Death Squads Emerge when a regime loses its impunity to abuse Human Rights

Death squads are often, but not exclusively, associated with the violent political repression under dictatorships, totalitarian states and similar regimes. They typically have the tacit or express support of the state, as a whole or in part. Death squads may comprise a secret police force, paramilitary group or official government units with members drawn from the military or the police. They may also be organized as vigilante groups. They are a form of State Terrorism.

Several scholars have accused the United States of conducting state terrorism. They have written about the liberal democracies and their use of state terrorism, particularly in relation to the Cold War. According to them, state terrorism was used to protect the interest of capitalist elites, and the U.S. organized a neo-colonial system of client states, co-operating with local elites to rule through terror. However, little of this work has been recognized by other scholars of terrorism or even of state terrorism.

Works include Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s The political economy of human rights (1979), Herman’s The real terror network (1985), Alexander L. George’ Western state terrorism (1991), Frederick Gareau’s State terrorism and the United States (2004) and Doug Stokes’ America’s other war (2005).

Beginning in the late 1970s, Chomsky and Herman wrote a series of books on the United States and state terrorism. Their writings coincided with reports by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations of a new global “epidemic” of state torture and murder. Chomsky and Herman observed that terror was concentrated in the U.S. sphere of influence in the Third World, and documented terror carried out by U.S. client states in Latin America. They observed that of ten Latin American countries that had death squads, all were U.S. client states. Worldwide, 74% of countries that used torture on an administrative basis were U.S. client states, receiving military and other support to retain power. They concluded that the global rise in state terror was a result of U.S. foreign policy.

In 1991, a book edited by Alexander L. George also argued that other Western powers sponsored terror in Third World countries. It concluded that the U.S. and its allies were the main supporters of terrorism throughout the world. Gareau states that the number of deaths caused by non-state terrorism (3668 deaths between 1968 and 1980, as estimated by the CIA) is “dwarfed” by those resulting from state terrorism in U.S.-backed regimes such as Guatemala (150,000 killed, 50,000 missing in Guatemala – 93% of whom Gareau classifies as “victims of state terrorism”).

Chomsky concluded that all powers backed state terrorism in client states. At the top were the U.S. and other powers, notably the United Kingdom and France, that provided financial, military and diplomatic support to Third World regimes kept in power through violence. These governments acted together with multinational corporations, particularly in the arms and security industries. In addition, other Third World countries outside the Western sphere of influence carried out state terror supported by rival powers.
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