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In many civil and regional conflicts in the world since the 1950s, states, state agencies (most often the military or police), or semiprivate groups have formed special death squads in an effort to eliminate unwanted ideological, ethnic, or religious opponents. Death squads have been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths, and perhaps more, during this time. The phenomenon has been most commonly associated in the public mind with Latin American countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, but in fact, death squads have surfaced in many other countries and most parts of the world, including Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Turkey, Algeria, Uganda, apartheid South Africa, and Northern Ireland.

Death squads are clandestine and usually irregular organizations, often paramilitary in nature, that carry out extrajudicial executions and other violent acts (i.e., torture, rape, arson, bombing) against clearly defined individuals or groups of people. Murder is their primary or even sole activity. Except in the rare case where an insurgent group forms them, death squads operate with the support, complicity, or acquiescence of a government, or at least some parts of it. In many cases government security forces have participated directly. However, at the same time death squads may be privately constituted, almost always involve the support and participation of elements outside of government, and develop considerable independence from their backers. Except in unusual circumstances, organizations or units involved in the killing of combatants in the context of war between sovereign states, even when irregular forces of resistance are involved, do not fall under this definition, although the killing of noncombatants may indeed be so described.

A key element of the definition—that death squads are clandestine—helps explain why government agencies and sometimes private entities resort to their formation and use. Death squads give no visible indication that they exercise the legitimate use of force and they make no public acknowledgment of whose orders they follow. This makes it possible for the state and other backers of death squads to claim no knowledge of or influence over them, and therefore to deny any responsibility for their actions. This "plausible deniability" is vital to many states that want to appear to be upholding international norms of justice and human rights so they can qualify for foreign aid and be accepted as legitimate partners for foreign trade, or, conversely, so that they do not attain the pariah status that openly oppressive states acquire. For example, in the Bosnian war of the early to mid-1990s the government of Slobodan Milosevic materially supported ethnic cleansing by Serbian paramilitaries, but denied that it exercised any control over them. Later, while on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in the Hague in 2002 and 2003, Milosevic cited this alleged lack of control over the paramilitaries in his defense against charges of crimes against humanity.

The work of death squads is usually intended to spread terror, which can multiply their repressive effect, so their acts are not kept completely secret. For this reason most (but not all) death squads make sure that their actions are very public: They discard their victims in public places; they torture and mutilate them in horrific ways that will long be remembered; and they sometimes leave notes or visible signs that the tortured or killed were victims of a particular unit. In some cases lists of intended victims are even published in advance in the public media.

The irregular, informal organization of death squads and the demands of covert action make the exercise of control over them very difficult. They exist outside the law, which practically requires that their members be granted the widest possible exemption from prosecution and interference. The independence of death squads may also mean that they develop their own political agendas, while as appendages of a bureaucratic system (no matter how informal their organization), they often act according to organizational imperatives stemming from competition with other agencies.

The involvement of private or nonstate actors in death squads usually arises from a confluence of interests between private groups and governments: The government's need for deniability may induce it to have extrajudicial killing funded, organized, and committed by people who are not formally or officially associated with the state and who in some way share the government's ideological, economic, political, or religious ambitions. In El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s, for example, death squads benefited from the considerable support and influence of large landowners and were often directed by a political movement (the Nationalist Republican Alliance), even though some arose organizationally within state agencies, such as the national guard, and all worked in some form of cooperation with state forces to stamp out an internal insurgency.

SEE ALSO Argentina; Chile; Einsatzgruppen; El Salvador; Guatemala

Arthur D. Brenner