When States Kill: Latin America, the U.S., and Technologies of Terror

"This is an edited volume looking at the establishment of a system of repression in Latin America, starting in the 1960s and going into the 1990s, from the Cold War to the War on Drugs . The argument made is set within (neo-)Marxist approaches to international relations. It suggests that the system of repression is established either at the direction of or with the complicity of the United States—understood correctly as the hegemon or dominant power—in order to maintain a system of economic and financial exploitation of Latin America. I find the argument quite persuasive, but whether one buys into this overall theoretical framework or not, is beside the point. The chapters themselves are incredibly detailed, and they provide some of the best analysis I’ve seen of the repression conducted by several countries in Latin America and of the rationales behind this repression. One of the running themes is the detrimental effects of what became known as the ‘doctrine of national security.’ This is a political and foreign policy doctrine, according to which the rights of the state are more important than the rights of individual human beings. And it tends to create a sort of double standard: one legal system for individuals and a separate legal system, primarily built on impunity, for security agencies, the military, and so on. Which, interestingly, is also an argument that Ronen Bergman made about Israel; he argued that in the history of Israel, assassination was able to be so prominent because the intelligence agencies operated on a parallel legal system to that of the rest of the country. The doctrine of national security in Latin America very much served the same purpose, the same function. There’s an interesting element of the discussion, making the argument that the responsibility of the United States can be seen in the amount of money pumped into the militaries of these countries, as opposed to their civil societies, development projects, and so on. Certainly, in the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin American militaries become the partners of choice for the US. And because they were so well funded and so well organised, it became almost inevitable that they would play a dominant role within the political life of their respective countries. When they did so, the United States was happy for them to stay in power, as long as they professed a strong anti-communism and conducted themselves, externally, with a modicum of respectability. Internally the regimes could do whatever they wanted, with little fear of repercussions and/or naming and shaming. Initially the book was to be a very ambitious history of US government involvement in assassination, full stop. But it was becoming as long as Lord of the Rings . It would have been difficult to convince any publisher to go with it. So, I narrowed it down to the assassination of foreign officials, primarily foreign leaders with a couple of exceptions. One is General René Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean army in the 1970s, and the other is Osama Bin Laden . Some people have made the argument that Bin Laden could be understood a foreign official, because he was the head of a structured terrorist group, but I argue primarily that the hunt for Bin Laden pre-9/11 is essential for us to understand the post-9/11 establishment and expansion of so-called ‘targeted killings.’ The book does two main things. Firstly, it tracks the US government involvement in assassination plots, and secondly, it looks at the politics surrounding assassinations, which to my mind include the degree of involvement of the President in decisions to kill and the language used to internally justify and publicly legitimate assassination. The turning point of the book is the 1970s, when after Congressional investigations of the intelligence community, the Ford administration published an executive order reforming the intelligence community, containing a prohibition on assassination. Some people have argued that, with the executive order, the US stopped being involved in assassinations until after 9/11. I make the argument that what changed with the executive order was not that the US stopped being involved in assassinations but that it started developing internally and—eventually—publicly a series of legal positions and political justifications to establish that what it was doing might look like assassination, but it was something else. Yes, I think by that point there were already quite a few signs of openness regarding the use of drones and so on. Various US officials had publicly justified the Administration’s use of drones as compliant with US and international law; something far from accepted. After the killing of Bin Laden, there was an article in The New York Times about Obama holding ‘Terror Tuesdays’ with his counterterrorism adviser John Brennan, in which they would go through PowerPoint slides of key terrorists to kill by drone strike. By this point, ‘assassination’ had been completely removed from the language of US foreign policy, it was all about ‘targeted killings.’ I guess what I tried to do in my book was uncover how we got there. In 2020, for example, the US government killed Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. Then-President Trump openly took responsibility by tweeting a badly pixelated American flag. US officials, though, denied that the killing of Soleimani amounted to an assassination. This is the historical puzzle I tried to unravel. In order to do this, I had to go back to the early Cold War, when the US published a manual on how to do assassination. I looked at long-forgotten cases of assassination and assassination attempts. And more famous cases, for example, the campaign against Fidel Castro, the assassination of Rafael Trujillo, and more recent cases such as Manuel Noriega, the leader of Panama, Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and eventually Bin Laden. Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, there was an effort to both conduct assassinations but to also make sure there was sufficient political and legal cover to be able to claim that these were not assassinations, but self-defensive and/or counterterrorism operations. Some novels are closer to the truth than others. Le Carré is a good example, because I think the portrayal he gives of the British secret services and how the Cold War rivalry played out is a very dark and pessimistic one, without your flamboyant James Bond running around shooting everyone. Lately I’ve been a big fan of Slow Horses , which is a darker and funnier take on post-9/11 covert operations. There are also roman-à-clefs , where everything is accurate except the names might be fictitious. For example, we mentioned the case of Hassan Salameh—the CIA contact with the PLO who was killed by Israel. That is told in surprising detail in a novel called Agents of Innocence by David Ignatius. So sometimes fiction gets really, really close to the bone. In many television dramas at the moment, there are a lot of Russian bad guys—I guess on the back of all these assassinations, and the Ukraine war, and so on—and many dramas in which the enemy is within, when your own government is behind whatever bad thing happens. Slow Horses does that a bit, and The Diplomat , a Netflix show which I enjoyed lately, does something like that. It all goes back to this question of who you can trust among spies, and that British obsession with cases like that of Kim Philby."