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Dictatorpedia
I am not a historian, so all
the information in Dictatorpedia is not history, but a personal view of some
facts.*
I also want to explain that I include only right-wing dictatorships
in this document, because in my eyes the dictatorship of the proletariat is a
completely different subject which needs to be analyzed separately. So to cover
this subject you need not only another document, but also another game than "Sim
Junta" (I strongly suggest the board game "Kremlin", from Avalon
Hill)
*Some parts of this document are information I found in
various books, Internet sites or magazines and in some cases I took the liberty
to use parts of text as they were and I hope that I didn't offend anyone by
doing so. For any comments please contact simjunta@excite.com
Chile
Augusto Pinochet
He was born in November
25, 1915 in Valparaiso of Chile. He graduated from the military academy in
Santiago in 1936, becoming a career military officer who was appointed army
commander in chief by President Allende 18 days before the coup. In 1973, with
the support of Usa (as president Nixon explained later in an interview, with
Castro in Cuba and Allende in Chile, U.S.A felt as the filling of a big
commounist sandwich, so they had to take action!!!), he planned and led a
military coup, which was the bloodiest in 20th-century South America. At least
5,000 were killed in the September military onslaught, among them the
democratically elected president Salvador Allende. He was killed fighting and
his body was recovered from the bombed remains of the Presidential Palace, which
had been heavily attacked by fighter jets. It was the start of a 17-year rule by
General Pinochet. But the bloodshed did not stop there. Pinochet was named
president of the victorious junta's governing council, and he immediately moved
to crush Chile's liberal opposition, arresting approximately 130,000 individuals
over a three-year period. In the following years a lot more Chilians were
arrested, tortured, executed or exiled! In 1976 the Pinochet's regime
anti-democratic tactics were glimpsed by the whole world when a former Allende
ambassador to the US was killed by a car bomb in Washington DC. Ten years later
General Pinochet himself was the target of an assassination attempt, by the
armed wing of the Communist Party. The dictator, unfortunately, escaped the
attack on his motorcade with a few minor injuries.
When in 1990 he stepped
down, it was due to his own miscalculation. He gambled his one-man rule on a
plebiscite and lost. The general was down but not out. The constitution he had
been instrumental in drawing up guaranteed that he would continue to be the army
commander-in-chief until 1998. He has ensured the armed forces remain largely
outside the control of the government - a condition that has made it difficult
to bring the military to book for past human rights offences.
Although still
powerful in Chile, Pinochet was arrested while on a trip in England, after a
request of the Spanish goverment, to bring him in trial on the account of
several human rights violations. The English goverment though refused to
extradite him to Spain, claiming that the general was too ill to face a trial
and continuing this way the England's notorius political role, as a true
supporter of all United States policies, fascist criminal dictators and
everything else opposed to democratic ideas! So Pinochet returned in Chile alive
and kicking, and the world still expects to see him pay for his
crimes!
For more information on Augusto Pinochet case, please connect to
the internet and visit:
Indonesia
Suharto, the father of 2.000.000
deaths!
Suharto is a genocidal maniac whose regime is every bit as
impressive as Adolph Hitler's when it comes to Death. He was born in June 8,
1921 at Kemusu Argamulja, Java. Like many Javanese, used only his given name,
without a surname. He came to power on March 12,1966, after a bloodbath in which
at least 500,000 people were slaughtered and tens of thousands more imprisoned.
