‘The Green Berets taught me torture’

Press, 12 July 1984, Page 26

‘The Green Berets taught me torture’

NZPA-Reuter Minneapolis

A former Salvadorean policeman has been quoted as saying he tortured prisoners with methods taught to him by Green Beret officers. The man said he received a month of classroom instruction in torture from a captain and a major in the United States Army Special Forces — the commandos known as the Green Berets. “I tortured them in order to interrogate them,” he said, according to an article in the “Minneapolis Star and Tribune.” “I beat them many times.” The man — who said he had assumed the name Rene Hurtado to protect his family in El Salvador — said that during his 4% years with the Treasury Police he had “participated in some killings” but had not slain anyone for himself. He said his class of eight to 10 people was shown

slides detailing torture techniques, the most sensitive areas ifi the body and where to hit to cause pain but no external marks. Besides beating prisoners, Mr Hurtado said, he used to skin them with a knife, bum them with cigarettes, and stick them with needles. Sometimes he wired them to a generator “You turn a handle, and the faster you do, the more strong the shock.” Mr Hurtado said Green Berets told them that Salvadoreans were fighting Cuban attempts to make their country Communist. "They say, ‘This is a war and in a war everything is permitted’.” He said that the Treasury policemen considered themselves followers of Hitler and Mussolini. He saw himself as a “neo-Fascist” and had a swastika insignia on his gun. Three years after he joined the Treasury Police,

Mr Hurtado began to change his viewpoint and argue with his comrades about their activities, he said. After a heated quarrel in 1981, he deserted and hid for a month in El Salvador, then made his way to the United States. In December, 1982, St Luke’s Presbyterian Church in Wayzata, outside Minneapolis, accepted him as the first Central American refugee to be harboured in Minnesota, in defiance of United States laws. Mr Hurtado said at the time, “I never thought that by being part of the security forces I was to see such horrifying crimes that human beings, if they, can be said to be human,’ are capable of committing.” In the article, he said: “I did many wrong things. I raped a woman. You are a member of the security force and you can do anything you want.”