They came for us
First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out.
Because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out.
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out.
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak for me.”
Martin Niemöller, 1946
Recent revelations by whistleblower Dawn Wooten, exposed that at ICE detention centers, doctors have been performing hysterectomies on unsuspecting patients. Her revelations, while appalling and detestable, are not surprising to me. I’ve seen this before. I know this movie well. It’s like The Ten Commandments playing on television during Good Friday, I know what happens next. I can quote this story line for line.
As a Latin American History scholar, I’ve spent many years familiarizing myself with people like Cornelius Rhoads, a former US Army doctor and hospital administrator who was oversaw racist and barbaric human experimentation projects. I have learned about forced sterilizations on colonial islands through documentaries like La Operación. I’ve combed through the published studies of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment on African American males who were injected with syphilis. I am well aware of the medical community’s penchant for using people in Africa to conduct clinical trials for prescription drugs.
There is an extensive and sordid history of the United States government agencies conducting unethical medical experiments on different populations, disproportionally targeting people of color. Quite often, the atrocities perpetrated against targeted people somehow never seem to find mainstream awareness, even as the results of such violent acts have contributed to “medical breakthroughs.”
As shocking and deplorable as the history of oppressive medical experimentation by this country on people of color is, it is very much interwoven into the fabric of the definition of what it is to be “American”. It is a definition that underscores the racism that this country is founded upon, which has been projected globally through foreign policy.
Medical experimentation isn’t the only destructive act carried out by this country historically. There is an extensive record of ‘experimentation’ in the form of political interventionism across this hemisphere; in the home countries of the people of color that are simultaneously racially targeted here. This very much defines and exemplifies the true racist nature of this country—exposing the political reality of who are considered expendable subjects in the project of empire-building. Here is a small list.
In 1965, the United States was operating the Phoenix Program in Vietnam during the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson. It was a C.I.A. initiative which fostered the formation of counter-insurgency groups whose responsibility was to target political opposition and subject them to torture, rape, murder, and assassinations as a means of destabilizing and undermining them. Some accounts estimate up to 80,000 victims of the Phoenix Program by its culmination in 1972, a program executed by locals under the direction of C.I.A. The intelligence collected was repackaged and repurposed, and the program’s framework would resurface in Operation Condor. This refers to a 1975 C.I.A. operation in South America that coordinated the oppression of opposing political activists using extra judicial means to disappear journalists, use rape as a weapon of terror, murder activists, and instill right-wing governments under military dictatorial mandates.
According to documents recovered from police station basement in Paraguay, Condor began when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s director of national intelligence Manuel Contreras invited the military liaisons of several South American countries to engage in coordinated efforts to rid each other’s countries of political dissidents. Contreras was a graduate of the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA), also known as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), an institution located at Fort Benning in Georgia that trained its students in all measures of repressing political dissent. It prepared its military graduates to take power and construct police states in their home countries under the mantra of preserving law and order, and maintaining the consolidation of power vested in rightwing doctrine and policy.
Many infamous strongmen, henchmen and dictators that retained power in Latin America have graduated from the SOA. This includes the military dictator Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina (in power from 1976-1981), during which an estimated 13,000 to 30,000 political dissidents were murdered and disappeared during this period. During his trial in an Argentine courtroom, it was revealed that approximately 500 babies were taken from their parents, who were being held in detention centers, and 80% of them were never reunited with their parents.
Another graduate of SOA was Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer Suarez, who took power in a coup that lasted from 1971 to 1978 (and again assuming the presidency from 1997 to 2001). Through Operation Condor, Banzer Suarez had the former Bolivian president, Juan Jose Torres, tortured and assassinated after he was forced into exile. Banzer also appointed Nikolaus “Klaus” Barbie to his administration, a.k.a. the Butcher of Lyon, the noted SS and Gestapo torturer under Hitler’s Nazi regime.
