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This chapter concerns Fr. Olivares’s expansion of public sanctuary to include Mexican undocumented immigrants. He did this not only because the undocumented were also in great need of protection and support, but because the Immigration and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986 provided amnesty for some undocumented people but not for others. Olivares defied this law by calling on others to hire the undocumented. The expansion of sanctuary only added to the tension between Olivares and immigration officials and with his own Church authorities. For his expansion of sanctuary, Olivares was threatened by Central American death squads.

Fifty years after the collapse of a violent and militarized police state, Brazil is a vibrant and robust democracy and a political leader in Latin America. Nonetheless, the nation remains internally divided and exceedingly violent, accounting for 10 percent of all homicides in the world. The nation is still burdened with a Nordestino (Northeast Brazilian) legacy of neo-feudal patron-client relations, social banditry, and vigilantism that has infiltrated local, state, and federal government. This chapter concerns the resurgence of death squads in the municipio of Timbaua, Pernambuco, from the late 1980s to the current day. There are many paradoxes in this narrative—a democratic transition that lifted thirty million Brazilians out of miserable poverty, eradicated hunger, and brought about a maternal reproductive revolution alongside a violent transition that released waves of organized and disorganized crime; drug and human trafficking; and seemingly legitimized corporate, political, judicial, and vigilante crime.

To test the theoretical components of the argument presented in chapter 5, this chapter develops an empirical model of how U.S. transnational corporations and paramilitary death squads mediate the U.S.-sponsored drug war’s effect on human rights repression in Latin America. In outlining this empirical model, this chapter is organized as follows: It first juxtapose the theoretical arguments of dependency and neoclassical liberal theories regarding the human rights effects of transnational capital by highlighting the theoretical and empirical limitations of neoclassical liberal claims. This is followed by a discussion of the empirical model, which draws on the extant human rights literature to identify important control variables that are important predictors of state repression. It then discusses important theoretical modifications that are incorporated into the overall empirical model. This is followed by a discussion of the limitations of the indicators used to measure the model’s mediating variables. structural equation modeling is used to analyze cross-national data for thirty-one countries from the Latin American region covering the period 1980 to 2012. All the components of the theoretical argument found strong statistical support.

Alvaro Saravia also testified before the Truth Commission and revealed significant information about the role of oligarchs in supporting Roberto D’Aubuisson and playing specific roles in Romero assassination. The legal team uses this information and new connections with U.S. investigators to continue digging for information about the death squad financiers. The chapter also provides the historical backdrop in which former U.S. ambassador Robert White went public in 1984 to tell the U.S. Congress about the allegations of the Miami Six financing D’Aubuisson and death squad operations. The legal team attempts to develop leads on one of the men White named, Roberto Daglio. Returning to the historical evidence, the chapter chronicles other disclosures in the 1980s from former military leader Roberto Santivañez, who claimed that his former subordinate, Roberto D’Aubuisson, arranged the assassination of Archbishop Romero.

This chapter examines ARENA in El Salvador and argues that, like the UDI in Chile, its success was the product of authoritarian inheritance and counterrevolutionary struggle. The first section discusses El Salvador’s long history of right-wing military rule. The second section examines the October 1979 coup and the resulting establishment of a left-wing Revolutionary Governing Junta. The third section discusses the intense counterrevolutionary response that the junta triggered. This included large-scale death squad violence, with future ARENA founder Roberto D’Aubuisson playing a key role. The fourth section examines the formation of ARENA in response to an impending transition to competitive elections. The fifth section shows how D’Aubuisson’s role as a high-level official in the pre-1979 military regime endowed ARENA with several valuable resources. The final section discusses how ARENA’s origins in counterrevolutionary struggle served as a powerful source of cohesion.

Building on the arguments presented in the previous chapters, this chapter is motivated by the following question: How does the drug enforcement regime’s addiction to increasing counternarcotic aid facilitate the expansion of American and other transnational corporate investments in Latin America and, in the process, create the conditions that give rise to corporate-induced repression? In answering this question, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that draws insights from the literature on foreign aid and its effect on foreign capital flows and then integrates these insights into theories of repression in dependent capitalist societies. It is argued that, in addition to combating drug trafficking, U.S. counternarcotic aid facilitates the expansion of American and other transnational corporate investments in Latin America by financing countries’ infrastructure development. In conjunction with neoliberal economic reforms, drug war infrastructure financing in Latin America is likely to facilitate the expansion of corporate investments by resource-seeking industries that require greater land use, which encroaches on the ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples. And, in response to Indigenous resistance to corporate appropriation of ancestral lands, resource-seeking transnational corporations will collude with local security forces, private security firms, and paramilitary death squads to repress and eliminate resistance to capital accumulation.

