How Panama Became the SKYNET for Orwellian Totalitarianism in the Americas

(or Why Green Berets in Panama have never been a good thing)

“WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”

- George Orwell’s “1984” (Big Brother Mantra)

There is the well-known saying that “History is Written by Victors,” a line made famous by Churchill though not the originator. It is a phrase that we have all heard and agree to be true largely from the vantage point, whether consciously or not, that we, that is the western world, make up this grouping of said “victors.” In other words, a point for our team so to speak, is a point for us the people. And who could have argued with such a perspective until not that long ago, that we the western people, most notably the American people, were living the most luxuriant and privileged lives by far superseding that of anyone else in the world.

To the majority of the world, which we viewed living in varying degrees of abject poverty and backwardness, to these subordinate social classes of “Second World” and “Third World” people who saw the most wonderful and extraordinary wealth depicted on the black-and-white screens of our glistening Hollywood movies – to this “other” world we must have appeared to all be living the life of a prince or princess in our own small castle or palace, and whose largest concerns appeared to revolve around romance and weather appropriate attire.

However, as time has gone by, there has become a very clear and evident need to review what exactly is meant by this phrase “History is Written by Victors” - for who in fact are the victors in the landscape of geopolitical warfare that has been waging for over an entire century, a warfare that has increasingly shown itself to consider victory over said ‘enemy’ to not just include a blurred idea of a savage foreign ‘enemy’ but has clearly come to encompass the idea of an ‘enemy’ within.

Increasingly the notion of Victory is not a notion that includes even the western people, who thought themselves the favourites and darlings of such a colossal war machine. Increasingly Victory means the success of an Idea, an Ideology which views itself the pinnacle of a natural hierarchy of the world, and those who resist this ‘natural order’ of things will be seen as an ‘enemy’ to the security of its envisioned social equilibrium.

In fact, Orwell himself was a part of this envisioned system of equilibrium in service to a ‘natural hierarchy.’ Orwell wrote his book “1984” after his experiences working in Burma working as an Imperial policeman where he had been supervising and participating in torture techniques used against the Burmese people in service of the British Empire [more on this story in Part III of this series]. In fact, George Orwell attended the infamous brainwashing (and buggery) institution of young boys, aka Eton, during the same time as Aldous and Julian Huxley. It is interesting that the two, arguably most famous dystopic novels of the 20th century, that is “1984” and “The Brave New World” were written by individuals that had been conditioned in the same environment.[1] Thus, Orwell, who continued to work for British Intelligence after his Burma experience, likely not an entirely voluntary situation, had become simultaneously the tormentor-programmer as well as the tormented-programmed. In other words, both the characters O’Brien and Winston, were different sides to Orwell himself, a collection of experiences he had undergone and inflicted as a policeman in Burma, portrayed in a so-called “dystopic future” in his book “1984,” when in fact it had already become a reality.[2]

In this three-part series, the story of these Second World and Third World people will be told, however, not in the isolated context of their collective tragedy, their collective enslavement to a system that we in the western world have largely turned a blind eye to as something detached from the glistening world we live in - but rather this story will be told in context of how today, such an Orwellian system has, with all of its monstrosity, finally come home to roost after years of experimenting on the “Second” and “Third World” subordinate peoples.

After all of these years that we thought to ourselves that such a system made up of secret police with their secret prisons, and their secret tortures would never be implemented in our own shining world, let it now be fully realised, that this vision of the Victors, never once included you in its idea for the New Dawn Utopia it is working to bring about.

How SKYNET and Orwellian Parallel States Have Already been Established in the Americas – You Just Never Knew It

Panama has been a long strategic stronghold for American interests. In fact, Panama is the very product of those colonial interests, originally being part of Colombia.[3] During the 1880s, a French engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps (the same not so coincidentally who would also construct another imperial strategic stronghold – the Suez Canal) was tasked to construct the Panama Canal, which at the time was simply known as Colombia. Colombia thinking this simply a means of faster travel and increased trade agreed to the proposal.

During Theodore Roosevelt’s Anglophile presidency, the United States demanded that Colombia sign a treaty turning the isthmus over as American property. Colombia refused. As with what happened in so much of the world during this time in service to Empire, Americans sent their warship transporting U.S. soldiers in 1903, ransacked towns and killed the popular local militia commander and declared themselves the owners of the newly created Panama, whom they had the arrogance to call an “independent” nation. A puppet government was quickly installed and Americans likely did not bat an eye, thinking they had “freed” subject people from barbarism in some distant land.

Panama continued to be an American colony and at least four U.S. military bases were built around the Canal Zone, Fort Sherman (the primary “defensive” base for the Caribbean sector of the Canal), Fort Amador, Fort Clayton and Fort Grant in 1912 after Panama’s inception as an “independent” nation.

