"Over the past two decades [Sluka is writing in 2000], between 200,000 and 300,000 people have been "disappeared" worldwide. In 1989, the UN Commission on Human Rights reported that the number of officially recorded disappearances had doubled over the previous year. 'Disappearances' are 'cases where individuals are seized by military, paramilitary, or police agents of the state [or their proxies], who secretly murder and dispose of the bodies of their victims, often after torture, always without legal process, and without acknowledgment and admitted responsibility of the state' (Herman 1982)"
(Herman: The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda)
Sluka 4-5: "The members of these death squads are usually linked directly or indirectly with
the regular security forces, but sometimes they are part of paramilitary 'defense' forces, or civilian right-wing paramilitary groups who kill people the state wants, or doesn't mind being, killed. Either way, there is always overlap in membership and other forms of direct and indirect collusion between the death squads and the army and police, and the death squads are usually directly or indirectly under official or unofficial state control."
"Hannah Arendt (cited in Herman 1982:7) has identified [death squads] as 'one of the
last and most terrible phases in the evolution and degeneration of totalitarian states.'"