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Third World fascists did not hesitate to commit atrocities recalling the Nazi massacres. For instance, the Chilean dictator General Pinochet, who came to power with a military coup against President Allende in 1973, turned his country into a river of blood. Pinochet had Allende killed with tank and jet attacks on the Presidential Palace. However, the Chilean people were told that Allende had committed suicide because he refused to surrender. Following that, a ruthless policy to eliminate Allende's supporters and the opposition was implemented. The junta killed thousands of people in its first year in power, and approximately 90,000 Chileans out of a population of 9 million were arrested. The terrorizing of the population, corpses piled up in morgues, or shot and thrown into the Mapocho River, the detention of suspects in the Santiago Stadium, hostage-takings, frequent search operations and lootings, were just a few of the crimes of the Pinochet regime. Academic institutions were "cleansed," and history and geography courses in universities were subjected to censorship by the fascist authorities.
Fascist dictatorships similar to that of Pinochet came to power in Latin American countries such as Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Paraguay, and also carried out appalling cruelties. Thousands of opponents of the junta in Argentina "disappeared." According to the evidence that emerged after the fact, more than 2,000 political detainees were put onto planes and thrown out over the sea from thousands of feet in the air. A former gendarme, Federico Talavera, who appeared on Argentine television on April 27, 1995, admitted the tortures carried out during the time, saying among other things that pregnant women were thrown into the sea and that dogs were specially trained to bite peoples' sexual organs. According to his confession, the dogs would take political detainees' sexual organs in their mouths and wait for an order. If the detainee refused to talk, then the dog was told to bite.
The brutality in Guatemala was also horrifying. In the 1960s and 1970s, the fascist regime which overthrew the country's first and only elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954, turned the country into killing-fields. Among the fascists' targets, in conformity with fascism's general hatred of religion, were men of religion. Amnesty International announced that between October 1966 and March 1968, some 8,000 Guatemalans, including many priests, were killed by "death squads." In 1972, the number of death squad victims went up to 12,000, and to 20,000 four years later.
The Roman Catholic Bishops Conference described the government's policy as "genocide." In Killing Hope:US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, the American writer William Blum explained the torture methods used by the Guatemala regime:
Anyone attempting to organize a union or other undertaking to improve the lot of the peasants, or simply suspected of being in support of the guerrillas, was subject ... unknown armed men broke into their homes and dragged them away to unknown places ... their tortured or mutilated or burned bodies found buried in a mass grave, or floating in plastic bags in a lake or river, or lying beside the road, hands tied behind the back ... bodies dropped into the Pacific from airplanes. In the Gual area, it was said, no one fished any more; too many corpses were caught in the nets ... decapitated corpses, or castrated, or pins stuck in the eyes ... a village rounded up, suspected of supplying the guerrillas with men or food or information, all adult males taken away in front of their families, never to be seen again ... or everyone massacred, the village bulldozed over to cover the traces ... seldom were the victims actual members of a guerrilla band. One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled with insecticide over the head of the victim; there was also electric shock — to the genital area is the most effective.133
William Blum quotes a statement by a female native Guatemalan. Taken for questioning, along with her family, on charges of being an "opponent of the regime," Rigoberta Menchú Tum described what happened to her on December 9, 1979:
On 9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other young men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President] Lucas Garcia's army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be paraded in a line.... I was with my mother, and we saw Patrocino; he had had his tongue cut out and his toes cut off. The officer jackal made a speech. Every time he paused the soldiers beat the Indian prisoners. When he finished his ranting, the bodies of my brother and the other prisoners were swollen, bloody, unrecognizable. It was monstrous, but they were still alive. They were thrown on the ground and drenched with gasoline. The soldiers set fire to the wretched bodies with torches and the captain laughed like a hyena and forced the inhabitants of Chajul to watch.134
These are but a few examples. The fascist regime in Guatemala, run first by General Romeo Lucas Garcia, and then by General Efrain Rios Montt, by similar methods, killed more than 100,000 people. William Blum speaks of victims "having their eyes put out, their testicles cut off and stuffed in their mouths, and their hands and feet cut off" by the security forces, as well as women "having their breasts cut off."
Similar fascist regimes held power in African countries, such as Zaire, Uganda and South Africa, for long periods of time. The regime of South Africa adopted a fiercely racist ideology, reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The black majority in South Africa, the original inhabitants of the land, were exploited by the white minority for years.
In short, the second half of the 20th century was as much the brunt of fascist violence as the first. Fascist regimes, similar to those overthrown in Europe, emerged in Latin America and Africa, who again led to the world becoming'a battlefield where "the strong survive and the weak are eliminated."