In fact over the years there would be over 20 US military bases (Army, Air Force and Navy) stationed in Panama. Several of these U.S. military bases were operational until the very end of the 20^th century. And several continue to be in operation today.

Things became tumultuous in Panama during the 1980s, as John Perkins discusses in his book “Confessions of an Economic Hitman,” Panama had become one of the many victims cheated out of their own money through debt-traps that were then funneled through the World Bank, USAID and other foreign “aid” organizations and into the pockets of a few wealthy families, including those living in Central and South America.

This was a ruse at gun point that was being implemented throughout the Americas. President of Panama Omar Torrijos (1968-1981) was one of many Central and South American leaders who were standing up to this colossal threat of empire, as confirmed by Perkins himself. Torrijos is referred to as a dictator in the United States for the simple reason that he was not in service to American interests. Officially recognised presidents of Panama by the U.S., contrary to what we are told, were not democratically selected by the Panamanian people. Torrijos was assassinated in 1981 for his defiance, orchestrated as a plane crash, though, as Perkins confirms it was a CIA hit since he who had been tasked as an economic hit-man of Panama had failed to do his job and thus the CIA jackals had been brought in to finish it. The death of Torrijos would be something that would haunt Perkins’ guilty conscience for a number of decades.

After the death of Torrijos, Manuel Noriega soon after took control as a puppet government of the United States from 1983 to 1989. The relationship was a dirty one to be sure, with a great deal of drug trafficking involved, ultimately in service of the creation and funding of parallel states that were being built up in service to the American Empire throughout South and Central America.

[Note: Parallel states, aka Shadow states, are set up when a state, in order to keep up a more pristine public appearance, creates parallel (underground) institutions, such as police force, task forces, prisons, interrogation centers etc. that are created separate from the above-ground institutions. Sometimes a parallel state can be run so smoothly that even political leaders in office are unaware of their existence. These parallel states came to be known as Operation Condor in South America, which we will discuss in greater detail shortly. They are known more broadly as Operation Gladio in Europe which was, along with the Vietnam Phoenix program, a model for Condor.]

However, the U.S. being unhappy with Noriega’s increasing defiance decided to forcefully remove him and invaded Panama in 1989. Since then, we are told that Panama has now truly become a real sovereign nation, however, America’s very overt presence with its active military bases have continued to this day. Thus, for over 120 years and going, there have been active U.S. military bases stationed in Panama.

Since a US warship was sent to Panama in 1903, Panama has been a colonial possession of the United States if not by name then by its sheer military presence – this tends not to leave a country free of deeply embedded imperial control over its essential institutions and functions – including matters of intelligence and security.

One very evident example of this is the fact that Panama had become the SKYNET for Orwellian Parallel States in the Americas beginning in the 1970s in service to imperial interests and there is no reason to suspect that this practice has ended but rather that it has in fact grown in its scope and execution today…

The Conferences of the American Armies and COPECOMI/CONDORTEL: The SKYNET of the Americas

“You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity…Reality exists only in the human mind, nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.”

– O’Brien in George Orwell’s “1984”

During the 1970s, something that had already been implemented in western Europe under Operation Gladio, and Vietnam under the Phoenix Program, began to expand upon these models of Orwellian parallel states and clandestine warfare and implemented them in Central and South America organised under a centralised computer network that had been set up by the Americans in Panama, known as CONDORTEL specifically relating to Operation Condor and COPECOMI as a more broad American purview, which oversaw and connected all of these parallel states in coordination with each other, implementing hunter-killer squads modeled off of and trained by the Green Berets (Special Forces) of the Phoenix Program.

The question as to the ideological reason why these programs were implemented and unleashed upon the general public to terrorise the people into submission will be answered in Part III of this series. For now a general outline of the Condor program and how it functioned through a centralised computer system stationed in Panama under the purview of certain select groupings notably the CIA will be discussed here.

The militaries in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay were the key protagonists of Condor, spreading dirty war, that is war that is not governed by any law or ethics, throughout the region and beyond. During the Cold War, tens of thousands of Latin American men, women, and children were tortured and murdered as a result of such methods within the framework of Operation Condor.

Although survivors of Condor and some human rights observers began perceiving Condor’s existence in the mid-1970s, the clandestine system remained shrouded in secrecy for another decade, a well-kept secret of the Cold War. ‘The investigation of Condor initiated by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, whose extradition request led to the 1998 arrest of Pinochet in London, produced new revelations. Then, in June 1999, President Bill Clinton ordered the release of the first of three tranches of declassified US documents.’[4] Until that time hardly anything was known about Operation Condor, not coincidentally it was largely from these declassified files that knowledge of Operation Gladio, a secret war against the western European people, was also collected outlining its details on a level that was not possible before.