At least 15,000 were imprisoned without trial for 15 years. During his 33-year
reign, the dictator Suharto used the military to keep an iron grip on Indonesia,
while himself, his family and friends treated the economy of the country as
their personal piggybank. Suharto, his children, his grandchildren, and all his
cronies are undisturbed in their exploitation of the country's natural resources
and of the Indonesian workers. According to Forbes magazine, Suharto is now the
third richest dictator in the world, all based on this exploitation, while at
the same time there are 27 million Indonesians earning less than 500 rupias per
day, the completely inhumane poverty level set by the regime itself. Suharto's
massive wealth stands in stark contradiction to the suffering of tens of
millions of Indonesian people. But he didn't stop there. In 1976 Indonesia
forcibly annexed the Portuguese colony of East Timor despite widespread
international disapproval. At least 500,000 people have died in East Timor,
either killed by Suharto's military under an organized genocide of the
population or from starvation, the result of the war of occupation and many more
continue to die even today, as the occupation continues! The invasion of Timor
was a direct order that Suharto received from the U.S.A. After the war in
Vietnam and the communist government in Cambodia, the U.S.A feared what they
call “the domino effect”. A theory that said that one after the other, all the
Asian countries could fell under communist rule. Men like Suharto in power and
the invasion of Timor was what U.S.A thought could stop the communist expansion,
and Henry Kissinger himself visited Suharto to ask for the invasion three days
before the attack.
At the same time Suharto tried to convince, God knows
who, that he was not a dictator. So he allowed three political parties to
function, including his own, but their platforms--and usually their
leaders--were pre-determined. Meanwhile he continued to imprison, torture and
slaughter thousands of Indonesians, until the day he stepped out in May 1997.
Notorious are the Dili massacre on November 12, 1991 and the increasing number
of political prisoners in the 1990s. Many of these prisoners are still missing,
since they were not arrested, but kidnapped from the police and executed
whithout anyone ever knowing!
Today, Suharto is in forced retirement, but
still free to live on that little something he put aside for the twilight years,
approximately 40 billion dollars! Of course himself, his kids and cronies are
under legal siege, but they still manage to come by. Everytime Suharto is
summoned to appear before a parliamentary investigation committee, he fails to
turn up for health reasons (like Pinochet) and the show goes on for ever!
Greece
George Papadopoulos
There are
some Greek islands nobody wants to visit!
In the morning of 21,
April 1967 the surprised citizens of Athens, saw army tanks running around the
city. The greek army, led by major George Papadopoulos who occupied the
parliament, the national television building, the prime ministers house and
several other strategic points. At the some time arrested aproximately 50.000
people.Once again the concetration camps, located in several Greek islands
reopend after a short period, ready to accept prisoners. (They have been used
before during the dictatorship of Metaxas 4, August,1936 and the civil war,
which the right-wing with the support of England and U.S.A had won. So for some
people that was the second or third time they were visiting these
islands!)
George Papadopulos was really the most rediculous dictator the word
have ever seen and if it was not for all that things Greece suffered during his
7 years junta, you could easily die laughing every time you heared him speak!
But at the same time hundreds of people were arrested, tortured or forced to
exile and the whole thing ended with the Tourkish invasion in Cyprous in July
1974.
Papadopoulos claimed he seized power because once again Greece was
close at the hand of the communists who were trying to start a revolution, but
the trouth is that communists were arrested, totrured and executed so often the
last 30 years, that surviving was the only they could really think off. But
someone else was really thinking of a "revolution" and he was king Konstandinos,
who had his coup ready for a long time now, but Papadopoulos with the help of
C.I.A just got there first! Konstandinos tried some months later to make a
counter coup, but he was defeated and forced to leave country (and thank God for
the poor Greek people, he never returned)!
So Papadopoulos stayed in power
for 7 years until 1974. There was an assasination attempt against him but
unfortunately, the bomd of Panagoulis missed the target. Panagoulis was
arrested, tortured and convicted to death, but Junta backed up under the presure
of the world community who knew that Panagoulis was really a hero. Although
Panagoulis suffered at least 3 false executions with fake fire!
In Noveber,
1973 thousands of students occupied the technical univercity of Athens demanding
the end of dictatorship and U.S interfearance in Greek political life. The
unarmed students manage to hold three days but the demostration ended in 17,
Noveber, 1973 with the invasion of the army in the univesity. Tanks and real
fire were used (and if the guy in front of the tank in China impressed you, wait
till you see this video!) Many students were assasinated that day and a lot more
were arrested and tortured.
