The book When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror,
despite its sensational title, is a collection of exhaustive academic
essays, edited by Cecilia Menjívar and Néstor Rodríguez, analyzing the
horrific counterinsurgency programs which had, and continue to have an
effect, on the majority of Latin America. The essays make clear that
they are by no means blaming the United States, but they often analyze
the decisive role that the U.S. plays in implementing “technologies of
terror”. The book touches on all of Latin America, from Operation
Condor, South America’s oppressive international counterinsurgency
program, to individual countries that continue to be plagued by the
state’s decision to kill, disappear, torture, or imprison without due
process. Despite the fact that each of the essays is by a unique
author, writing about a single country, a definite pattern emerges.
U.S. militarization of Latin American states, first for the purposes of
anti-communism, then counter narcotics operations, and most recently
the war on terror, often places the machinery of brutal repression in
the hands of an already oppressive aristocracy. Even more frightening,
are the counterinsurgency techniques taught to the thousands of Latin
American military officers through U.S. training in the infamous School
of the Americas, as well as elsewhere. Interrogation methods, such as
the application of electrical shocks, appear time and time and again in
rare instances of exposure in Latin America, even, most notoriously,
half way around the world in Abu Ghraib.