A History of Political Murder in Latin America: Killing the Messengers of Change

384 Pages·2015·5.012 MB·English

by  Green, W. John

A History of
Political Murder
in Latin America
SUNY series in Global Modernity
——————
Arif Dirlik, editor
A History of
Political Murder
in Latin America
Killing the Messengers of Change
W. John Green
Cover art: Masacre en Colombia by Fernando Botero, courtesy of the Museo Nacional
de Colombia.

Map images © Brian Wrigley
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2015 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Green, W. John, 1963–
A history of political murder in Latin America : killing the messengers of change /
W. John Green.
pages cm. — (SUNY series in global modernity)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5663-8 (hardcover : alkaline paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-5665-2 (e-book)
1. Political violence—Latin America—History—20th century. 2. Murder—Latin
America—History—20th century. 3. Assassination—Latin America—History—20th
century. 4. Disappeared persons—Latin America—History—20th century.
5. Massacres—Latin America—History—20th century. 6. Political persecution—
Latin America—History—20th century. 7. State-sponsored terrorism—Latin
America—History—20th century. 8. Political culture—Latin America—History—
20th century. 9. Latin America—Politics and government—20th century. 10. Latin
America—Social conditions—20th century. I. Title.
F1414.G75 2015
306.2098—dc23 2014027596
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments vii
Map of Mexico and Central America xii
Map of South America xiii
Key Terms and Acronyms by Country xv
Introduction: A Political Culture of Murder 1
Part I
THE PRACTICE OF POLITICAL MURDER
IN LATIN AMERICA
1 Targets and Victims 17
2 Dirty War Mechanics 43
3 Bodies of the Slain 83
Part II
JUSTIFICATIONS, ASSOCIATIONS,
AND CONSEQUENCES
4 Dirty Warriors on Dirty War 113
5 International Collaborations and the Conflicted Roles of the
United States 145
vi / Contents
6 The Enduring Appeal and Continuing Challenge of Political
Murder in Latin America and Beyond 177
Appendix—Political Murder in Latin America: Individual
Country Narratives 209
Notes 273
Bibliography 305
Index 337
Preface and
Acknowledgments
On the morning of November 17, 1991, I went for a hike that began along
the Circunvalar, a winding road that threads its way through the Parque
Nacional on the eastern edge of Bogotá, where the city crowds against
Mount Monserrate. After rounding a secluded bend, my companions and
I saw a group of military police milling about a grassy bank. Spread upon
it lay the bodies of two young men, neatly arranged side by side. Each
had been shot in the chest several times and obviously moved there later.
As we passed, one of the soldiers joked, “No están durmiendo.” (“They’re
not sleeping.”) Before I left Colombia in late July 1992, I ran across the
publically displayed bodies of people violently killed on two other occasions.
The early to mid-1990s were the final years of the bloody and highly
successful offensive by paramilitary groups against the leftist Unión Patrióti-
ca party, a political organization with ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia, the FARC, Colombia’s largest guerrilla army. One might say
that this project began with those sightings, but it also grows out of my
long-term research interest in popular political mobilizations and the repres-
sion they often face. My first book explored Colombian Gaitanismo in the
1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, a populist movement that ended with its leader’s
assassination in 1948 and the violent suppression of its adherents in the
years that followed.
This venture is, admittedly, ambitious in its scope. I examine the phe-
nomenon of political murder throughout modern Latin America, focusing
on many different countries in some depth, with quicker but significant
glances at most of the rest. Given the number of such killings in Latin
America, the aim is necessarily more thematic and comparative than ency-
clopedic. I build on an expansive literature composed of monographs on
individual countries and their regions. And though a growing number of
vii
viii / Preface and Acknowledgments
excellent collections now compare and contrast the various “dirty wars” since
the late 1960s, they are multiauthored and invariably structured as a series
of separate country studies that sometimes seem like an exercise in parallel
play. In contrast, this book flips the focus from country histories to political
murder itself, pulling the broader literature together to let the various cases
illuminate the phenomenon in concert and thematically. Obvious disparities
exist among the different countries’ experiences, but what really jump out
are the similarities. This is important to recognize because many specialists
tend to see “their” country or subregion (Mexico, Central America, the
Caribbean, the Andes, the Southern Cone, Brazil) as unique or the “worst”
case, while others might insist that their countries are “not as bad.” This