Operation Condor, formed in the 1970s, extended the dirty wars across borders. The system’s key members were the military regimes of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, later joined by Ecuador and Peru in less central roles. ‘The Condor militaries made use of a highly sophisticated system of command, control, and intelligence in their counterinsurgency war. Within the framework of Operation Condor, military and paramilitary commandos “disappeared” refugees and exiles – including democratic leaders – who had fled coups and repression in their own countries. Some were targeted in Europe and the United States, and in 1980 Condor operations and methods appeared in Central America. Condor was a secret strike force of the military regimes, and it signified an unprecedented level of coordinated repressions in Latin America.’[5]

J. Patrice McSherry, author of “Predatory States” writes: “The Condor system linked together secret units within the military intelligence forces of member countries into one transnational group or organization, focused on extraterritorial action. A former agent of Chile’s secret police referred to the organization’s commanders as the Condor Group. In each country, Condor operatives were drawn from branches of the military, intelligence organizations, and police, and also included right-wing civilians, all operating under centralized military command. Cover Condor operations were state policy under the military dictatorship of the era but were carried out largely by special squadrons that were top secret and not known to all government or military officials.”[6]

Thus, the Orwellian states were born in the Americas under the sleeping eye of Americans. It was meant not to be at first obvious. These Orwellian parallel states would not come into existence out in the open, but as an almost parallel universe. It was a brilliant solution to how to conduct a military dictatorship that would be forcefully implemented mostly from within the shadows. ‘Through the use of terror, the military states sought to extinguish the aspirations for social justice and deeper democracy held by millions of people during the 1960s and ‘70s. The evidence suggests that Operation Condor, and the generalized repression of the Cold War years in Latin America, represented a military ‘solution’ to an age-old problem: the distribution of power and wealth in human society, who gets what, how, and why.’[7]

McSherry writes:[8] “What were the defining features of Operation Condor? First, its specialization: cross-border and foreign operations against exiles. In this sense, Condor was a subset of the broader repression carried out by the militaries within their own territories, although they used the same methods. Condor squads carried out cross-border surveillance, targeting, abduction, torture, and transfer of exiles, working with counterpart intelligence apparatuses or with extreme-right paramilitary networks in member countries. Operations were directed by specialized units within larger intelligence organs of the Condor countries, such as the Foreign Department of the gestapo-like DINA [Chile] and the Extraterritorial Task Force (GTE) of the Argentine army intelligence apparatus, Battalion 601.

…A second trait of Condor was its multinational character. Operation Condor united militaries that had previously considered themselves adversaries and had long histories of suspicion and conflict. On the operational level, Condor units included specially trained men from two or more countries, organized into squadrons or task forces based on the model of Special Forces teams, with expertise in unconventional warfare and ‘counterterror’ operations (the use of ‘terror to fight terror’). One 1976 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report stated, for example, that one Condor unit was ‘structured much like a US Special Forces Team’...”

Thus, Condor squadrons, that is, death squadrons, were explicitly structured to mimic the US Special Forces Team, aka the Green Berets. As we will see, it was the Vietnam Phoenix Program, which was the first to implement, for Americans, the new form of warfare (counterinsurgency warfare), that was executed by US Special Forces, aka the Green Berets. In fact, Condor squadrons were often trained directly by Green Berets often in the Panama Canal Zone (this will be discussed further shortly) and in certain situations Green Berets have accompanied these Condor death squadrons on specific missions.

As already mentioned, Operation Condor is what allowed for the formation of parallel states in South America, which relied upon the implementation of parastatal structures, McSherry explains:[9] “…parastatal structures as the forces and infrastructure of ‘black world’ special operations. This hidden part of the state…the parallel state - includes parapolice and paramilitary forces, harbored and directed by the state, with access to a vast shadow infrastructure including secret prisons, fleets of unmarked cars and unregistered aircraft, unofficial cemeteries, secure communications systems, and other parallel structures funded by ‘black budgets’.

In Latin America, the parallel state augmented the lethal capabilities of the military dictatorships while allowing them to retain the appearance of legality and a certain legitimacy. Parastatal structures permitted the militaries to avoid international law and human rights guarantees, prevent public scrutiny, expand the powers of the state over society, and give up the militaries free rein to utilize extreme and lawless methods against ‘subversion.’ The parastatal forces created by the counterinsurgents included the clandestine groups, secret intelligence organizations, ‘task forces,’ and civilian informant networks acting covertly on behalf of the state.”

