Hidden terrors
As dramatically written as a suspense story, Hidden Terrors tells about how the CIA, the Pentagon, and hundreds of U.S. police advisors encouraged the overthrow of democracy in Brazil and set up a pattern for military takeovers in Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. A.J. Langguth focuses his account on one symbolic figure, Dan Mitrione, the U.S. police advisor who gained international attention in 1970, when he was kidnapped and later murdered by Uruguayan guerrillas. Mitrione may be remembered by most Americans as the protagonist in the controversial film State of Siege. This book explains how a hometown boy and former police chief of Richmand, Indiana--someone most Americans would consider decent and respectable-- could in the service of his government abroad, become involved in acts that destroyed just such rights. It lays out the ways in which his job led him inextricably and without resistance into a web of brutality and torture. Langguth reconstructs Mitrione's life and death through the eyes of those who carried out and those who opposed U.S. policy in Latin America. The reader moves right up the U.S. chain of command into the White House itself; into the conference rooms of embattled American embassies; into the hideouts of urban guerrillas; and finally into the torture chambers of Brazil and Uruguay, where the hidden terrors of U.S. "victories" in Latin America were being played out with a vengeance
Print Book, English, ©1978
Pantheon Books, New York, ©1978