Bad air in the Windy City:

CHICAGO, July 19 2006 — Special prosecutors said today that scores of criminal suspects were routinely tortured by police officers on the South Side in the 1970’s and 1980’s, but that extensive legal research convinced them that there was no way to skirt the statute of limitations preventing prosecution.

[NY Times: Link]

“Skirt” the statute of limitations? I dislike this usage — we’re talking about wide-scale police torture, not some punk dodging misdemeanors on technicalities. But then, the New York Times is not suggesting that we experience outrage.

Eric Ruder of Counterpunch takes a stronger position:

The facts of the Chicago police torture scandal are well established. Former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers working under him used a variety of torture techniques — Russian roulette, electroshock, suffocation and beatings — to extract “confessions” during interrogations at Area 2 and 3 police stations.

For more than a decade, the officers suffered no consequences for their crimes. In fact, they were often promoted for “getting the bad guys” and “closing their cases” with speed and certainty, at a time when politicians nationally were declaring a “war on crime.”
[Eric Ruder, Counterpunch: Link]

Democracy Now has an interview with Flint Taylor, an attorney with the People’s Law Office in Chicago. Taylor represented many of the torture victims and was directly involved in spearheading the special prosecutor’s investigation.

[The report is] kind of a mixed bag in the sense that the evidence was so strong that the special prosecutor found that over half of the 148 people that said they were tortured and abused were, in fact, that they believed they were. But they used the legal out of saying it wasn’t beyond a, quote, “reasonable doubt.”

[T]he other thing that’s outrageous about the whole thing, is we see now that there is a blueprint that’s been developed in various cases for prosecuting people for perjury, for obstruction of justice, when in fact they’re able to cover things up for so long and avoid prosecution until the, quote, “statute of limitations” has run on the acts themselves, that being the torture, etc. If you accept the fact that there’s not a continuing conspiracy, which we say there was, that starts with the torture and continues to this day in covering it up, if you just look at it in terms of obstruction of justice and perjury and racketeering violations under the RI

[Democracy Now: Link]

WBBM Radio Chicago on “Top Cops React to Torture Report”:

Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline on Wednesday described the city’s current police force as “very different” from the Chicago Police Department of 20 years ago during the Jon Burge-era.

Despite uncovering evidence of past police torture, special prosecutors praised the Chicago Police Department for adopting new procedures for handling suspects, including a requirement that interrogations be tape recorded.

“We accept the special prosecutor’s report,” said Cline. “What they’re citing happened but the fact that they said that this couldn’t happen today speaks volumes about the Chicago Police Department.” Cline added, “We take this very seriously because past perceptions can erode all of the good work and progress that been accomplished.”

[WBBM: Link]

Google News: Chicago Police Torture

Google Web: Jon Burge

David Sasaki on recent violence in San Salvador Atenco, Mexico:

This much we know for sure. On May third and fourth [2006], in the Mexican town of San Salvador Atenco, riots broke out which resulted in 200 arrests and 50 injured officers according to an official statement. We also know that a 14-year-old youth named Javier Cortés Santiago was killed in the violence. Those small details, however, are about the only facts that all sides agree on. Disagreed upon is 1.) whether Cortés was killed by a bullet of the police or protesters 2.) whether protesters were raped by police officers or if such claims are fabrications 3.) whether the government was justified in using force, and 4.) most importantly, just what actually set off the riots?
[Link]

John Ross @ Guerilla News Network: “The “Dirty War” Returns to Mexico”:

MEXICO CITY: Between 1970 and 1982, three Mexican presidents waged a “dirty war” against dissidents from one end of the country to the next. Recently compiled documentation lists 15,000 illegal detentions during that terrible period, thousands of instances of torture, and the forced disappearance of more than 700 Mexican citizens …

Nowhere was the dirty war more cruelly fought then along the Pacific coast of Guerrero state where farmers had risen in rebellion behind the rural school teacher-turned guerrillero Lucio Cabanas and his Party of the Poor. Carlos Montemayor, author of “War In Paradise”, perhaps the most vehement expose of that repression, is an assiduous scholar of how the dirty war in Guerrero was organized and carried out.

Writing in the left daily La Jornada, Montemayor recently described the characteristics of that counter-insurgency campaign against farming villages along the Guerrero coast, and the striking similarities to the May 4th assault on San Salvador Atenco just outside of Mexico City by thousands of highly militarized police to quell a campesino rebellion.

According to Montemayor’s description, first an overwhelming force is assembled with the primary mission of totally subjugating a recalcitrant population. Then informers are introduced into the village to identify and eliminate rebel community leaders and those associated with them. If the leaders evade capture, their families are held hostage. Young men are rounded up and selectively tortured to extract information and to turn them into “soplones” (informers.)

Meanwhile, shock troops terrorize the civilian population into submission. Indiscriminate beatings, home invasions, the theft of personal items of value, and the systematic destruction of property are encouraged by police commanders. Women are raped and sexually abused to underscore the occupation force’s total domination over the rebellious villagers.

Virtually all of these dirty war characteristics were on display in San Salvador Atenco May 4th when 3000 armed state police and elements of the Federal Preventative Police (PFP), a force largely extracted from the Mexican military, slammed into that dirt-poor town of 30,000 out on the dried lake beds east of the capital, killing one 14-year-old, leaving a 20-year-old student hovering between life and death, and arresting 209, all of whom required hospitalization from the beatings they received under security force batons – although only some prisoners actually received it (and they were chained to their hospital beds.) Of 47 women arrested, 23 reported that they had been raped or were otherwise sexually abused.
[Link]