Extrajudicial killing in the context of "Mexican Dirty War"

A massacre is an event of killing people who are not engaged in hostilities or are defenseless. It is generally used to describe a targeted mass killing of civilians by an armed group or person.

The word is a loan of a French term for "butchery" or "carnage". Other terms with overlapping scope include war crime, pogrom, mass killing, mass murder, and extrajudicial killing.

Lynching is an extrajudicial killing by a group. It is most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged or convicted transgressor or to intimidate others. It can also be an extreme form of informal group social control, and it is often conducted with the display of a public spectacle (often in the form of a hanging) for maximum intimidation. Instances of lynchings and similar mob violence can be found in all societies.

In the United States, where the word lynching likely originated, the practice became associated with vigilante justice on the frontier and mob attacks on African Americans accused of crimes. The latter became frequent in the South during the period after the Reconstruction era, especially during the nadir of American race relations. Black people were the primary victims of lynching in the U.S. (about 72% of the total), which was often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities along with other acts of racial terrorism.

The Río Negro massacres were a series of killings of villagers by the government of Guatemala between 1980 and 1982.

In 1978, in the face of civil war, the Guatemalan government proceeded with its economic development program, including the construction of the Chixoy hydroelectric dam. Financed in large part by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank, the Chixoy Dam was built in Rabinal, a region of the department of Baja Verapaz historically populated by the Maya Achi. To complete construction, the government undertook voluntary and forcible relocations of dam-affected communities from the fertile agricultural valleys to the much harsher surrounding highlands. When hundreds of residents refused to relocate, or returned after finding the conditions of resettlement villages were not what the government had promised, these men, women, and children were kidnapped, raped, and massacred by paramilitary and military officials. More than 440 Maya Achi were killed in the village of Río Negro alone. The string of extrajudicial killings that claimed up to 5,000 lives between 1980 and 1982 became known as the Río Negro massacres. The government officially declared the acts to be counterinsurgency activities – although local church workers, journalists and the survivors of Rio Negro deny that the town ever saw any organized guerrilla activity.

At 7:15 p.m. on September 23, 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos announced on television that he had placed the Philippines under martial law, stating he had done so in response to the "communist threat" posed by the newly founded Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP), and the sectarian "rebellion" of the Muslim Independence Movement (MIM). Opposition figures of the time (such as Lorenzo Tañada, Jose W. Diokno, and Jovito Salonga) accused Marcos of exaggerating these threats and using them as an excuse to consolidate power and extend his tenure beyond the two presidential terms allowed by the 1935 constitution. Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1081 on September 21, 1972, marking the beginning of a fourteen-year period of one-man rule, which effectively lasted until Marcos was exiled from the country on February 25, 1986. Proclamation No. 1081 was formally lifted on January 17, 1981 by Proclamation No. 2045, although Marcos retained essentially all of his powers as dictator until he was ousted in February 1986.

This nine-year period in Philippine history is remembered for the Marcos administration's record of human rights abuses, particularly targeting political opponents, student activists, journalists, religious workers, farmers, and others who fought against the Marcos dictatorship. Based on the documentation of Amnesty International, Task Force Detainees of the Philippines, and similar human rights monitoring entities, historians believe that the Marcos dictatorship was marked by 3,257 known extrajudicial killings, 35,000 documented tortures, 737 enforced disappearances, and 70,000 incarcerations. After Marcos was ousted, government investigators discovered that the declaration of martial law had also allowed the Marcoses to hide secret stashes of unexplained wealth that various courts later determined to be "of criminal origin".

Luis Echeverría Álvarez (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈlwis etʃeβeˈri.a ˈalβaɾes]; 17 January 1922 – 8 July 2022) was a Mexican lawyer, academic, and politician affiliated with the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) who served as the 57th president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. Previously, Echeverría was Secretary of the Interior from 1963 to 1969. He was the longest-lived president in Mexican history and the first to reach the age of 100.

Echeverría was a long-time CIA asset, known by the cryptonym, LITEMPO-8. His tenure as Secretary of the Interior during the Díaz Ordaz administration was marked by an increase in political repression. Dissident journalists, politicians, and activists were subjected to censorship, arbitrary arrests, torture, and extrajudicial killings. This culminated with the Tlatelolco massacre of 2 October 1968, which ruptured the Mexican student movement; Díaz Ordaz, Echeverría, and Secretary of Defense Marcelino Garcia Barragán have been considered as the intellectual authors of the massacre, in which hundreds of unarmed protestors were killed by the Mexican Army. The following year, Díaz Ordaz appointed Echeverría as his designated successor to the presidency, and he won in the 1970 general election.

A death squad is an armed group whose primary activity is carrying out extrajudicial killings, massacres, or enforced disappearances as part of political repression, genocide, ethnic cleansing, or revolutionary terror. Except in rare cases in which they are formed by an insurgency, domestic or foreign governments actively participate in, support, or ignore the death squad's activities.

Death squads are distinguished from assassination groups by their permanent organization and the larger number of victims (typically thousands or more) who may not be prominent individuals. Other violence, such as rape, torture, arson, or bombings may be carried out alongside murders. They may comprise a secret police force, paramilitary militia groups, government soldiers, policemen, or combinations thereof. They may also be organized as vigilantes, bounty hunters, mercenaries, or contract killers. When death squads are not controlled by the state, they may consist of insurgent forces or organized crime, such as the ones used by cartels.

Targeted killing is a form of assassination carried out by governments outside a judicial procedure or a battlefield.

Since the late 20th century, the legal status of targeted killing has become a subject of contention within and between various nations. Historically, at least since the mid-eighteenth century, Western thinking has generally considered the use of assassination as a tool of statecraft to be illegal. Some academics, military personnel and officials describe targeted killing as legitimate within the context of self-defense, when employed against terrorists or combatants engaged in asymmetrical warfare. They argue that unmanned combat aerial vehicles (drones) are more humane and more accurate than manned vehicles.

Lynching was the occurrence of extrajudicial killings that began in the United States' pre–Civil War South in the 1830s and had mostly ended by time of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, although instances occurred as late as 1981. Although the victims of lynchings were members of various ethnicities, after roughly 4 million enslaved African Americans were emancipated, they became the primary victims of lynchings by white Southerners. Lynchings in the U.S. reached their height from the 1890s to the 1920s, and they primarily victimized ethnic minorities. Most of the lynchings occurred in the American South, as the majority of African Americans lived there, but racially motivated lynchings also occurred in the Midwest and the border states of the Southwest, where Mexicans were often the victims of lynchings. In 1891, the largest single mass lynching (11) in American history was perpetrated in New Orleans against Italian immigrants.

Lynchings followed African Americans with the Great Migration (c. 1916–1970) out of the American South, and were often perpetrated to enforce white supremacy and intimidate ethnic minorities along with other acts of racial terrorism. A significant number of lynching victims were accused of murder or attempted murder. Rape, attempted rape, or other forms of sexual assault were the second most common accusation; these accusations were often used as a pretext for lynching African Americans who were accused of violating Jim Crow era etiquette or engaged in economic competition with Whites. One study found that there were "4,467 total victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941. Of these victims, 4,027 were men, 99 were women, and 341 were of unidentified gender (although likely male); 3,265 were Black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, 10 were Chinese, and 1 was Japanese."