Under Operation Condor, military intelligence organizations created special clandestine detention centers for foreign prisoners outside of the normal prison system, hidden in military bases or abandoned buildings. Torture and execution were rife in such centers. ‘Exiles and refugees who were legally arrested could be passed into the covert Condor system, at which point all information available to the outside world about the person ceased. Prisoners were transferred across borders without passports, on unregistered flights, and like the other disappeared, their detention and imprisonment were denied by the state. To avoid detection, Condor disposed of victims by burning their bodies or throwing them into the sea. The pervading sense of ambiguity, unreality, and dread created by the parallel state was a key element of the terror used by the militaries to consolidate power over society.’[10]

McSherry writes:[11] “Condor employed a computerized database of thousands of individuals considered politically suspect and had archives of photos, microfilms, surveillance reports, psychological profiles, reports on membership in organizations, personal and political histories, and lists of friends and family members, as well as files on all manner of organizations. Several sources indicate that the CIA provided powerful computers to the Condor system (and, in fact, no other country in the region was technologically capable of doing so).

An Argentine military source told a US Embassy contact in 1976 that the CIA had played a key role in setting up computerized links among the intelligence and operations units of the six Condor states. A former Bolivian agent of Condor, Juan Carlos Fortun, told a Bolivian journalist in the early 1990s that an advanced system of communications was installed in the Ministry of the Interior in La Paz [Bolivia], along with a telex system interlinked with the five other Condor countries. He said that a special machine to encode and decode messages was made especially for the Condor system by the Logistics Department of the CIA.

The Condor network’s secure communication system, Condortel, enabled Condor controllers to exchange data on suspects, track the movement of individuals across borders on various forms of transport, and transmit orders to operation teams, as well as share and receive intelligence information across a large geographical area. Condortel allowed Condor operations centers in members countries to communicate with one another and with the parent station in a US facility in the Panama Canal Zone.

This link to the US military-intelligence complex in Panama is a key piece of evidence regarding secret US sponsorship of Condor…Operation Condor had access to an encrypted (or encoded) system within the secure US communications network based in the Canal Zone.”

Thus, the Panama Canal Zone was the official headquarters for CONDORTEL, and as we will see, was also the headquarters for the American training schools, notably the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), in US Special Forces counterinsurgency tactics that would be taught to those who would make up the death squads of Condor in South America and Central America. In other words, the Green Berets stationed in Panama were training the death squads of South America and later Central America.

McSherry continues:[12] “In the Americas, the United States acted in the 1940s to establish new inter-American security structures and agreements to interlink the Latin American militaries and solidify defenses against world communism. Washington took the lead in unifying the militaries under one doctrine and mission, upgrading their capabilities, and facilitating coordinated counterinsurgency operations. After the 1959 Cuban revolution, the US security establishment dramatically reoriented, reshaped, expanded, and mobilized the existing hemispheric system to combat the threat of communist-inspired subversion. The Latin-American military mission was redefined to combat ‘internal enemies’ as the primary threat [like Operation Gladio would do against the western European people]…militaries were reorganized and trained to undertake aggressive counterinsurgency operations within their own societies.

US strategists led the integration of the hemisphere’s militaries within a dense network of continental defense organizations, including USARCARIB (1946), later called the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), the Inter-American Defense Board (1948), and the Conference of American Armies (1960).

SOUTHCOM and Special Action Forces were ‘unilateral components’ of the inter-American military system, to ensure US dominance and control. Essentially, US policy centered on gaining strategic control of military and security forces in weaker states as a means to mold their internal security environments and, on a deeper level, shape political outcomes. As a spokesman for SOUTHCOM said in 2003, ‘If we can train and equip other people to act in what we consider to be US national interests, then that, of course, is our job. And we have been successful in training other people to do that so far, particularly in the last few decades in Latin America’.”

‘The United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), located in Doral in Greater Miami, Florida, is one of the eleven unified combatant commands in the United States Department of Defense. It is responsible for providing contingency planning, operations, and security cooperation for Central and South America, the Caribbean (except U.S. commonwealths, territories, and possessions), their territorial waters, and for the force protection of U.S. military resources at these locations. USSOUTHCOM is also responsible for ensuring the defense of the Panama Canal and the canal area.’ Source: USSOUTHCOM website February 2024.

USSOUTHCOM banner

Above is the banner for the USSOUTHCOM, notice that the United States has made it rather clear that it considers itself as the head commander over security within Central and South America. The reader should note the emphasis of the USSOUTHCOM’s role in ensuring the defense of the Panama Canal and the canal area, this is a prerogative that continues to this day.

The USSOUTHCOM is still in operation today and thus there is a strong reason to believe that CONDORTEL/COPECOMI, based in the Canal Zone, is also still in operation. Thus, Green Berets in Panama, should also be viewed as an ongoing central feature to this apparatus that has existed in Panama for over 50 years.

