How I Got Snatched By A Death Squad
And how ICE in some ways treats the public worse
June 28-30
By Marc Cooper
As American democracy circles the drain, I could easily write about the Nincompoop-in-Chief, or his toadies like Marco Rubio or the numbskull like Pete Hegseth. There’s also ICE “KLAUS” Barbie as a legit target. The degenerate Supreme Court and its insane decision on the birthright case. And of course, there’s also the lies from the stupidest president in our history and the most dangerous, not to mention his new master Benjamin Netanyahu, himself a serious head case. Front and center is the astounding bullshit that has been spewed by Trump’s five minutes of military action that will NOT earn him his coveted peace prize, just as it did not stop the decades-old conflict between Israel and Iran, and certainly did nothing, if anything, to stop Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon. Indeed, it has only accelerated it.
all of this is worthy fodder for our massive editorial staff to chew on in the coming weeks. But at this morning’s editorial meeting which I conducted on my own while half asleep at 5:30 AM, a more attractive thought dropped on my head.
Five decades of journalism taught me that sometimes a very big story can be better told through one illuminating anecdote. Not always, but sometimes. So I got the staff (which only has one vote) to agree to take on the Big Stories in the first graph over the coming days, and today I want to dwell on one anecdote to tell you something about ICE and what it means in the bigger picture of the Trump era. It’s a pretty good story, so make yourself comfortable and pour a drink and enjoy – at least until we get to the scary part relevant to today.
BACKGROUND: The Argentine Military Coup And The Dirty War
I take you back now 50 years, to the Spring of 1976 where my wife and I had been living in Buenos Aires after the cataclysm of the Chilean military coup.
Juan Perón was in exile. His second wife, a low IQ element named Isabel was in the presidency, a low-intensity insurgency was simmering in the north, and the economy was in ruins. People here scream about 5–6% inflation. At this time in Argentina it was running at about 10% A DAY or more. When you went to change money, the peso would have already dropped some more by the time you got to the exchange shop. Worse, so-called death squads were already active and run out of Isabel’s Ministry of Interior and went freely about snatching up real or imagined enemies (‘subversives”) simply shooting or butchering their prisoners or carting them off to myriad torture chambers from which they conveniently disappeared.
It was a time of great uncertainty and anxiety, to say the least. And on March 24, 1976 the Argentine Armed Forces staged a bloodless coup. That evening, having just recovered from a bout of hepatitis, I watched on TV as the new ruling general, a wooden-faced psycopth named Jorge Rafael Videla, gave a stern speech that ended with this little ditty: “If we had not done this, then God and the Homeland would have demanded otherwise.”
I don’t know what God thought but I was pretty sure I was about to see re-run of Pinochet. That was enough to make me immediately shave my beard and trim my shaggy hair. But the coup was initially welcomed by many, even by the Argentine Communist Party, because nobody thought anything or anybody could be worse than “Isabelita” and her thug regime.
They were wrong. The coup was merely the opening act of the so-called Dirty War that stretched for 9 years until the military surrendered power after losing the Falklands War. In the meantime, as many as 30,000 political activists, trade unionists, dissident intellectuals, and, of course, journalists were murdered or disappeared. Not that Videla had not sounded a warning early on when he said national security could be achieved even if "much blood would need to be spilled in order to cleanse the nation."
Skipping ahead before I get to the good part. Civilian rule was restored in 1984 and Videla, who, in fact, had a much bloodier record than neighboring dictator Pinochet, died in prison at age 87 in 2013.
The Good Part: Snatched by the Death Squads
If there is one iconic symbol of the brutal Argentine dictatorship, it was a fleet of mid-1970s green Ford Falcons – with no license plates. These cruised the city unimpeded and with impunity and could be seen somewhere any day peopled by – well – the state-backed killers inside of them. And they were a lot scarier than armored vehicles used by ICE because their occupants were ruthless killers, not dumbass cosplayers.
The March 24 coup closed the banks for 4 or 5 days and by the first week of the dictatorship I needed to change some dollars into pesos, as I had run out of the latter.
I cleaned myself up, even put on a sports jacket and went downtown with two goals: change $200 into pesos and then mail off a radio feature I taped on cassette to WBCN in Boston focused on… the death squads.
I had my money, my passport, some national ID, a press card and the cassette in an addressed sealed envelope that I would drop off at the Post Office.
