Torture as State Crime by Melanie Collard

Author:Melanie Collard [Collard, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781315456119
Google: T7JjDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 34702983
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

As French political analyst, Georges Gabriel Périès, explained:

It’s not any officer who would start teaching and spreading the doctrine of Revolutionary War at the École Supérieure de Guerre, but frustrated soldiers who just came out of two wars that they lost […]; one can easily imagine the impact that their attitude and mindset were going to have on Argentine officers attending their conferences.

(Périès 1999: 786)

As for the content of the course they followed in Paris, Argentine officers were obviously exposed to the doctrine of Revolutionary War. One of the first French theoreticians on the subject, along with Trinquier, was Colonel Charles Lacheroy (Villatoux and Villatoux 2012: 45). A French army officer who spent most of his career in the African colonies, Lacheroy was sent to Indochina from 1951 to 1953, where he began to discover and appreciate this new type of warfare and its techniques, in particular the methods of psychological action. These became his speciality upon his return to France, where he was to drive the creation of a 5th Command dedicated to this task in every military unit. A typical example of the French praetorianism so common at the time, he was constantly involved in coups: he took an active part in the civilian and military rebellion of 13 May 1958 which, from Algeria, caused the fall of the Fourth Republic and the appointment of Charles de Gaulle; he was then personally involved in the failed Generals’ Putsch of April 1961 against de Gaulle himself; and, finally, at the end of 1961, he became leader of the OAS and exiled in Spain where, paradoxically, his ideological ally Francisco Franco arrested him and sent him as a prisoner to the Canary Islands. Sentenced to death in absentia in April 1961, Lacheroy was granted an amnesty in 1968 and returned to Paris, where he retired (Villatoux and Villatoux 2012: 47).

In 1958, while the situation in Algeria was still tense, he was made Director of Information and Psychological Action Services in Algiers and, in December of that year, he started to hold conferences at the École Supérieure de Guerre and at the Centre d’Études Asiatiques et Africaines – Centre of Asian and African Studies – in Paris (Oliveira-Cézar 2003: 71–72). During his lectures at the École Supérieure, he structured the fundamentals of the knowledge on Revolutionary War available at the time, which would be used as a model for later analyses. In doing so, he would teach Argentine officers, among others, a theory that they would themselves apply later.

According to Lacheroy (Lacheroy 1958), this new type of war was a total war: it involved women, children and the elderly. Traditional rules of war were dead: conventional armies no longer confronted each other – not even in the form of an army against bands of guerrillas – because it was a war in which the main objective was not simply to take power but to ‘take’ the population. By conquering the body and soul of every individual, the population would be controlled and victory assured.

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