These Abductions Started During the First Trump Administration.
As ICE terrorizes people with Brown skin in California, I wrote about the first of the Trumpian abductions in the Red Bluff Daily News back in 2020. This is nothing new for Trump.
Did you think it couldn’t happen here?
PUBLISHED: July 20, 2020 at 4:29 PM PDT
Back in the spring of 1983, I was sitting in the zocalo in Cuernavaca, Mexico having a beer with a former Catholic priest who had been working in El Salvador. El Salvador at the time was a few years into a bloody civil war between leftist guerrillas and the right-wing Salvadoran government. One of the tactics used by the Salvadoran military was to send unidentified paramilitary police and soldiers at night to break into the homes of suspected guerrilla sympathizers, or union organizers, or teachers, or whoever else they felt was a threat including nuns and priests; they would abduct the suspects, take them to a dumping site outside of town in unmarked SUV’s, torture them, and then execute them. Often the bodies were mutilated.
These paramilitary outfits were called “death squads” and they killed thousands of people in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992. Human Rights groups have said as many as 35,000 peasants were killed in this manner.
The priest I was sitting with had been in El Salvador at the beginning of the war and he told me the following story about an attempted military abduction.
The priest was driving home late at night when he saw a couple of soldiers roughing up a young male. The priest told me he pulled over and took out a gun that he kept in the glove box and proceeded to point the weapon at the soldiers as they were manhandling the kid. The priest commanded them to stop and let the kid go. They let the kid go.
At the time, the Salvadoran military was dependent upon the US for funding the war and also for training the military in counter insurgency tactics.
Jump forward in time. After the Twin Towers fell, the US was looking for revenge. We conquered Afghanistan. We started a bloody war in Iraq. But one of the more sinister programs in that vengeful period was called “extraordinary rendition.”
This was a program where US intelligence agents would capture a suspected terrorist in a foreign country — and then they would move the prisoner to a “black site” in another country, like Poland or Egypt, where the victims could be interrogated using torture methods not legal to be used in the United States. This happened to hundreds of suspects, of which, at least a dozen were cases of mistaken identity.
With the advent of the cell phone, we see a whole lot more things than we used to. Witness the George Floyd killing. Another one of those cell phone videos vividly recorded an event in Portland a couple nights ago. It has been shown on a regular basis on CNN and other news outlets.
The video shows some unidentified camo-wearing soldiers abducting a protester and then putting the protester into an unmarked vehicle and speeding off with the victim. The soldiers were later identified as federal agents sent to Portland by Trump.
It is chilling to watch the abduction. I couldn’t help but think of the similarity to other politically motivated abductions in El Salvador in the ’80s — or the excesses we had with the extraordinary rendition program more recently. Except now the abductions aren’t in a war-torn Central American nation or on the streets of a foreign city. Now the abductions are happening at home.
This is the sort of thing that happens in stinking torture states — not the United States.
Why is this happening? Because Donald Trump wants to be re-elected as a law-and-order guy. He said he wants to save the suburbs from leftists, antifa and anarchists. That’s not a very subtle racial dog whistle.
Trump sent the camo-wearing agents into a volatile situation in Portland — a city that was on the cusp of extinguishing the protests — and proceeded to blow up a tense situation by using untrained federal agents to do Trump’s political work. All of this done against the wishes of the Governor of Oregon and the Mayor of Portland.
Using abductions for political gain. Seriously? Did you think it couldn’t happen here? It just did.
Allan Stellar is an RN and a freelance writer who moved to Red Bluff after the Camp Fire. He can be reached at Allan361@aol.com.