This chapter argues that the mass killings of 1965–66 were neither inevitable nor spontaneous. It shows first how the temporal and geographic variations in the pattern of mass killing corresponded closely to the varied political postures and capacities of army commanders in a given locale, and how the army's logistical assets facilitated the killings. Next, it outlines how the army encouraged and carried out mass killings by mobilizing civilian youth groups and death squads, and encouraging them to identify, detain, and kill members of the PKI and their allies. Third, the chapter describes how the army provoked and legitimized mass killings by launching a sophisticated media and propaganda campaign that blamed the PKI for the kidnap and murder of the generals, and called for the party and its affiliates to be physically annihilated. Fourth, it shows how a variety of religious and political leaders embraced and replicated the army's polarizing and retributive language and propaganda, adding their considerable authority to the campaign of violence. Finally, it draws on this evidence to address the critical question of responsibility.

This chapter focuses on the death squads of the Shanghai Station of Juntong. It explains that kidnapping was a specialty of the secret agents commanded by Dai Li, and it was conducted on a vast scale that by 1937, Special Services Department (SSD) agents boasted that they could kidnap anybody, anyplace, anytime. It discusses the use of standard gangland technique of hustling their victim into a waiting automobile at gunpoint from behind, the dehumanization of victims through torture and the disposal of the victims' bodies.

This chapter provides an overview of the recent history of El Salvador, with a focus on the importance of coffee as a crop that built fortunes for a small group of families. The wealth concentrated in the hands of oligarchs led to massive economic inequality throughout the twentieth century, and an uprising in the 1930s was put down in such a brutal manner that it stifled opposition for decades and came to be known as the Matanza. This chapter chronicles U.S. government support for anti-Communism and counterinsurgency efforts that created the death squads in El Salvador, continued military repression amid growing cries for reform in the 1960s and 1970s, the rise of insurgent groups targeting the oligarchs, and the bloody response of the military and death squads. After a reformist military coup in 1979, Roberto D’Aubuisson and civilian supporters carried out a public crusade denouncing advocates of reform as Communists, with the country getting closer to civil war.

This chapter describes the filing of the legal case against Alvaro Saravia as well as several unnamed “Doe” defendants, designations intended to be filled with the identities of death squad financiers with connections to the United States. The chapter presents the documentation and evidence that describes the alleged funding of the death squads, including the Saravia Diary and a U.S. embassy cable about a group called the “Miami Six”. It transitions to a discussion of how, as a full-scale civil war raged, many of the Salvadoran oligarchs teamed up with Roberto D’Aubuisson to create the ARENA political party while the U.S. administration of Ronald Reagan greatly increased economic assistance to the Salvadoran military responsible for so much of the repression.

The legal team returns to El Salvador for interviews crucial for gathering evidence about the death squad financiers and understanding further details of the Romero assassination. A worker for the ARENA party in the early 1980s discloses significant information about party members and their links to violence. She confirms testimony that she previously provided to the Truth Commission and provides a new statement for the legal team detailing payments made by party faithful and insider information about the facts of Romero’s murder.

This chapter shows the variety and intensity of community-building accomplished by progressive norm-breaking. It focuses on the core Holocaust perpetrators—Himmler's elite troops in the death squads and in the concentration camps—who generated and experienced togetherness in a world that bore no relationship to civilian ways of life. Whether shooting Jews in the occupied territories in the East or pushing them into gas chambers, men, and sometimes also women, competed in performing the Nazis' revolutionary morality that invalidated individual responsibility, human compassion, and human rights. Based on close readings of post-1945 trial testimonies and other eyewitness reports, the chapter examines how the Nazis welded disparate individuals together by energizing a sense of belonging to a monstrous elite that had burned its bridges to the rest of the world.

This chapter chronicles the surprising post-trial revelations by Alvaro Saravia, who comes out of hiding to give an interview to a Miami newspaper. Saravia then contacts the legal team, starting a months-long dialogue that eventually leads to a sit-down meeting with two members of the team in Honduras. The legal team refuses to negotiate with Saravia unless he reveals everything he knows about those responsible for the Romero assassination and the financing of Roberto D’Aubuisson’s death squad, and although the meeting ends without an agreement, Saravia does make some interesting disclosures.

Opening with an anecdote about an American who trained the US-backed forces of Central America in the 1980s taking a surfing vacation in El Salvador in 1982, the introduction shows that surfing has a history more complicated than the sport’s popular representation suggests.