The exchange shop I was headed to was smack downtown on the busiest street in the country, adjacent to the hulking Safico building that housed the international press office and hangout. I stopped in there to pick up the local gossip, then exited, walked a few feet into the exchange store only to find they had run out of dollars (BTW for you tango fans, as best as I could determine, the Safico offices were located at Corrientes Tres Cuatro Ocho as memorialized in millions of recordings of Carlos Gardel).
The street was as crowded as Broadway in midtown Manhattan. I got a few steps out of the exchange office only to be stopped in my tracks by a big guy, around 30, dressed in jeans and a red velour top, with light brown hair and pale skin, and with an amiable demeanor despite his bulging biceps.
He simply stood right in front of me so I could not pass and he pulled out a wallet and quickly flashed a badge I could not read and turned his neck and face toward the street, about 6 feet away. And there, double parked, with the back door open was a green Ford Falcon with a red-headed driver. Nobody put any hands on me, I was just motioned into the car’s back seat by head movements. I was not feeling great.
A Couple of Polite Killers And Some Pretty Good Lying
I was so fearful that I felt no fear. Guess I was too numb but determined to get out of this jam some way or another and wanted to think clearly and not panic.
The killers were extremely polite. They never raised their voice nor directly threatened me as everybody already knew what was in play here.
They asked me to sit on my knees on the backseat with my hands on the top of the front bench seats. Then they asked me to remove my necklace, bracelet, glasses and rings (making it harder to identify a corpse) and, of course, to hand over my leather hand clutch where I had my ID, my money, and my cassette tape.
I admit that my anxiety level cranked up when they made a right turn at the end of Corrientes and were clearly headed for La Boca, the run-down local port – one of the favored places for dumping bodies.
When asked my profession, I told them I was a journalist as I figured this detention was random but they had probably seen me come out of the press office and while not very different looking than many Argentine men, my clothes probably tipped them off I was a foreigner.
Asked what I reported on, I said soccer and food and I turned the convo back on them. “You guys are for River Plate or Boca?” as every Argentine man was a fanatic of one team or another. River Plate was the answer. Then I asked them if they liked either one of my two favorite steak houses.
They weren’t going for that, and they immediately seized back the convo. The driver, a balding thirtysomething dressed in a pinstriped suit, then said: “we are mostly out hunting subversives. Do you know any?”
Before I could answer he pulled out a handgun and asked if I knew what it was. I calmly answered, “Yes, it’s a Browning .45 caliber semi-automatic 1911 model.” (Anybody who knows anything about guns would recognize it.)
The driver chambered a round, scrunched his eyebrows and said, with a certain level of sharpness, “How in the shit do you know that?”
I had hooked a whopper and now it was time to land it. I nonchalantly answered: “My uncle is the sub-director of the FBI and he gave me one a few years ago. A fine piece.”
“The FBI?” he quizzed me.
“The FBI anti-terrorist division,” I answered, figuring if I’m gonna lie, it better be a good one. “You know the FBI, I’m sure.”
The driver nodded yes, exclaimed something akin to “holy shit” and then holstered his gun. The other guy, who had stopped me, asked me where I lived and I gave him my rather high-falutin’ penthouse address (don’t get the wrong idea, with the runaway inflation and devaluation of the peso, my 3 bdrm furnished place was costing about $7 a month down from $120 six months before).
That seemed to cinch the case, and they returned my personal items to me. When they handed over the $200 in small bills, the guy who stopped me said go ahead and count it. I declined because I had figured he had taken some of it and wanted me to count it and say nothing. After two polite refusals on my part, I ceded, counted it and it was all there.
They told me to sit back and just relax. “We’re just going to check your house for weapons and then we are done.”
A Lucky Happy Ending In Spite of a Dangerous Joke
The 20-minute ride to my apartment was amiable chit-chat. Iasked them to tell me about the other weapons hey used and I feigned great enjoyment. When we were about a block away from home I worked up the courage and meekly asked my new pals, “So you never told me, what agency are you from? The Federal Police?” The driver cracked a sly smile and said, “Yeah, something like that.”
I didn’t have any weapons, but I did have a Chilean wife, and most Chileans in Argentina at that time were a glaring red flag – most of them exiled opponents of the neighboring Pinochet regime (which we were).
When we got to our front door, praying my wife wasn’t home, I unlocked the door only to find it chained. Damn. My wife, who could not see through the crack in the door and had no idea I wasn’t alone cracked a joke and sternly said “contraseña, por favor?” Meaning: password please?
I thought I was going to pass out on the spot. I don’t think these guys understood English so I didn’t want to say I’m here with the “police” as they would have caught that last word. So in light-hearted English, I said “Please open I’m accompanied by a couple of thugs.”
