immigrant mistaken for a bomber, shot multiple times in the head by plainclothes London police as commuters watched horrorstruck; the Egyptian cleric who Italian prosecutors say was kidnapped in broad daylight and stuffed into a van by 13 CIA operatives and who, days later, called his wife from Egypt, said he had been tortured and has since disappeared; and the abuse and intimidation endured by Abu Ghraib detainees (sexual humiliation was a favored tactic of South America's torturers). <snip>

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