McSherry writes:[13] “In 1960, the US commander-in-chief of SOUTHCOM, Major TF Bogart, initiated the Conference of American Armies, a hemispheric security organization dominated by the United States and its organizational and ideological doctrine. US military officers played a prominent role in these conferences. SOUTHCOM hosted the first, at Fort Amador in the Panama Canal Zone, where commanders from seventeen armies discussed specific accords to guide and regulate future combines activities. The yearly conferences, secret session that excluded civilians, provided a means for the Latin American armies, under US tutelage, to form coordinated strategies – with no civilian input or control – and solidify an anticommunist front in the Americas.

…According to a 1985 history of the conferences [Conference of American Armies], early meetings in the 1960s focused on the creation of a continental doctrine to fight ‘communist aggression’; the interchange of intelligence about subversive groups and international communism; the establishment of a permanent inter-American intelligence committee, located in the Panama Canal Zone; the setting up of schools of intelligence in each country; the creation of a system of encoded telecommunications among the armies; and programs of training for all the armies in strategies of countersubversion, counterrevolution, and internal security. Operation Condor, which was organized later, was clearly an outgrowth of these transnational structures and programs.

In the 1963 Conference of the American Armies, SOUTHCOM focused on international communism and emphasized the importance of hemispheric communications systems. US personnel played a key role in setting up military and intelligence communications networks in order to integrate counterinsurgency command and control throughout the hemisphere. In the 1965 conference, the twin concept of ‘security and development’ in the continental doctrine were a central focus. In the 1969 conference, the armies shared information on communist subversion in the Americas and discussed the necessity of exchanging information on subversion, a topic that appeared repeatedly in subsequent conferences.

In June 1973, a meeting of the Conference of Chiefs of Communications of the American Armies was held in Brasilia, Brazil, in which discussion took place regarding how the military communications network should operate. One document, ‘Permanent Instructions for Transmissions for the Network of Inter-American Military Communication [RECIM],’ originating in Fort Clayton ([Panama] Canal Zone) and dated October 1973, was sent confidentially to eighteen Latin American armies. The permanent Commission of Inter-American Military Communication (Comision Permanente de Comunicaciones Militares Inter-Americana, or COPECOMI), was set up during this period.

The headquarters of COPECOMI was in the [Panama] Canal Zone, and the system served as a means to upgrade the communications capabilities of the armies and link them together. Another document discussed how to integrate the overlapping communications systems of RECIM and COPECOMI; how COPECOMI should be financed (at the time, the US Army mainly financed the system); and how very high frequency (VHF) signals could be used for military communications to give them greater security and speed. This system may have later housed Condor’s secure communications network.

School of Americas training also changed dramatically after the Cuban revolution, specifically in 1961-62. The US Army objectives was to make US strategies and doctrine dominant in Latin America…During those years, it is known that SOA [School of Americas] instructors taught torture techniques and other dirty war methods being used at the same time in Vietnam.

In Vietnam in the late 1960s, the Phoenix Program – a CIA-led counterinsurgency operation using assassination, terror, and psychological warfare – was decimating civilian sympathisers of the Vietnamese insurgents. Much of the ‘dirty work’ was done by paramilitary hunter-killer squads and criminal thugs drawn from the ranks of South Vietnamese officers and civilians, while US personnel provided lists of suspects, participated in interrogations, and supervised, controlled, and financed the program. There was no due process, and tens of thousands of civilians were tortured and killed. US soldiers in the Phoenix Program were sworn to secrecy; they were warned that revealing the classified operation to unauthorized persons would result, at minimum, in a $10,000 fine and ten years in prison.

… In the 1975 Conference of American Armies, further discussions took place on the adoption of standards for the inter-American military communications system, COPECOMI [whose headquarters were in the Panama Canal Zone]. In the 1981 conference in Washington DC an accord was signed among the armies to inhibit the activities of subversive organizations of any member country in another member country. Washington thus fostered the consolidation and integration of the region’s military and intelligence force and laid the groundwork for multinational, coordinated countersubversive policies, which spawned Operation Condor.”

Operation Condor emerged in the context of a new form of warfare in world history: counterinsurgency, born out of the CIA led Green Beret Phoenix Program in Vietnam. This new form of warfare, counterinsurgency warfare, transformed the nature of state and society, restructuring it in profound ways. ‘Intrinsically linked to the counterinsurgents’ reshaping of the polity was their creation and mobilization of a parallel or shadow state apparatus engineered to implement and extend the state’s repressive power over society. This parallel apparatus was created to carry out covert or secret policies, to avoid legal constraints, and to circumvent any form of accountability. Operation Condor as a transnational state terror system was a product of counterinsurgency doctrine and training, a cross-border component of the parallel state created by the military regimes. Condor death squads were created as an integral part of a broader counterinsurgency or ‘counterterror’ campaign condone by elite groups as well as key foreign ally, the United States.’[14]

As General Paul Gorman, then chief of the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), said in 1984, counterinsurgency is “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.”[15]

One 1962 US Army PSYOPS manual stated:

“Civilians in the operational area may be supporting their own government or collaborating with an enemy occupation force. An isolation program designed to instill doubt and fear may be carried out, and a positive political action program designed to elicit active support of the guerillas also may be effected. If these programs fail, it may become necessary to take more aggressive action in the form of harsh treatment or even abductions.”[16]

In short, the use of terrorism was an integral part of US counterinsurgency operations and training in the 1960s.

