Hidden Terrors

by A.J. Langguth

Book Overview

A "devastating" expos? of the United States' Latin American policy and the infamous career and assassination of agent Dan Mitrione (Kirkus Reviews). In 1960, former Richmond, Indiana, police chief Dan... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394738020
• ISBN13: 9780394738024
• Release Date: July 1979
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 343 Pages
• Weight: 0.76 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Torture and Totalitarianism

When one reads Langguth's HIDDEN TERRORS: THE TRUTH ABOUT US POLICE OPERATIONS IN LATIN AMERICA, one is struck with the similarities between what was happening there and then and what is happening here and now. As we shall see, that similarity is not coincidental. For instance, there is the same attempt to justify torture by using the "ticking bomb scenario" (pp. 141-2). But when one examines the actual behavior of Latin American police trained by American "advisors" and at times, the advisors themselves, one finds that the reality has nothing to do with any such threat to human life and very little to do with the quest for intelligence. Take for instance the case of Jean Marc Von der Weid, a Brazilian activist whose father was a Swiss banker and whose mother was from a prominent Brazilian political family. He first became involved in politics in 1968 after a high school boy was killed by the police in the course of a peaceful demonstration. As police methods of quelling demonstrations became more brutal, he went into hiding. Eventually he was caught and taken to a local police station where six other suspect were waiting. "They were told to stand with their feet far from the wall, and then to lean forward and press their palms against it. For half an hour they were beaten on their kidneys with clubs. It was not a punishment for refusing to answer questions. No questions had been asked. It was a preliminary lesson, to impress upon them the consequences of being arrested." (pp. 162-3). Needless to say, no policeman stopped to wonder if they might not even have the right suspects-- a person who had done nothing whatsoever and was picked up by mistake would have received the same treatment. Afterwards, Jean Marc was shipped to a prison where he was beaten with clubs and shocked with electric wires for twenty-four consecutive hours. "At first, the torture was purely administrative, the first step in the prison's routine." Jean Marc's captors did not even discover his identity until the third day, yet they were torturing him from the start (p. 163). Then there was Marcos Arruda, a geology student who had protested foreign control over Brazil's mineral wealth. Unable to find employement commensurate with his abilities because of his activism, he went to work at a Mercedes-Benz factory. In 1970, he began to get involved with trade union demonstrations against the deplorable working conditions in the factory. In the course of this, he became involved with a woman named Marlene Soccas, who was a member of the resistence to the US-backed dictatorship. Ultimately Marlene was captured and tortured continuously for four days. The police got her to point Marcos out to them. When they brought him to headquarters, they beat him for hours before they asked a single question (p. 211). Then they started using electrical torture. The torture went on until Marcos went into convulsions, which did not stop. "For the next month and a hal

The Unpleasant Truth

"Langguth is a novelist as well as a newspaperman, and he must have realized before he began this book that he could not simply lay out the facts of our complicity in police terror in Latin America: he had to find a way to make us as angry as he is about the harm our government has done, or his book, like so many exposes, might be further used to inflate our old boast that the USA is a wonderfully free, democratic society to allow such publications. He chose to tell flatly, laconically, as if it were as early Sinclair Lewis novel, the story of Dan Mitrione, the American police advisor in Uruguay kidnapped and executed in 1970 by the Tupamaros, and to alternate this small-town Midwesterner's experience with what was going on in the more glamorous and various worlds of Washington, the CIA, the Brazilian and Uruguayan military commands, and the revolutionary underground. He succeeds in creating interest and suspense, and in making one share his moral repulsion; indeed, one wished, as naively as when one was young, that this book would make something happen." by Jose Yglesias, The Nation --from book's back cover