As I occasionally note, I started my career as a Latin Americanist. Part of what drew me to the region, at least thematically, was the region’s experiences with democracy, its collapse, and its revival. When I was an undergraduate, the region was starting its move away from authoritarianism toward democratization. For example, Argentina started its transition in 1983 (actually, while I was in High School) and Brazil in 1985. Chile was in process when I graduated in 1990.

I bring this up because studying democracy and democratization in the region as an undergraduate and graduate student also required learning about authoritarianism in the region. It meant looking at, for example, how Chilean democracy fell in 1973 and what the government of Augusto Pinochet looked like, and what it did (it wasn’t pretty–look up “Operation Condor” by way of example).

And, of course, even democratic Colombia, the country I know the best, has been rife with internal conflict and political violence, even though it only briefly succumbed to authoritarian rule in the 1950s (something I noted just the other day).

There are certain words that I directly associate with these regimes. Three have come to mind of late as it pertains to the Trump administration, and they are not pleasant words.

One is “disappearances,” which I have written about before. The federal government currently is fine with the notion of plucking people off the streets and whisking them off to detention centers where they can languish (and even die) as they await deportation.

Two other terms now come to mind: “impunity” and “death squads.”

These are terms that I would not have ever thought to be relevant to discussing contemporary American politics, and yet here we are.

Let’s note a couple of recent headlines.

Via the NYT: ICE Agent Kills Person in Vehicle in Maine, Homeland Security Says.

A federal immigration agent shot and killed a person in a vehicle on Monday in the coastal city of Biddeford, Maine, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

[…]

The Homeland Security Department said in a statement that at about 7 a.m., ICE agents had been monitoring the last known address of someone who was in the country illegally, for whom they had a removal order. A person then left that address in a vehicle, according to the statement.

The agents then tried to stop the vehicle, the statement said. “The vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon,” the statement continued. The driver was struck and died from his injuries.

Reports note, by the way, that the person killed wasn’t the person for whom ICE had the removal order.

Also, the notion that a vehicle driving away is a threat to “public safety” comes across to me as a post hoc justification for the killing. It makes no sense given that firing a gun in such a circumstance has to be a greater threat to public safety than the person driving away.

All of which is an ongoing story, within a week of this story via the BBC: Man fatally shot by ICE in Houston was not intended target, DHS says.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national, was stopped at 07:00 local time (12:00 GMT) while driving to work and was killed shortly afterwards.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Thursday the stop was initiated because they saw “a white van with an individual who resembled the target” of an operation. They have said the officer shot in self-defence.

I am guessing that Salgado Araujo made the mistake of looking like a Hispanic person, hence the resemblance.

I will remind readers of what they probably don’t need reminding, but the excuse that they were acting in self-defense was the justification proffered in the killings by ICE of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. I would note, too, that no serious investigation into those killings seems to have been conducted at the federal level.

Back to the killing of Salgado Araujo, as reported by the NYT, Witnesses Say ICE Fired Fatal Shot Into Open Passenger Window in Houston.

The shot that killed a man during an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation last week in Houston was fired into the front passenger side window, according to a local congresswoman and a lawyer who spoke with witnesses who were in the vehicle.

The precise moment of the shooting of the man, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, 52, remains unclear in video evidence obtained by The New York Times. But witnesses gave firsthand accounts to Representative Sylvia Garcia, a Democrat who represents part of the Houston area, and Ruby Powers, a lawyer representing the victim’s younger brother, who was the front-seat passenger.

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was driving to work at a construction site with his brother, Victor Hugo Salgado Araujo, and two other passengers when ICE agents began tailing them.

[…]

The ICE agents did not identify themselves as they approached the van shortly before 7 a.m. on Tuesday after it slowed on Canal Street, Ms. Garcia said.

It is unclear from available video whether ICE agents identified themselves.

[…]

Ms. Garcia said, according to her conversations with both men, that after the van came to its final stop, an agent fired a single shot through the lowered front passenger window, striking Mr. Salgado Araujo.