After the Turkish invasion in Cyprous, England
and U.S.A decided that they had no more unfinished buisness to take care and
withdrew their support to the dictatorship. George Papadopoulos and his party
were arrested and brought to trial as traitors. Papadopoulos was convicted three
times to death, but Greek goverment gave him a pardon. He passed the rest of his
life in prison, until his death in 1999.
Turkey. The "Midnight Express" in
numbers!
On September. 12, 1980, the senior command of the army,
led by General Kenan Evren, seized power in Turkey. That was the third army
intervention in the political life of Turkey in 20 years. Is truth that in those
days (and today also) Turkey was pretty crowded by CIA agents. U.S was really
afraid about the situation in Midle East, after the Soviet intervention in
Afghanistan and the overthrow of the Iranian monarchy and the stabilization of
an extreme right-wing regime in Turkey was their answer.
In 12, March, 1971
the leading politicians were arrested, and parliament, political parties, and
trade unions were dissolved. A five-member National Security Council took
control, suspending the constitution and implementing a provisional constitution
that gave almost unlimited power to military commanders. Martial law, which had
been established in a number of provinces in 1979, was extended throughout
Turkey, and a major operation was launched to eliminate juntas opponents. There
followed armed clashes, thousands of arrests, imprisonment, torture, and
executions. These actions against democracy turned Turkey into a
"democracy-disabled" country that perpetrates torture in the eyes of the
international community. Read the following statistical analysis according to
estimates of the Human Rights Association:
-More than 650,000 people
were taken into custody and subjected to torture.
-500 people lost their
lives in custody, only 171 of them were officially identified.
-Thousands of
people were left disabled.
-210,000 political cases were opened in military
courts. A total of 85,000 people were tried because of their "thoughts."
-6,353 people were tried, with prosecutors demanding the death penalty.
-Fifty people were eventually executed.
-A 17-year-old leftist detainee,
Erdal Eren, was executed on grounds that he had killed a gendarmerie private.
-Files were opened on 1,683,000 people.
-348,000 people were banned from
acquiring passports.
-15,509 people were ousted from their university posts
under Law No. 1402.
-18,000 public servants, 2,000 judges and prosecutors,
4,000 police officers, 2,000 army officers and 5,000 teachers were forced to
resign.
-All political parties were closed down.
-The activities of
23,667 associations were halted.
-The press was censored.
-4,509 people
were sent into exile by the martial law administration.
-14 convicts lost
their lives while in prison due to maltreatment and hunger strikes to protest
this maltreatment.
-113,607 books were burned.
-39 tons of books,
magazines and newspapers were destroyed by state paper production factories.
-937 movies were banned.
-2,792 authors, translators and journalists
were tried.
The junta members claimed they acted in order to stop
fraternal bloodshed, but in the past 15 years some 40,000 people have been
killed in the ongoing conflict with the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which is
itself the outcome of the oppressive mentality of the Sept. 12 regime. The junta
said it acted to protect the country against the threat of communism, but the
ultranationalist hitmen who they set up for this purpose metamorphosed into
mafia gangs challenging the state. The 12,000 Koranic schools which the military
opened in order to cement a single state Turkish-Islamic ideology, using Islam
as a political antidote to Communism, actually increased the social polarization
that casts a shadow over the secularist future of the country.
Today in
Turkey the people have the right to vote for their goverment, But the army
continues to rule the country using two ways. First the continuous threat that
once again is going to seize the power, if something that they don't like is
going to happen, and second through the national security council. This
organization whose members are army generals has by the constitution more power
than the prime minister or the president of the country.
Argentina. The human
monster
When it comes to torture, death and terror the Argentinean
Junta makes all the other look like a child's play! Please don't pass these
lines easily, because the minute you start to read of what these bastards did to
Argentina, the issue stops to be just a political matter and becomes a long
study of the human monster!
Between 1976-1983, 30.000 people disappeard and
assumed dead. Today we know from former military officer's confessions what
really happened. For 7 years the Junta kidnapped, tortured and eventually killed
all of these people. None of them ever passed a trial or charged with any
crimes. They were all innocent citizens and their kidnappings were used by the
military as a mean to terrorize the society. These operation are better known as
"The Dirty War".
