Uruguay's Church asks witnesses of dictatorship's crimes to find victims
Eduardo Campos Lima
By Eduardo Campos Lima
Aug 14, 2024
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Contributor
An anthropologist working on the excavation of human remains at the Battalion 14 in Uruguay, an area where three victims of torture have already been found over the past years. (Credit: Gov. of Uruguay.)
SÃO PAULO, Brazil – Church leaders in Uruguay has joined the country’s institutions in charge of looking for people who disappeared during the 1973-1995 military dictatorship and hopes to receive information about the whereabouts of the human remains of dozens of victims of the regime.
The initiative had been discussed over the last six months by Observatorio del Sur (Observatory of the South or OBSUR), an association of Catholic priests and lay people that promotes humanitarian values, the Institución Nacional de Derechos Humanos y Defensoría del Pueblo (National Institution of Human Rights and Ombudsman’s Office, or INDDHH), an organ of the Uruguayan Congress that promotes human rights’ policies, and by prosecutor Ricardo Perciballe, who investigates crimes against humanity.
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During the dictatorship, about 5,000 Uruguayans were detained for political crimes. Many of them were taken to clandestine military facilities that functioned like centers of torture. At least 197 of them were killed, but the number might be higher.
“Bodies may have been thrown from helicopters on the sea, others may be lost forever. But some of them were buried and covered by construction materials and still can be found,” Villareal said.
More:
https://cruxnow.com/church-in-the-americas/2024/08/uruguays-church-asks-witnesses-of-dictatorships-crimes-to-find-victims
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Wikipedia's account of Mitrione:
Daniel Anthony Mitrione (August 4, 1920 – August 10, 1970) was a U.S. government official in Latin America who trained local police in the use of torture.[1] He was kidnapped and executed by the Tupamaros guerrilla group fighting against the authoritarian government in Montevideo, Uruguay.
Career in the Office of Public Safety
In 1960, Mitrione joined the Public Safety program of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA). The program, begun in 1954, provided U.S. aid and training to civilian police in countries around the world. Mitrione's first post was in Belo Horizonte, a large city about 250 miles northwest of Rio de Janeiro.[5] During the two years Mitrione was posted in Belo Horizonte, ICA was replaced by the United States Agency for International Development, and the police aid program was reorganized into the Office of Public Safety (OPS).
After two years in Belo Horizonte, Mitrione was transferred to Rio de Janeiro in 1962, where he served as a training adviser for another five years. During these five years he shared torture techniques that were used by the Brazilian dictatorship against its own citizens.[citation needed] In 1967, he was rotated back to the United States and taught for two years at the OPS International Police Academy in Washington, D.C.[6]
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Former Uruguayan police officials and CIA operatives[who?] stated Mitrione had taught torture techniques to Uruguayan police in the cellar of his Montevideo home, including the use of electrical shocks delivered to his victims' mouths and genitals.[8] His credo was "The precise pain, in the precise place, in the precise amount, for the desired effect."[9] He also helped train foreign police agents in the United States in the context of the Cold War. In 1978, at the 11th International Youth Festival in Cuba, Manuel Hevia Cosculluela, a Cuban who claimed to have infiltrated the CIA as double agent from 1962 to 1970, stated that Mitrione ordered the abduction of homeless people, so that he could use them as 'guinea pigs' in his torture classes.[10][11][12] He said that attempts would be made to keep each victim alive for multiple torture sessions,[10][12] but that torture would eventually kill them, and that their mutilated bodies would be dumped in the streets. He claimed that Mitrione personally tortured four homeless people to death.[10]
Mitrione's captors may also have believed him to be the inventor of a torture device known as the "Mitrioni vest".[13] This alleged device was described as "an inflatable vest which can be used to increase pressure on the chest during interrogation, sometimes crushing the rib cage."[13]
Mitrione was kidnapped by the Tupamaros on July 31, 1970[14] demanding the release of 150 political prisoners.[15] The Uruguayan government, with U.S. backing, refused and Mitrione was later found dead in a car, shot twice in the head.[16] There were no other visible signs of maltreatment,[17] beyond the fact that during the kidnapping, Mitrione had been shot in one shoulder, a wound that was clean and healing well, and had evidently been treated while in captivity.[17]
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Commemoration
The Nixon Administration, through spokesman Ron Ziegler, affirmed that Mitrione's "devoted service to the cause of peaceful progress in an orderly world will remain as an example for free men everywhere."[20] His funeral was widely publicised by the U.S. media and was attended by, amongst others, David Eisenhower and Richard Nixon's secretary of state William Rogers. Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis held a benefit concert for his family in Richmond, Indiana.[21]
More:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Mitrione#:~:text=He%20claimed%20that%20Mitrione%20personally,as%20the%20%22Mitrioni%20vest%22.
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Daniel Mitrione
Daniel Mitrione was born in Italy on 4th August, 1920. The family emigrated to the United States and in 1945 Mitrione became a police officer in Richmond, Indiana.
Mitrione joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1959. The following year he was assigned to the State Department's International Cooperation Administration. He was then sent to South America to teach "advanced counterinsurgency techniques." His speciality was in teaching the police how to torture political prisoners without killing them.
According to A.J. Langguth of the New York Times, Mitrione was working for the CIA via the International Development's Office of Public Safety (OPS). We know he was in several foreign countries but between 1960 and 1967 he spent a lot of time in Brazil and was involved in trying to undermine the left-wing president João Goulart, who had taken power after President Juscelino Kubitschek resigned from office in 1961.
João Goulart was a wealthy landowner who was opposed to communism. However, he was in favour of the redistribution of wealth in Brazil. As minister of labour he had increased the minimum wage by 100%. Colonel Vernon Walters, the US military attaché in Brazil, described Goulart as “basically a good man with a guilty conscience for being rich.”
The CIA began to make plans for overthrowing Goulart. A psychological warfare program approved by Henry Kissinger, at the request of telecom giant ITT during his chair of the 40 Committee, sent U.S. PSYOPS disinformation teams to spread fabricated rumors concerning Goulart. John McCloy was asked to set up a channel of communication between the CIA and Jack W. Burford, one of the senior executives of the Hanna Mining Company. In February, 1964, McCloy went to Brazil to hold secret negotiations with Goulart. However, Goulart rejected the deal offered by Hanna Mining.
The following month Lyndon B. Johnson gave the go-ahead for the overthrow of João Goulart (Operation Brother Sam). Colonel Vernon Walters arranged for General Castello Branco to lead the coup. A US naval-carrier task force was ordered to station itself off the Brazilian coast. As it happens, the Brazilian generals did not need the help of the task force. Goulart’s forces were unwilling to defend the democratically elected government and he was forced to go into exile. This action ended democracy in Brazil for more than twenty years. According to David Kaiser (American Tragedy) this event marks the change in the foreign policy developed by John F. Kennedy. Once again, Johnson showed that his policy was to support non-democratic but anti-communist, military dictatorships, and that he had fully abandoned Kennedy’s neutralization policy.
Mitrione remained in Brazil to help the new government deal with the supporters of João Goulart. According to Franco Solinas, Mitrione was also in the Dominican Republic after the 1965 US intervention.
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/