Patricia met them with a charming smile and welcomed them in. One of the guys noticed her Chilean accent and said, “You’re from Chile? Such a beautiful country with beautiful women.” And that was that. They spent about 5 minutes opening but not ransacking the drawers and cabinets. They missed the set of close-up photos I had of Fidel Castro face up under the glass cover of my desk.
As they were about to leave, they did notice the crossed 7-foot lances up against the living room wall. “Aren’t those weapons?” one asked. I laughed and for once told the truth. “Oh no, they are decorations. We rent this apartment from Retired Colonel Icazatti, former Governor of Buenos Aires under the government of Onganía and commander of the Argentine Army Lancers division.
They loved that answer. I mean my uncle was an FBI bigwig (under cover as a barber) and I was renting from the military officer/Governor of a previous dictatorship? Another 5 minutes and I would get a job offer.
They thanked me and my wife, excused themselves for taking up my time and offered to post the cassette/letter I was going to drop off before my detention. I told them it was very thoughtful of them but I would do it on my own, and they quietly left.
So What Has This Got To Do With ICE?
Nothing and everything. Let me make one point clear. ICE, whatever it is, is not analogous to the Argentine death squads. ICE does not mutilate and murder its victims. The level of torture exercised by ICE usually amounts to deprivation of communication, anonymity, and a practice of holding people for hours without water or any information.
When it comes to torture, ICE merely outsources it to jack-ass dictators like Bukele in El Salvador.
The death squads were unimaginably brutal, ghoulish in their torture methods and imposing slow painful deaths on their victims, including tossing them into the sea from airplanes. They were 100% unaccountable and impugn. On many occasions their prey were, in fact, armed opponents and it was certainly high-risk for the squads to make some detentions where their lives were also at risk.
They were usually unidentifiable but the green Ford Falcons were their badges and they did not hide them. The cars themselves spread fear. But they did not wear masks even though they were contending at times with armed guerrillas. They usually worked in pairs of two. They avoided making noisy public scenes. They didn’t gang up in groups of five or six heavily armed units that tackled their subjects and beat them to the ground. They were highly lethal but in public they kept a low profile and made their detentions quickly, with little if any force and did not spread havoc. Argentines were quickly whisked away by them, not piled onto by bunch of bottom of the barrel law enforcement bullies cosplaying in their little heads like the Gestapo.
The death squads were the Gestapo and they acted pretty much like you see them in the movies. Precision, quiet detentions. “Come with us, please.” What happened after that, well, we all know.
I don’t suffer from PTSD from my brush with the Argentine version of ICE (I’m a crusty old fellow and have been arrested by better: the LAPD, the County Sheriff, the Salvadoran Army, the Mexican Judicial Police, the Egyptian secret police and the Chilean carabineros and I never panicked. (You have to stay smart when in custody).
But every time I see a video of ICE tackling grandmothers, pushing gardeners up against a wall, or beating them in in the face, my own detention in Buenos Aires comes to mind and I am taken back by the over-the-top militarization and brutality being exercised by these true-to-life American thugs. I think of cowardly sycophants, pathological in their own special way: Ice Barbie and her pal Little Widdle Marco who stand behind the masked street rabble and who bless their barbaric treatment of anybody they damn well choose.
For me this is a crystallization of the Trump regime. It’s the public face of brutal authoritarianism. And it’s terrifying because it is so undisciplined and crude. Couple that with the belligerence and hostility displayed and announced in public by shit heads like Noem and Rubio and Vance and Trump himself and I can only reach one conclusion.
These ICE thugs are acting on orders from the top to be as brutal as possible. They got the message. Fear is their primary weapon. And they swing it recklessly because they know it’s what most pleases their civilian bosses.
We can debate all day and night on how we should characterize this regime as that is key to understanding how to confront it.
Personally, I think we are in a period of transition from a flawed constitutional democracy into some form of a presidential dictatorship. It would be premature to declare the entire system as fascist.
But its leaders are already there. And the message that the people are the enemy has trickled down to the bottom of the barrel where the despicable ICE bullies dwell. When they treat their civilian detainees worse than an Argentine death squad, you know something is very very wrong. +++
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Thank you for sharing your story.
a chilling comparison. I understand your comment on staying very calm when the authorities are threatening. Experiences at Wounded Knee in the early 70's, while not as deeply terrifying as the one you described, also required a very calm, almost "loose in the saddle" attitude when the FBI and right wingers' guns are pointed your way. Thanks for sharing.