Hidden Terrors Part 2

excerpted from the book

Hidden Terrors

the truth about U.S. police operations in Latin America

by A.J. Langguth

Pantheon Books, 1978, paper

p157
Throughout the world, 1968 was a year of demonstrations. Back in Washington, Dan Mitrione was finding the United States far different from the country he had left eight years earlier. Brazilian students at the IPA sometimes asked him why he had not stayed in Brazil, and Mitrione joked with them, "I had to come back so as not to forget I'm American."

But the lawlessness he was finding at home troubled him deeply. IPA instructors in Brazil agreed among themselves that the streets at night were less dangerous than the streets of New York, and Mitrione could feel that he had contributed to the quiet that had fallen across Brazil.

The contrast was so strong that three years later, when Senator Frank Church's foreign relations subcommittee began to probe the rumors of torture coming out of Brazil, the senators called in Brazil's chief U. S. police adviser and asked him where he had felt safer, in Washington, D. C., or in Rio.

The adviser, Theodore Brown, took the bait: "I would feel safer in Rio."

"If that is the case," Senator Church asked, "then how is it we are so well qualified to instruct the Brazilians on adequate police-protection methods?"

It was a debater's point, and the perfunctory committee hearings turned up no hard evidence against the Office of Public Safety, its Washington academy, or the U. S. advisors in the field.

p158
If Nelson Rockefeller wondered what sort of young hooligan organized the protest demonstrations against him in the spring of 1969, one answer was the studious and well-mannered son of a Swiss chemist.

Rockefeller was still governor of New York when Richard Nixon sent him to Latin America to prepare a policy report. The governor was scheduled to spend only a few hours in any one capital, but even the short duration of each stay did not mollify the protestors. In Latin America, the governor was not widely perceived as the beaming egalitarian who ate blintzes and pizza on the streets of New York City. For two generations, long before the prison riots at Attica had tarnished Nelson Rockefeller's liberal standing at home, his family's name had been handy political shorthand throughout South America for imperialism and repression.

The average U. S. taxpayer might find it mystifying that since the 1964 coup, Washington had pumped $2 billion into Brazil to protect U. S. investments totaling only $1.6 billion. But in Latin America as a whole, the stakes were much higher. U. S. investors controlled 8S percent of Latin America's sources of raw material. U. S. investment had doubled from $6 billion in 1960 to $12 billion nine years later, and the Rockefeller interests remained among the most visible of those investments.

At the time of the governor's trip, Standard Oil of New Jersey, part of the trust put together by Rockefeller's grandfather, controlled 95 percent of Venezuela's largest oil company, Creole Petroleum. Below the equator, another Rockefeller family corporation, IBEC, showed assets of well over $50 million. There were also Rockefeller-controlled industries, banks, and supermarkets. Not unexpectedly, then, Rockefeller met riots in Colombia. In Ecuador, the police killed six students demonstrating against him. Faced with public protests, the governments of Chile and Venezuela withdrew their invitations.

Given the scope of Rockefeller's inheritance and the hostile reception he received, the liberals of Brazil were not surprised that his report to Nixon followed a very hard line. According to Rockefeller, workers were largely under Communist domination. The same was true of students, but perhaps they were merely dupes. The report praised the hemisphere's police and its armed forces. The army had enabled each country to deal with "a growing, covert Communist threat to their internal security." As for the police, the Rockefeller report chided the people of the United States for not appreciating the importance of their role. True, the police had been used for political repression, and that was "unfortunate." But if anything, Rockefeller's report concluded, the Latin American police must be strengthened.

That spring, there was more than the Rockefeller mission to occupy Jean Marc. In February, the government had issued Decree 477, forbidding all political activity within the university. The authorities also closed most student centers. In Rio, only Catholic universities were exempt. Many student leaders were expelled, and Jean Marc found growing company in the underground.

Torture was also becoming more systematic. In the earliest aftermath of the coup, a number of men and women had disappeared; their bodies were later found in fields and gullies. The cases of torture had been isolated-a couple of actors; a former army sergeant, Raimundo Suares, tortured to death. Even the leftist students were inclined to blame that torture on a few brutes among the police and military. Their respect for the presidency died hard, though the office was now occupied by usurpers, and torture was far removed from the Brazilians' own view of themselves.

