"For four months I was heavily tortured by the Army in Rio de Janeiro, and then in the Naval Information Center.... Near death, I was taken to the hospital for the sixth time. The beatings had been so severe that my body was one big bruise. The blood clotted under my skin and all the hair on my body fell out. They pulled out all my fingernails. They poked needles through my sexual organs and used a rope to drag me across the floor by my testicles. Right afterwards they hung me upside down. They hung me handcuffed from a grating, removed my artificial leg, and tied my penis so l could not urinate. They forced me to stand on my one leg for three days without food or drink. They gave me so many drugs that my eardrums burst and I am impotent. They nailed my penis to a table for 24 hours. They tied me up like a pig and threw me into a pool so that I nearly drowned. They put me in a completely dark cell where I remained for 30 days urinating and defecating in the same place where I had to sleep. They fed me only bread soaked in water. They put me in a rubber box and turned on a siren. For three days I neither ate nor slept and I nearly went mad...."
-- Manuel de Conceicao, peasant leader in Brazil He was arrested in 1972 and brought before Brazilian security police who had been schooled at US army bases in the latest methods of counterinsurgency and interrogation. He was tortured by Brazilian army units -- trained and equipped by US military-aid programs.
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A young Salvadoran deserted the Salvadoran army and fled to Mexico. His story was published in The Other Side magazine, 1982 Part of his training by eight American Green Berets consisted of "teaching how to torture." He witnessed a boy of about fifteen, suspected of supporting the guerrillas, being subjected to a demonstration torture by the Green Berets They tore out the youth's fingernails, broke his elbows, gouged out his eyes, and then burned him alive. The author reports that the torture sessions continued into the next day and included a thirteen year-old girl. Another victim had various parts of his body burned and was then taken up in a helicopter while still alive and thrown out at 14,000 feet. The defector noted that "often the army goes and throws people out over the sea." (The editors of The Other Side withheld the Salvadoran informant's name "for obvious reasons" but claimed that "the basic outline of his story has been corroborated by independent sources which we believe to be reliable.")
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"They tell how the Chilean military -- trained and financed by the United States -- tortured people with electric shock, particularly on the genitals; forced victims to witness the torture of friends and relatives (including children); raped women in the presence of other family members; burned sex organs with acid or scalding water; placed rats in women's vaginas and into the mouths of other prisoners; mutilated, punctured, and cut off various parts of the body, including genitalia, eyes, and tongue; injected air into women's breasts and into veins (causing slow, painful death); shoved bayonets and clubs into the vagina or anus, causing rupture and death."
--Victims and survivors of the fascist coup in Chile in 1973
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"Four men came in, bearing a cot with a sheet-covered figure. "Sit down," one ordered. "You're going to see a performance by a bad actor, an actor who has forgotten his part. Help him remember it." They uncovered a body entirely purple, missing a foot. "Come closer," another ordered. "Look at him. You'll know him." And she did. It was 27-year-old "El Gordo" Toledo, with whom she had been 20 days before. He could hardly speak, or scream, any more. When Elba maintained that she did not know him, they said, "Let's see"-they pulled out his nails, cut off his remaining ear, cut out his tongue, gouged out his eyes, and killed him slowly as she watched, thinking, "He could be my son." Then they brought another "actor," 26-year-old Eduard Munoz. It took them five hours to kill him, under her eyes. It was worse than any pain they could have inflicted on her, she said. Later she was forced to watch while her cellmates-aged 16, 17, and 40, nude and drugged, were directed to perform an erotic dance before they were raped. Another girl, back from a dreaded torture center, and pregnant, was so crazy that each time she awoke she screamed that her only desire was for her child to be born so she could kill it."
-- Elba Vergara, secretary to President Allende (himself murdered by the Chilean generals),
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"Rosa had her breasts cut off. Then they cut into her chest and took out her heart. The men had their arms broken, their testicles cut off, and their eyes poked out They were killed by slitting their throats and pulling the tongue out through the slit."
-- A survivor of a raid by US-backed Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s
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