McSherry writes:[17] “French officer Paul Aussaresses, who had participated in torture in Algeria and whose descriptions and justification of torture resulted in a criminal conviction in France in 2001, also trained US officers [including Green Berets] in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Panama in the early 1960s. He instructed Latin America officers in interrogation techniques in Manaus, Brazil, in the 1970s when he was a military attaché there. The training in French methods of counterrevolutionary war included torture techniques and the formation of death squads, Aussaresses said. Indeed, the Frenchman said he had translated French manuals on torture into English during his time in the States.

Aussaresses was named military attaché in Washington, DC, in 1961. One of his US trainees, Robert Komer, later became one of the organizers of the Phoenix Program, the deadly [Green Beret] counterinsurgency campaign that resulted in tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Vietnam.”

McSherry continues: “The French impact was crucial, but given the status of the US government as the hemispheric hegemon, and its enormous resources, US military influence was ultimately the more powerful in Latin America. US national security doctrine and training were imparted to tens of thousands of Latin American officers through US training centers (such as the Army School of the Americas) and in -country Mobile Training Teams (MTTs), equipped and financed through Military Assistance Programs (MAP) and, later, International Military Education and Training (IMET).

The Latin American Special Action Force (1st Special Forces, 8th Special Forces Group) was stationed in the Panama Canal Zone in 1962 and was the main source of MTTs to disseminate the US doctrine in Latin American countries.

MTTs specializing in counterinsurgency warfare advocated unconventional tactics such as subversion, sabotage, and terrorist activities against insurgents. The diffusion of the new security doctrine and organizational model was accompanied by massive US expenditures to reshape the hemispheric security architecture and mobilize its military partners in a US-led anticommunist crusade.

… Moreover, US military and CIA training manuals declassified in the 1990s provided documented evidence that army and CIA instructors taught torture methods, such as the use of electroshock; the use of drugs and hypnosis to induce psychological regression; the sequential use of sensory deprivation, pain, and other means in interrogations; assassination methods; and the use of threats against and abduction of family members to break down prisoner resistance.”

US personnel assisted in the formation of special elite units to conduct aggressive, covert, offensive operations against domestic opposition, accompanied by CIA-designed PSYWAR programs. Significantly, such covert activity was to be used not only in situations of unrest or revolution, but as a preventive means to assure that such a situation would never materialize!

As a secret US national security policy document stated in 1962:

“Where subversive insurgency is virtually non-existent or incipient (PHASE I), the objective is to support the development of an adequate counter-insurgency capability in indigenous military forces through the Military Assistance Program, and to complement the nation-building programs of AID [Agency for International Development] with military civic action [aka paramilitary action]. The same means, in collaboration with AID and CIA, will be employed to develop a similar capability in indigenous paramilitary forces.”[18]

Thus, even in peaceful Third World societies, it was US policy to develop military counterinsurgency forces all the same and add to their capabilities by creating paramilitary auxiliaries. What could be more Orwellian than this? The targeting of people who might at some point in the future become insurgents. The assumption that civilian populations were potentially subversive, even in the absence of lawless behaviour, was akin to implementing a thought police and recognising certain thoughts or assumed thoughts as forms of crime, that is, crimes that are assumed will be committed in a yet to be determined point in time in the future.

The creation of paramilitary forces served to “provide visible and effective demonstrations of the power of the state,” as one US Army study noted.[19] ‘Thus, civilian sectors were weakened and progressive social change halted or reversed in numerous countries. The repressive forces of the state exponentially expanded in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world, in many cases deployed against all forms of political opposition. US doctrine and training deeply shaped the strategic perspectives, organization, logistics, operations, intelligence, and deployment of the Latin American armed forces. It was a policy that contributed to new forms of mass repression in Latin America.’[20]

McSherry writes: “The new security doctrine produced an expansion of the military role in Latin America as the armed forces inserted themselves in political, economic, social, psychological, and cultural spheres, and internationalized domestic conflicts by linking them to the ‘international communist movement.’ CIA personnel worked closely with SOUTHCOM and US military intelligence structures to develop new intelligence organizations in Latin America that would integrate all countersubversive efforts – by police, military, and intelligence forces – under one command.