During that "Dirty War " more than 340 secret locations
functioned as concentration camps (one of them was Sheraton hotel in Buenos
Aires). The prisoners there suffered the most suvire tortures as they waited for
their fate. During the trial of the Junta that began on 22 April 1985, 833
witnesses testified tortures that can make you sick like mothers giving birth
while handcuffed and 15-year-olds being killed by medieval torture tactics such
as empalamiento--in which the victim is seated on a spear fixed to the floor,
tearing apart his/her entrails. During the eight-month trial, newspapers--even
those which had supported the military dictatorship--published one to two pages
of victim and witness testimony every day. But how 30.000 people disappeared?
I'll let one of the real witnesses and killers to tell the story: Adolfo
Scilingo is a former naval officer, who confesses throwing prisoners into the
ocean during the "dirty war" : "They were unconscious. we stripped them, and
when the flight commander gave the order, we opened the door and threw them out,
naked, one by one. " Scilingo as a 28-year-old lieutenant, he was stationed in
Buenos Aires at the Naval School of Mechanics in 1977; He says his post, already
a notorious detention center for those rounded up on charges of disloyalty, soon
became a way station to death. For the next two years, he remembers, some 15 to
20 prisoners were trucked every Wednesday to the Buenos Aires airport, put on a
military plane, and then dropped, drugged but alive, from a height of about
13,000 ft. into the Atlantic Ocean!" Scilingo estimates that between 1,500 and
2,000 people "disappeared" in this manner from his base alone. He admits
responsibility for 30 of them. He says he was ordered to participate in two of
the death flights in 1977, adding that his fellow officers drew the same sort of
assignment: "It was to give everyone a turn, a kind of Communion." On his first
flight, Scilingo helped strip and then throw 13 victims out of a coast guard Sky
Van; on his second, he did the same to 17 more out of a navy Elektra.
Those
were the ways of Argentinean Junta that seized power on March 24th, 1976, led by
3 army men: Commander in chie Jorge Rafael Videla, General Orlando Ramon Agosti
and Admiral Eduardo Emilio Massera.These are responsible for the return of
Argentina in the Dark Ages and of course USA that supported them from the day
one.(In 1981 Ronald Reagan was elected as the next U.S. president, and the
superpower began to support the Argentine military as it had done prior to the
Carter Administration. Reagan's U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne
Kirkpatrick, developed a peculiar theory to differentiate "dictators from
tyrants" a questionable distinction which allowed the United States to support
violent and repressive regimes. Once again, the foreign policy objective was the
eradication of the subversive communist threat. In 1981 General Leopoldo
Galtieri became president of Argentina, and closed a deal with the United States
under which Argentine military officers would receive U.S. funding to train
forces--such as the Nicaraguan Contras--fighting communism in Central
America.)
The defeat of the Argentinean army in Falklands War from the
England brought down the junta in 1983. (And this is maybe the first time that a
country looses a war and benefits from it!) After trials held for years hundreds
of the people responsible for Junta's crimes were found guilty and imprisoned,
but as in all the cases we have covered in Dictatorpedia, no one was finally
punished enough for his crimes. So in these case also the punishment of the
criminals was once again stopped. On 8 October 1989, president Menem pardoned
277 people: almost 40 generals awaiting trials for human rights abuses,
low-ranking officers involved in military rebellions, former guerrilla members
and the former minister of the economy. On 28 December 1990 Generals Videla,
Massera and four others were set free by presidential pardon. (Yes free, to walk
again the streets that they used to kidnap men, women and children and send them
to their horrible death!) The majority of society was opposed to these pardons.
According to opinion polls, 72 % of the population was against the pardons of
the generals. On 30 December 1990, 60,000 people marched to the Plazo de Mayo in
protest but as you should know by now people with the power in their hands,
don't really listen to the people.
