This article deals with the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the federal government of the United States that are violations of human rights. Training and support The CIA has been involved in the support and training of military and paramilitary units that defend against enemies of US-backed governments in Latin America. Florencio Caballero, a former Honduran Army interrogator, said that he had been trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, which The New York Times confirmed with US and Honduran officials. Much of his account was confirmed by three American and two Honduran officials. It may be the fullest yet given of how army and police units were authorized to organize death squads that seized, interrogated, and killed suspected socialists. He said that while Argentine and Chilean trainers taught the Honduran Army kidnapping and elimination techniques, the CIA explicitly forbade the use of physical torture or assassination. Caballero described the CIA role as ambiguous. "Caballero said his superior officers ordered him and other members of army intelligence units to conceal their participation in death squads from CIA advisers. He added that he was sent to Houston for six months in 1979 to be trained by CIA instructors in interrogation techniques. "They prepared me in interrogation to end the use of physical torture in Honduras – they taught psychological methods", Caballero said of his American training. "So when we had someone important, we hid him from the Americans, interrogated him ourselves, and then gave him to a death squad to kill." John R. Stockwell, a CIA officer who left the Agency and became a public critic, said of the CIA field officers: "They do not meet the death squads on the streets where they are actually chopping up people or laying them down on the street and running trucks over their heads. The CIA people in San Salvador meet the police chiefs and the people who run the death squads, and they do liaise with them, they meet them beside the swimming pool of the villas. And it is a sophisticated, civilized kind of relationship. And they talk about their children, who are going to school at UCLA or Harvard and other schools, and they do not talk about the horrors of what is being done. They pretend like it is not true." Human Rights Watch asserted in a 2019 report that the CIA was backing death squads in