The graduates of the SOA were sent back to their respective countries to unleash the blood thirsty, undemocratic oppression that has plagued this side of the globe throughout the Americas, all orchestrated and coordinated by the United States. As recent as 2018, the U.S. was still very much involved in subversive political oversight through Operation Thesaurus (later as Rubicon), using “Crypto AG”, a C.I.A. front that manufactured encryption machines to gather intel and monitor the political strategies of countries. All this political maneuvering was not circumstantial, nor was it a benevolent attempt to rein in a chaotic political landscape. It was exactly what the United States had declared they would do. It was the calculated outcome of an expressed aspiration to become an empire.
I learned about the Monroe Doctrine in grade school, wherein James Monroe in his State of the Union Address in 1823 declared to the world that anyone attempting to involve themselves in the western hemisphere would be considered an act of war. This declaration was not mere grandstanding filled with empty rhetoric, to date the US has been involved in military conflicts virtually each year since the Revolutionary War in 1775, apart from only a few short lapses. The US has more than 700 acknowledged military bases in 130 countries across the globe, even in enemy territory like the one in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The United States has been prepping for this moment its entire existence, invading country after country, initiating coup de tats of governments like we did in Guatemala or usurping leaders like we did to the Shah of Iran, assassinating heads of state, like Patrice Lumumba, and our attempts on Castro and Chavez. This was the manifest destiny that was so often affectionately referred to by so many presidents and political pundits and ingrained in us from an early age through the singing of songs like America the Beautiful; And it was achieved by undermining democratic values through sinister schemes.
Currently, across this country, people are being snatched from city streets by masked, unidentified police, like the ones off Portland streets, just like in Condor. Currently, the police are conducting extra judicial executions, like they have done to so many Black people (#SayHerName), just like in Condor. Journalists are being attacked and undermined using catch phrases like “fake news”, just like in Condor. There are detention centers where children are being taken from their families only to be lost in the system, just like in Argentina during Condor, while women are undergoing hysterectomies without their consent.
There are calls for the imprisonment of political rivals, first with “Lock Her Up” followed by the calls for investigating Joe Biden and his son. There are armed militias roaming the streets that are coordinating with the state, as witnessed in Kenosha. There is the undermining of the electoral process with purging of voters from electoral rolls and reductions in polling locations.
There is the silencing of political dissension, like the labeling of BLM movement as a terror organization. There is the raiding of government funds and the enriching of heads of state, which Trump has continually done since achieving office. And just the other day, after numerous instances throughout his administration of stating that laws don’t apply to him, he stated that he would not leave office or transition power peacefully.
In our educational system academic curricula centers a Eurocentric and white supremacist version of world history. Much of the history and truths of the people of color throughout Latin America are not extensively covered by institutionalized curricula, resulting in a lack of context for the political realities of countries that we share this hemisphere with. The arrogance, and exceptionalism, imbedded in U.S. culture contributes to a collective ignorance.
We continue to believe our government is benevolent—even in the absence of benevolence—and continue to believe that our oppressive actions across the globe would never affect us; that we are safe and insulated. We are even blind to the “insurgencies” of the US government into our own lives—through institutions such as the Supreme Court. We are currently witnessing a right-wing takeover that will eventually serve as an instrument to deploy harm, just like in Condor.
We have never concerned ourselves with the plights of people of color across Latin America. We’ve never confronted ourselves about the realities of what our government actually is—so we never realized that what this government does abroad could easily be redirected at us. This collective ignorance, whether intentional or not, is the result of the US education system and “American” culture, which focuses history through a Eurocentric lens while dismissing the realities of people of color throughout this hemisphere.
It is an epistemology that prevents the population from recognizing the ways in which we have victimized our Latin American neighbors. We stood by watching as our government invaded and interfered and disrupted political dynamics throughout the Americas for more than a century. We scorn them when they come here to seek asylum from the upheavals that we are responsible for. And now, we face the same repression from our own government in all of the same ways. We didn’t speak up when our government came for our Latin American neighbors. Martin Niemöller warned us about the consequences of inaction. Now, we must speak up for ourselves.
Ivan Waldo, a Bronx resident, holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Puerto Rican Studies and is currently a student at the CUNY Graduate Center studying the political relationship and colonial realities of the island of Puerto Rico with the United States.