I don't really feel that I have
touched the terror of the Argentinean junta. So please for more info connect to
the internet and visit the following sites:
http://www.derechos.org/human-rights/argentina.html
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/magazine/article/0,5744,255923,00.html
Guatemala. Bananas and death!
In 1954,
the democraticaly elected president of Guatemala, Guzman made agrarian reform
the central project of his administration. The National Congress passed a
measure providing for the expropriation of unused portions of landholdings in
excess of a specified acreage and for the distribution of the land among
landless peasants. The land reform, had a heavy impact upon the U.S.-owned
"United Fruit" Company and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) began
efforts to destabilize the goverment of Guatemala. CIA recruited a force of
Guatemalan exiles in Honduras, which was led by the exiled Colonel Carlos
Castillo Armas. When the invasion began, the army refused to fight for Guzman,
and in June 1954 he was forced to resign. Castillo Armas emerged from a military
junta as provisional president, and a plebiscite made his status official. He
extirpated communist influence, quashed agrarian reform, and broke labour and
peasant unions with violence. During his military junta the influence of the
monopoly "United Fruit" increased and the land which had been expropriated by
the former government was given back to the large landowners. The wave of terror
against the people, reached its top in 1966 when the entire country was sold off
to U.S companies for a mere song. In 1967, after the "search and destroy"
operations against the guerrilla movements, roads had become unpassable because
of the many corpses. Water wells and rivers were full of corpses. This sight
more or less became normality. These operations was held by the "Glorious Army
of Guatemala", in collaboration with the USA, the NOA (New Anti-Communist
Organisation) and a contra-guerrilla organisation, called MANO (Organised
National Anti-Communist Movement) Besides the army massacres, daily mass
mortality continued, caused by poverty. From the 70.000 people who died in
Guatemala in 1968, 30.000 were children.
Cuba
Batista (y Zaldivar) Fulgencio
Son of farmers, Batista was born in January 16, 1901 in Banes,
Cuba. He worked in various jobs until he joined the army in 1921, starting as a
stenographer. He rose to the rank of sergeant and developed a large personal
entourage, which he used to gain power through an army revolt in March 1952.
During the 7 years of his dictatorship, he managed to control the university,
the press, and the Congress, imprisoning his enemies and terrorizing the
citizens. He embezzled huge sums from the soaring economy, building a huge
fortune for him and his associates.
His dictatorship was finally over after
a revolution led by the rebel forces of Fidel Castro, who launched their
successful attack in the fall of 1958. Faced with the collapse of his regime,
Batista fled with his family to the Dominican Republic on Jan. 1, 1959. Later he
went into exile on the Portuguese island of Madeira and to Estoril, near Lisbon.
He died in August 6, 1973 in Marbella, Spain.
U.S.A and right-wing Juntas in Central America
Military dictators were supported by the USA during the Second World War
on the grounds that they were anti-Nazi, and after the war because they were
anti-Communist:
-In 1941, President Arias of Panama was disposed of in a
US-supported coup.
-In 1944, the dictator of El Salvador, Martinez, was
overthrown, but the new government itself was toppled by a counter-revolution by
Martinez's former chief of police. The United States immediately recognized the
government of the new dictator. This move tarnished the so-called Good Neighbour
policy of the United States in the eyes of many Latin Americans.
-In
1954 Guzman, the elected president of Guatemala, was overthrown by the American
CIA. Guzman's "crime" was that he was introducing land reforms, which included
seizing some unused lands held by the US-based "United Fruit"
company.
-In 1959, Fidel Castro's forces toppled the corrupt government
of the dictator Batista, and he became president of Cuba. Initially supported by
the CIA, the American government was alarmed by his success and attempted to
eliminate him. The US imposed an economic embargo against Cuban sugar, a major
export. The blockade was later made total. Faced with American opposition,
Castro accepted help and support from the Soviet Union. Continued Cuban-US
tension led to the CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961, the Bay of Pigs. The
invasion was defeated, a major American humiliation.