But in June 1969, people in Sao Paulo were speaking guardedly of a paramilitary organization called OBAN, apparently a collection of intelligence agents from the police and the military. In the war against the Left, OBAN considered itself to have a free hand, and its financing came from industrialists around the city who funneled their money through a man named Boilesen.

p160
Jean Marc spent many months underground without being forced to resort to false documents. Challenged for identification, he would either show his Swiss passport or his card as a marine officer. With a glance at either of those elite documents, policemen would wave him past. Twice when Jean Marc's name was on "wanted" lists, he was scooped up by a police dragnet; but the officers failed to check each name against their lists, and he was let go.

Life underground affected the hunted differently. For some, the constant movement and daily fears weighed so heavily that they sighed with relief at the clasp of the police hand on their shoulder. Jean Marc was not one of those. When his night came, he was no half-willing accomplice in his own capture.

It was August 31, 1969. Such were the tangled loyalties of that era that Jean Marc was hiding in the house of a physician who was also attending the president of Brazil. In that way, Jean Marc heard that Costa e Silva had suffered a stroke, which the military high command was covering up while his potential successors jockeyed for his position.

It was news too explosive to hoard for himself. Jean Marc set off for the house of friends. They were not at home. Still excited, he broke one of his own security rules and went to a house where fellow revolutionaries were living. Before, he had always met them on the street.

As Jean Marc approached, instinct warned him that something inside the house was not right. Listening at the door, he heard strange voices. Quietly he began to back away.

It was a trap. Minutes earlier, the house had been raided. Now police on the street were watching the door. When they seized him, Jean Marc told the officers that he was simply a student who had come to the wrong address. The police may or may not have believed him. Under the procedure that was evolving, it did not matter. The government had discovered that random beatings created a climate of quiescence at the universities, and the generals much preferred that stillness to the riots of the previous year.

Jean Marc was taken first to the headquarters of the Departmento de Ordem Politico e Social (DOPS), where he found six other suspects already waiting. They were all told to stand with their feet far from the wall, 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 punishment for refusing to answer questions. No questions had been asked. It was a preliminary lesson, to impress on them the consequences of being arrested.

During this first round of beatings, Jean Marc was not blindfolded, and looking around he saw twelve men in the room. Later, he learned that half were from CENIMAR. The other six were civilians from DOPS who specialized in torture.

The main CENIMAR prison was in the basement of the Ministry of the Navy, near the docks of Rio's lovely harbor. Whenever possible, the intelligence agents on the fifth floor of the ministry waited to do their torturing at night, when the staffs were gone from their offices. U. S. Navy officers based at the naval mission in the building sometimes heard screams from across the court. Their attitude was one of wry distaste; but none of them, not even missions commanders-like Rear Admiral C. Thor Hanson, who told aides of overhearing the screams-raised the matter with their hosts. It was an internal matter and none of their business.

Sometimes they saw men, obviously fellow countrymen wearing civilian clothes, around the intelligence office. If anyone was to object to the torture, it was they. Since the screams indicated that the torture was continuing, the information being gathered must be extremely vital to Brazil's security and, by extension, to the security of the United States.

Occasionally Brazilians who had undergone torture at CENIMAR managed to interest a foreign journalist in their ordeal. Once, their story reached William Buckley, Jr., the conservative columnist, as he toured Rio. They complained to him that they had heard English-speaking voices next door to the room in which they were being tortured. If they could hear conversation, why had the North Americans not heard them screaming?

Buckley, who had once worked for the CIA in Mexico City, reported later to his readers that there were radio monitors in the ministry. He said that what the prisoners had heard were not U. S. intelligence officers in the next room but rather transmissions from U. S. ships moored in the harbor.

Jean Marc, when he heard Buckley's explanation, thought that an excuse so transparent would only confirm the accusation in any neutral mind. But who was listening? Either to the charge or to Buckley's rebuttal?