These new organizations were central to the new counterinsurgency model, and they had access to sophisticated US surveillance and communication technology. Organizations such as DINA (Chile, La Tecnica (Paraguay), and Servico Nacional de Informacoes (National Information Service – SNI, Brazil), all formed with CIA advice and support, became SS-like political policing organizations that were the main instruments of state terror in their societies.

As the intelligence apparatus of the Latin American state expanded, the ideological assumptions of the new security doctrine guided its operations. Increasingly, a person’s ideas – not illegal acts – were the criteria used in decisions to detain or disappear him or her. Counterinsurgency specialists also reengineered police forces and changed their mission from a law enforcement to a militarized model.”

Colombia would serve as one of the earliest models that implemented its parallel state under the overseeing and instruction of the United States. These findings were presented by the US team in charge of this project. In their final report to the US Special Group (counter-insurgency) included a secret supplement that advised extreme measures if Colombia’s internal security faced heightened threats. Quoting the reports Dennis M. Rempe summarizes:

“Civilian and military personnel, clandestinely selected and trained in resistance operations, would be required in order to develop an underground civil and military structure. This organization was to undertake ‘clandestine execution of plans developed by the United States Government toward defined objectives in the political, economic, and military fields’…[including] ‘counter-agent and counter-propaganda’ functions as well as ‘paramilitary, sabotage, and/or terrorist activities against known communist proponents’.”[22]

This revealing proposal exposed a US policy to encourage and develop secret underground units – parallel structures that were essentially death squads – to carry out terrorist acts. Moreover, such units operated not only in the service of their own military, but also to advance US defined plans and objectives.

McSherry writes:[23] “National security doctrine’s [created by the United States] emphasis on the internal enemy and the extralegal methods it advocated had profound ramifications in Latin America. Far from focusing only on communist guerillas, the militaries increasingly targeted broad sectors of society as subversive. New internal security systems erased the boundaries between war and peace, guilt and innocence, deeply rending the social fabric and destroying the bonds of trust between government and society and within society. The focus on war by stealth, against civilian populations, gave rise to strategies of state terror that led to the brutalization, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of people.”

As Jaime Malamud Goti vividly described state terror in Argentina:

“Repression targeted vast social segments. Indeed, the generals’ speeches revealed that the social areas they considered contaminated by subversion were the religious, the political, the educational, the economic, and cultural. Except for a few citizens who stood beyond suspicion, the rest of society was considered to be vulnerable to the inviting advances of this enemy with infinite shapes…To quell this infinite threat, terror became the regime’s principal political tool.”[24]

McSherry writes:[25] “Military terror atomized and traumatized society and caused citizens to retreat to private life. The overwhelming presence of the terrorist state created fear, dissolved social networks, and paralyzed collective political action. In some countries, meetings of any kind (including birthday parties) required state permission. Many witnessed armed squadrons of men break down a neighbor’s door and drag him or her away. Overall, counterinsurgency warfare against ‘internal enemies’ produced a dramatic enlargement of military political power in state and society. Moreover, this form of warfare led directly to the creation of the parallel state.

…To secure at least a minimal acceptance of their legitimacy, the national security states needed to mask the involvement of the state in the atrocities being carried on. Thus, the military rulers created shadow systems to carry out illegal acts that were, on the one hand, visible – part of the strategy of terror – but on the other, deniable. The parallel state allowed the military rulers to claim that the waves of torture, disappearance, and assassination that engulfed their countries were the work of ‘out-of-control death squads’ or ‘internecine conflicts within the left.’ And at some times, these regimes were able to achieve a partial legitimacy, especially vis-à-vis elite groups, based on regime policies that favored elite economic interests and eliminated the ‘leftist threat.’

The parallel state apparatus was thus the invisible side of the military state but closely linked – if secretly – to its visible face. Parastatal death squads carried out disappearances, torture, assassination, and extrajudicial execution covertly, as an appendage of the visible state and under its orders, while affording the military governments deniability and disclaimability.

Parastatal structures were, therefore, an integral part of the internal security apparatus of the military states. While appearing to be out-of-control forces, paramilitary units were actually more dangerous and more powerful because they acted under the secret direction of a military command, backed by the full resources of the state.

The parallel state was an instrument to accomplish secretly what could not be accomplished legally or politically. It was created to carry out policies that violated all laws and norms and to circumvent any limits on the coercive power of the state, allowing the state to sue extreme violence against ‘internal enemies’ beyond all civilized boundaries, with no lawful constraints and with total impunity. Parallel state structures were ‘state owned,’ but they were a deformation of a legitimate state.

…because parallel structures are fundamentally unaccountable and undemocratic whether they are used by states that are ‘democratic’ or ‘undemocratic,’ the distinction between the two becomes blurred…The parallel state represented the growth of a new form of state power, a hidden component of newly rationalized and bureaucratized military dictatorships.”