Mr. Salgado Araujo then got out of the van before agents pulled him to the ground, Ms. Garcia added. He died shortly after.

[…]

The brother emphasized, Ms. Powers said, that the men inside the van did not know that law enforcement officials were chasing them.

May I note, yet again, that having ICE agents move about in unmarked cars full of masked individuals is a really good way to freak people out. If traffic cops can get people to pull over with clearly marked cars, a siren, and some blue lights, I fail to see the need for ICE to engage in clandestine activities that could easily feel like an attack by criminals.

The video in the NYT piece, while nowhere near as comprehensive as the video of Renee Good’s slaying, shows the van coming to a full stop and does not show it threatening anyone. Yet again, this looks very much like lying about someone using their vehicle as a weapon to justify an extrajudicial execution.

ICE said in a statement on Monday that agents had tried to pull over Mr. Salgado Araujo’s vehicle as part of a “targeted enforcement operation” and that an agent fired in “self-defense” after Mr. Salgado Araujo “weaponized his vehicle.”

The existing evidence calls that assertion into question, to put it mildly. Indeed, given existing patterns, it sounds like a deliberate lie to me.

We seem to have moved from “he had a gun” as an excuse to kill people by law enforcement to “they were in a car, and cars can be dangerous!”

More than 20 people have been shot at since September, nearly all while inside vehicles, and several have been killed. 

So, back to terms.

Impunity means in this context the ability of the state to deploy violence, including death, on whomever it likes without any threat of serious legal repercussions.

If “rule of law” is a real thing, then officers who shoot and kill people should be investigated, and yet in these cases, there appears to be little interest in doing so, at least at the federal level. As a general matter, ICE appears to be in a position to do whatever it wants, including murdering people in the streets (who aren’t even the targets of their orders!), and then just wash their hands of it all and move on.

Do I have to note that the ability to use lethal force is a serious one that should only be deployed in the direst of circumstances?

I guess I do.

That brings me to another term, “death squads.” During the 1960s and into the 1980s, it was not unusual to refer to regimes deploying groups to disappear or simply kill opponents and dissidents. These might be actual government operatives engaging in clandestine, or at least semi-clandestine (you know, unmarked vehicle, masks, and so forth) actions or paramilitary groups.

I usually don’t go to Wikipedia for definitions, but I would note the beginning of the entry on “death squads.”

A death squad is an armed group whose primary activity is carrying out extrajudicial killings, massacres, or enforced disappearances as part of political repression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror.

Is it hyperbole to use that term to describe ICE? Part of me is hesitant to say “yes” (probably out of a sense of my own academic disposition). But we definitely have with ICE extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances in the name of ethnic cleansing and some level of state-sponsored terror (I mean, how else are you going to get people to self-deport).

Thankfully, we are not seeing massacres or genocide, so the issue at hand, definitionally, is more one of scale than anything else, yes?

Is the following not accurate? The federal government is deploying armed, masked men in unmarked cars to cities around the country seeking to remove as many brown and black-skinned migrants as possible. They are willing to disappear them off the streets and send them away before possibly depositing them in a dangerous third-party country (or in a torture prison). If they resist at all, suspects can be gunned down (even if they aren’t the actual suspect, but happen to still be Hispanic), with the shooter being seemingly immune from consequences.

Where am I factually wrong?

And where does that not sound at least like proto-death squads?

The main defense vis-à-vis the definition above would be that this isn’t ICE’s “primary activity.” So more death squad hobbyists, I guess?

Weirdly, that doesn’t make me feel better.

I would be remiss in not noting that we do have a history of impunity when it comes to police and black motorists as well (for example, see here). So, this is not entirely unique, and I do not want to dismiss or ignore that history. Nor do I want to ignore the history of lynching. As such, what we are seeing is not unique or new to our history. Still, it should be a shock to our collective conscience that we have not fully buried those past evils.

And yet, we find that many who proclaim their fealty to “law and order” instead empower agents of death who act with impunity and thereby mock the notions of both law and order.