project is, therefore, a regional history that should be of use to the wider
scholarly community, yet it is also aimed at a general audience. I present a
broad portrait of political murder in Latin America and offer a unified thesis
about its causes and practices. My goal is comparative synthesis.
Many Latin Americanist scholars attest to the value of comparative
history, but few actually attempt it. One explanation for this situation, as
Charles Bergquist noted in his own ambitiously comparative Labor in Latin
America, is that historians revere studies rooted deeply in primary sources,
and rightly so. But this laudable preference can unfortunately reinforce a
tendency toward excessively focused specialization, with contentious territo-
rial undertones, even in an interconnected field like Latin American studies.
The result is a palpable timidity regarding forays onto other people’s turf.
Not surprisingly, most works of history dealing with the postindependence
period still revolve around the nation-state. It is also true that many “big”
comparative books can have problems. Some are better at presenting lots of
details and entertaining vignettes than at outlining a coherent interpretation,
while others are long on interpretation but short on evidence. Both of these
undesirable outcomes dissuade authors.
Finally, historians can be divided broadly by disposition into splitters
and lumpers. The more extreme splitters object to overarching comparisons.
They want to focus on the individual cases, separate regions, and very dif-
ferent countries during neatly defined periods. As with the insistence on
primary documents, this healthy impulse can also be taken to absurd levels.
Regional history is more unwieldy, to be sure, but Mexico, Colombia, Peru,
Argentina, Brazil, etc., are themselves large, complex, culturally and region-
ally diverse nations. Given that all political boundaries are to some degree
artificial constructs, should we also avoid talking about them as “wholes”?
Another extreme that would be absurd in the present circumstance is see-
ing every murder and massacre as a separate, unique, atomized occurrence,
Preface and Acknowledgments / ix
unrelated and uncomparable. Certainly the timing, scale, or intensity of
political murder is tied to the individual political story of a country or one
of its regions. The details and context matter. But even giving the splitters
their due, we can recognize parallels and similarities. Whether consistent
or sporadic, recourse to political murder across the region reveals a broader
phenomenon. Countries with intense histories of political murder turn out to
be examples of a larger experience rather than exceptional cases. The splitters
love monographs on narrow topics. So, in fact, do lumpers, but they see
them as building blocks, and believe that we should use them to construct
larger interpretive structures (ones that can stand straight and true, of course).
I should also note that despite the importance of political murder,
and my own fascination with the topic, I feel a certain trepidation about
writing such a book as this one. A real danger exists that readers with
little or no personal experience of Latin America will come away with an
unduly negative image of the region, or have old stereotypes reinforced.
This problem came up the first time I taught this material to undergradu-
ates, at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, where no one in
that particular class had ever traveled in the region. Subsequent classes at
Hampden-Sydney College and Washington and Lee University confirmed
my fear that people who have not been to Latin America are more likely
to develop a negative impression, though I should also point out that these
were all popular classes, and students from each expressed desires to go there
when the courses were completed.
The compelling beauty of Latin America’s varied locales and the hospi-
tality of its peoples are widely acknowledged, and I’ve spent a big chunk of
my adult life wandering there in the years since 1980. Many Latin Ameri-
canists began as I did, when they traveled in the region as young people.
So as I worked on this project, I liked to remind anyone who would listen
that in Latin America most people, most of the time, do not witness or
experience overt political murder. Yet when I remembered those young men
on the Circunvalar, and considered that most Latin Americans have some
firsthand experience of political murder, I pressed on with the task. Though
I would like to look away, as many good people there do much of the time,
I can’t escape a basic fact: in the twentieth century, to differing degrees, the
phenomenon was nearly ubiquitous, and it has yet to disappear. We should
also remember that millions of Latin Americans constantly and heroically
resist all forms of political repression, and to appreciate their struggle, we
must understand what they are up against.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I acknowledge that for several years I
served as a Colombia country specialist for Amnesty International USA. I