French journalist Marie-Monique Robin explores the terrible French colonial past during the Cold War and the decisive role armed forces played in the conceptualization and dissemination of the counter-subversive war. France’s withdrawal from Indochina (1954), where some of its troops had started to develop techniques to fight the “internal enemy”, encouraged the perception of the war in Algeria as a struggle aiming at maintaining the empire’s last bastion, against the Soviet bloc. In this context, torture and dirty war techniques were refined and widespread and, since the early sixties, “exported ” to the American continent. Without them, it would be impossible to understand the repressive and genocidal character of Latin American dictatorships.(J.A.)

[translated title: Death squad, the French school]