The Panama base – which housed the SOA, a large CIA station, the headquarters of SOUTHCOM, and the headquarters of the special forces and other military branches – was certainly the center of the hemispheric counterinsurgency effort.

The sophisticated US telecommunications network allowed Condor operation centers to communicate with one another and with the Panama Canal base and to direct covert actions in the region. The unavoidable conclusion is that select US forces had complete knowledge of – and provided unambiguous operational support to Condor intelligence and hunter-killer operations coordinated through the communications network.

In the years of 1973-1975 as the Condor system emerged large numbers of exiles ‘disappeared’ and tortured had begun to be found. Latin Americans perceived a terrible escalation of death squad operations. The aegis of the inter-American security system COPECOMI, cemented the transcontinental countersubversive network. ‘US military and intelligence officials, operating from the Canal Zone headquarters and US embassies, provided vital resources and support to upgrade, modernize, and make more efficient the program of coordinated repression. Using parastatal structures and terrorist operations within the framework of Operation Condor, the militaries consolidated state power, crushed dissent, and extended their reach across the continent.’[26]

Thus, when Green Berets (who have always received their commands from the CIA since the days of Vietnam) are giving “tours” of Panama and warning of a migrant crisis out of South America that has unchecked border crossings throughout Central America, be warned. For there is no reason to assume that the United States does not have the greatest level of supreme control over such operations, having already established a centralised computer system that coordinates with essentially all Central and South American parallel states, that are still in place today, as well as complete control over border security and surveillance throughout the Americas, including that of Central America for the past 50 years.

Thus, if there is a massive migrant border crossing occurring that is going unchecked, it is because the United States army and intelligence clearly wishes this to be so.

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Refer here for Part II of this series.

Cynthia Chung is the President of the Rising Tide Foundation and author of the books “The Shaping of a World Religion” & “The Empire on Which the Black Sun Never Set,” consider supporting her work by making a donation and subscribing to her substack page Through A Glass Darkly.

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Footnotes:

[1] For more on Aldous Huxley see my series “Who Will Be Brave in Huxley’s New World?”

[2] According to reported excerpt from Timothy Leary’s unpublished book “The Cybernetic Society” written in 1987, visiting Aldous Huxley on his deathbed (Aldous was a mentor of Leary’s), Leary wrote “I spent the afternoon of Nov. 20, 1963 at Huxley’s bedside, listening carefully as the dying philosopher spoke in a soft voice about many things. We fashioned a pleasant little literary fugue as he talked about three books he called “Parodies of Paradise,” his own Island, Orwell’s 1984 and Hesse’s Bead Game. Aldous told me with a gentle chuckle that Big Brother, the beloved dictator of Orwell’s nightmare society, was based on Winston Churchill. “Remember Big Brother’s spell-binding rhetoric about the blood, sweat and fears requisitioned from everyone to defeat Eurasia? The hate-sessions? Priceless satire.” Source: https://urbigenous.net/library/huxley_hesse_cybernetic.html

[3] Yes, the United States has its own colonies in case you were not aware, the most well-known and out in the open case being that of the Philippines who became a colony of the United States after the US defeated the Spanish in the War of 1898. Though an American colony, it was called the First Philippine Republic. The Philippines would “officially” become independent in 1946, however, has continued to be largely a land subservient to American geopolitical interests to this day.

[4] J. Patrice McSherry. Predatory States (2005). Pg. xix

[5] J. Patrice McSherry. Predatory States (2005). Pg. xix

[6] Ibid, pg. 2

[7] Ibid, pg. 2

[8] Ibid, pg. 7

[9] Ibid, pg. 8

[10] Ibid, pg. 8-9

[11] Ibid, pg. 9

[12] Ibid, pg. 46

[13] J. Patrice McSherry. Predatory States (2005), pg. 47

[14] J. Patrice McSherry. Predatory States (2005), pg. 47

[15] Cited in Douglas Valentine’s “The Phoenix Program” (1990), pg. 425.

[16] Cited in Doug Stokes’ “US Miltiary Doctrine and COlomia’s war of Terror,” Znet, September 25, 2002.

[17] J. Patrice McSherry. Predatory States (2005). pg. 16.

[18] US State Department, “United States Overseas Internal Defense Policy,” (SECRET), September 1962: 10, 28.

[19] McClintock, The American Connection, pg. 35

[20] J. Patrice McSherry. Predatory States (2005). pg. 18

[21] Ibid, pg. 19

[22] Rempe, Guerillas, pg. 8

[23] J. Patrice McSherry. Predatory States (2005). pg. 20

[24] Jaime Malamud Goti, “State Terror and Memory of What?” University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Review, Vol 21, no. 1 (Fall 1998): 107.

[25] J. Patrice McSherry. Predatory States (2005). pg. 20

[26] Ibid, pg. 48