Page 33 of the CIA's Contra psychological-operations manual

Page 33 of Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, a CIA manual for Nicaraguan Contra fighters, in the CIA's English translation released in 2023. It advises "neutralizing" selected judges and officials before an assembled population.

What the page says

This is a typed page from a training manual, not a poster. It is the CIA's English translation of a Spanish-language text written for the Nicaraguan Contras, whom the manual calls "freedom commandos." The page runs from the end of one lesson into a section headed "Selective Use of Violence for Propaganda Effects." The core of it reads:

- Make the population see that if the Sandinista regime had ended its repression, with the corruption sponsored by foreign powers, etc., the freedom commandos would not have had to take up arms to cut down the lives of their Nicaraguan brothers, which hurts our Christian feelings. If the informant had not tried to escape, he would be enjoying life together with the rest of the population, because he would not have tried to inform to the enemy. This death would have been avoided if justice and freedom existed in Nicaragua, and this is exactly the objective of the democratic guerrilla.

5. Selective Use of Violence for Propaganda Effects

We could neutralize[2] carefully selected and planned-for targets, such as court judges, cattle judges [jueces de mesta], police or state security officers, CDS chiefs, etc. For purposes of the psychological effect, it is necessary to take extreme precautions, and it is essential to gather the affected population together to attend, take part in the act, and formulate accusations against the oppressor.

[footnote 2] The word neutralize was inserted during the translation process. The English language lesson plans used the word remove.

What it is, plainly

The section heading says what the act is: violence, chosen for its effect on an audience. The targets named are officials, judges first. The crowd is to be gathered to watch and to accuse. The paragraph above it explains how to talk about a death afterward, so that the dead man and his government carry the blame. The manual's own footnote shows the verb being changed in translation from "remove" to "neutralize," which is euphemism documented inside the document. The archive tags the page as euphemism and glittering generalities: "justice," "freedom," and "Christian feelings" are wrapped around instructions for staged violence.

It was wrong. A U.S. agency put this advice in writing, for a force it was backing, and the record now carries the agency's own release stamp. No reading of the Cold War makes public violence against judges, staged for a crowd, into anything else.

The record and its dates

The catalog date is October 18, 1985; the record title gives the manual only as "1980s," and this page does not narrow it further. The CIA approved the page for release on December 27, 2023. The archive's copy comes from the Internet Archive mirror of the CIA Reading Room. The archive files the source class as impersonated, and its record does not explain that classification further.

The fact that Americans can read this page at all is the system working late. A document an agency would have preferred to keep is now public, under the agency's own stamp. For the domestic form of hidden-hand work, see COINTELPRO and the press.