Luis Almagro: Ignoramus regarding Torture?

Luis Almagro: Ignoramus regarding Torture?
Fecha de publicación: 
26 March 2019
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Consistent with the litany unleashed by Secretary of States and former director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, accusing Cuba “of being the real imperialist power behind Venezuela,” the General Secretary of the OAS, Luis Almagro, has just denounced “the systematic use of torture in Venezuela backed by Cuba, a crime against humanity that shall be investigated as soon as possible.”

According to AFP, the General Secretary of the Ministry of Colonies pointed out, among other abuses: “psychological and physical tortures,” “brutal beatings,” “electric shocks,” “suffocation,” and “sexual abuses,” something you usually find in slums located in Washington, where the OAS has its headquarters. Besides, it must be part of the historical memory, somehow.

As expected, at least in his childhood and adolescence, Luis Almagro, who is born in Uruguay, certainly happened to hear about Operation Condor, which is described by Wikipedia as: “a coordination plan of action and mutual support among top leaders in South American regimes —Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia, and randomly Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela with the complicity of the U.S.”

According to the online encyclopedia, the plan was implemented in the decades of 1970s and 1980s to eradicate from the face of the Earth the scourge of communism in Latin America: “it implied, officially and deliberately, the monitoring, detention, torture during interrogation, transfers of prisoners among countries, and forced disappearance or killings of people labeled by such regimes as subversive to the order created, or contrary to their policies or ideology.”

In those “Terror Files” found in Paraguay in 1992, the number of victims reached 50.000 people assassinated, 30.000 missing, and 400.000 incarcerated.

But, in case he does not like history, and he really wants to do some research about torture, Almagro just needs to imitate Brazil head of state Jair Bolsonaro and tours the headquarters of the CIA, whose current director, Gina Haspel, has a broad expertise on the subject.

As everyone knows, Haspel has spent more than 30 years in the intelligence agency and oversaw a torture program in Iraq from a secret prison she led in Thailand where Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, two collaborators of Bin Laden, were imprisoned. Up to 80 times these men were subjected to the torture techniques known as waterboarding —water poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages. They also suffered forced nudity, sleep deprivation, isolation and low temperatures, stress positions, physical assaults, and solid food deprivation.

A propos of jails and tortures, if that meeting with Haspel is not enough for him (Almagro), he could perfectly visit the concentration camp of the U.S. in Guantanamo, Cuba. The OAS, in this case, seems to know nothing about it.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Diaz/CubaSi Translation Staff

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