Battalion 316 received substantial training from the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Hundreds of people, teachers, politicians, and union leaders were assassinated by government-backed forces. Honduras also had death squads active through the 1980s, the most notorious of which was the army unit Battalion 316. Death Squad activity stretched well into the Reagan years (1981–1989) as well. and led to a temporary cutoff in military aid at the end of his presidency. These events prompted outrage in the U.S. funding and military advisors during the Carter administration. The murderers were found to have been soldiers of the Salvadoran military, which was receiving U.S. Priests who were spreading liberation theology, such as Father Rutilio Grande, were often targeted as well. Death squads were instrumental in killing hundreds of real and suspected Communists. In December 1980, three American nuns, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel, and Maura Clarke, and a lay worker, Jean Donovan, were gang raped and murdered by a military unit later found to have been acting on specific orders. See Operation Condor for examples.ĭuring the Salvadoran Civil War, death squads achieved notoriety on 24 March 1980, when a sniper assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero as he said Mass inside a convent chapel. The Chilean military regime of 1973–1990 also committed such killings. For example, Alianza Anticomunista Argentina was a far-right death squad mainly active during the "Dirty War". Argentina used extrajudicial killings as a way of crushing the liberal and communist opposition to the military junta during the " Dirty War" of the 1970s. In Latin America, death squads first appeared in Brazil where a group called Esquadrão da Morte (literally "Death Squad") emerged in the 1960s they subsequently spread to Argentina and Chile in the 1970s, and they were later used in Central America during the 1980s. It was also used during the Battle of Algiers by Paul Aussaresses. It officially installed Iron Guard death squads in 1936 in order to kill political enemies. The term was first used by the fascist Iron Guard in Romania.
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