Beginning in the late 1970s,
Noam Chomsky and
Edward S. Herman wrote a series of books on the United States' involvement with
state terrorism. Their writings coincided with reports by
Amnesty International and other
human rights organizations of a 'new global epidemic of
state torture and murder'. Chomsky and Herman argued that terror was concentrated in the U.S.
sphere of influence in
developing countries, and documented
human rights abuses carried out by U.S.
client states in
Latin America. They argued that of ten Latin American countries that had
death squads, all were US client states. Worldwide they claimed that 74% of regimes that used torture on an administrative basis were U.S. client states, receiving military and other support from the U.S. to retain power. They concluded that the global rise in state terror was a result of
U.S. foreign policy. Chomsky concluded that all powers backed state terrorism in client states. At the top were the U.S. and other powers, notably the United Kingdom and France, that provided financial, military, and diplomatic support to
Third World regimes kept in power through violence. These governments acted together with
multinational corporations, particularly in the arms and security industries. In addition, other developing countries outside the Western sphere of influence carried out state terror supported by rival powers. The alleged involvement of major powers in state terrorism in developing countries has led scholars to study it as a global phenomenon rather than study individual countries in isolation. Gareau states that the number of deaths caused by non-state terrorism (3,668 deaths between 1968 and 1980, as estimated by the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)) is "dwarfed" by those resulting from state terrorism in US-backed regimes such as Guatemala (150,000 killed, 50,000 missing during the
Guatemalan Civil War – 93% of whom Gareau classifies as "victims of state terrorism"). Among other scholars, Ruth J. Blakeley says that the United States and its allies sponsored and deployed state terrorism on an "enormous scale" during the
Cold War. The justification given for this was to contain
Communism, but Blakeley contends it was also a means by which to buttress the interests of U.S. business elites and to promote the expansion of
neoliberalism throughout the
Global South. In
Worse Than War, Daniel Goldhagen argues that during the last two decades of the Cold War, the number of American client states practicing mass murder outnumbered those of the
Soviet Union. According to Latin Americanist
John Henry Coatsworth, the number of repression victims in Latin America alone far surpassed that of the U.S.S.R. and its East European satellites between 1960 and 1990.
J. Patrice McSherry asserts that "hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans were tortured, abducted or killed by right-wing military regimes as part of the US-led anti-communist crusade."
2026 During the
second presidency of
Donald Trump, media sources, politicians, and others have described
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activities, particularly during
Operation Metro Surge, as
terror. In February 2026, in a court case on the
immigration policy of the second Trump administration, Judge
Sunshine Sykes wrote "Beyond its terror against noncitizens, the executive branch has extended its violence on its own citizens". ==Definition==