After being held at CENIMAR, Jean Marc was shipped across Guanabara Bay to a prison on the Isle of Flowers, a dot of land in the Atlantic Ocean as beautiful as its name. A battalion of Brazilian marines kept the low white buildings and the grounds immaculate. Also on hand were interrogators who specialized in torture.

For twenty-four consecutive hours, Jean Marc was beaten with clubs and shocked with electric wires. At first the torture was simply administrative, the first stage in the prison's routine. But on the third day, his captors discovered his identity, and the brutality of his beatings intensified.

The island's commander was Clemente Jose Monteiro Filho, a marine commandante and graduate of the U. S. course in military intelligence in Panama. Monteiro came only twice to watch Jean Marc being tortured. The prisoners were blindfolded, but Monteiro's distinctive voice gave him away. Women prisoners said he looked in more often on them, especially when they were stripped naked.

Among the torturers themselves there was a division, an acknowledgment that a few were sadists and the others merely career men who were following orders. One man who enjoyed his assignment was an agent from DOPS named Solimar. Half admiringly, the other guards called him Doctor Bottleopener for his skill in extracting the last bit of information from the most stubborn prisoner. Solimar was very small, but his energy was prodigious. Jean Marc wondered whether he used drugs. Other torturers often complained of being tired, but Solimar could go on for six and seven hours.

Yet he was not the leader. That man was Alfredo Poeck, the navy commander who had been so impressed by his U. S. training in psywar at Fort Bragg. Poeck tried to protect his reputation by using the alias Doctor Mike.

The fury of the assault of these men on Jean Marc astounded him. He saw how unprepared Brazilians of his generation were for a political war. In Vietnam, fighting had gone on for a quarter of a century; to be a young Vietnamese meant arming oneself for war. But after the first Vargas regime, Brazil had enjoyed nearly twenty years of peace and democracy. Torture had no place in Jean Marc's universe. Until the Isle of Flowers, his greatest pain had come at the hands of his dentist. Now he found himself isolated in a room with men who let him know that they hated him and felt not a trace of compassion for his suffering.

These men routinely wrapped wires around his penis and his testicles, betraying no embarrassment at the intimacy of handling his genitals. With the end of one wire attached to his sex, Jean Marc had the other stuck into his ear, and both were connected to a battery-operated field telephone. Jean Marc recognized the telephone. His marine reserve unit had used equipment like it, supplied by the United States through the military assistance program.

When the crank was turned, voltage leapt between the wires, shocking Jean Marc's tenderest skin. When they wanted to apply the shocks to his mouth, a torturer first put on a rubber glove to hold the wire in place.

Other times, wires were attached to Jean Marc's fingers or, with clothespins, to his nipples. Brazilians called the pins crocodiles because of their wooden jaws. Jean Marc found it disturbing to see those harmless adjuncts to the family wash now appear as instruments of suffering. It was one more proof that the world was mad.

There was another torture Jean Marc hated even more.

The guards took paddles-flat pieces of wood with holes drilled through them-that were normally used to discipline schoolboys. A swat or two left a nasty stinging, like a nun's knitting needle, but until the Island of Flowers the paddle had been nothing for Jean Marc to fear. Now the torturers used them hours at a time, repeatedly beating his head, his kidneys, his sex.

Those beatings and shocks went on for seven days, the first four without interruption. Jean Marc was sure he would not live. What offense justified this fury? Setting fire to a jeep? Giving a few speeches?

On the seventh day, blindfolded and beaten on the ears until his eardrums seemed about to burst, until the inside of his head ached worse than any bruise on his body, Jean Marc learned the answer. He heard Commander Monteiro translating into English the questions put to Jean Marc: "What groups did you belong to?" "Where are its members?"

Jean Marc also heard a man speaking to the commander in English with a United States accent. At the time, Jean Marc was hanging upside down, trussed like a roasting chicken, his wrists and ankles tied to a pole called the parrot's perch. The guards were giving him electric shocks on the inside of his ears. Yet he heard the astonishing news and understood the frenzy that went into his beating.

The U. S. ambassador to Brazil had been kidnapped.

Hidden Terrors

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