The talk around the water cooler this week is about Mike Tyson's ear nibbling episode, as if a convicted rapist being paid $30 million to beat the shit out of another boxer is somebody you could trust to play fair. "What was Mike thinking?" one sports fan agonized to his co-worker.

It's obvious, isn't it? In the third round, with a cut on his forehead bleeding into his eyes, Mike Tyson's thinking went something like this: "He head-butted me, so I'll bite his fucking ear off." The referee warned Tyson to re-insert his mouthpiece; the boxer complied, then spit it out again when the referee wasn't looking. Tyson then went on to get his little piece of revenge against his opponent.

Here's what Cortez Kennedy, a Seahawk defensive tackle, had to say about this incident: "I can't believe it. I spent all this money for these tickets. They shoulda let 'em keep going." Seattle sports pages reported this with some bemusement; they didn't bother to remind fans that Kennedy himself pleaded guilty in February 1996 to a charge of domestic violence assault stemming from an incident with his wife; other charges were dropped after his wife could not be located to testify. Maybe we can build a stadium for Tyson, too.

But football and boxing--even the heavyweight championship of the world--are, in reality, bush league when it comes to brutality. Mike could learn a few tricks from some of his colleagues in third world countries, who also do this sort of thing for a living. Let's look at Peru, for example.

Peru, you'll recall, was much in the news two months ago for the Army's heroic and celebrated rescue of Japanese embassy hostages from Peruvian terrorists (who, it was noted in passing, were executed on the spot). With the MRTA's blood mopped up, presumably the problems of the average Peruvian are now over. We're certainly not hearing anything about them--we hear about Iron Mike instead.

But lots has been happening in Peru in the last two months. In a land where prison riots are an annual ritual and street protests routinely draw 20,000 to 50,000 people, activists can tell you all about goons who act and think like Mike Tyson. These are the sort of guys who staff Peru's U.S.-funded military death squads and intelligence units. The following excerpt is from an Associated Press article on Leonor La Rosa, herself a former employee of Peru's intelligence service, who for 12 years infiltrated union meetings and demonstrations, and trailed activists, students and suspected terrorists. In January, she was arrested by her own colleagues. Here's the story of how Tyson-types treat their "opponents":

...[La Rosa's] superiors started to suspect her of telling a newspaper about military plans to intimidate and assassinate opposition activists and journalists. "One day I arrived at work and everybody was silent and staring at me," she said.

..La Rosa has publicly disputed the armed forces' claim that military death squads have been disbanded. La Rosa says she regularly saw the death squad's members at army intelligence headquarters. "They continue in activity, continue in their normal functions. They go in and out as if it's their home," she said...

There you have it. For years, Peruvian activists, students, opposition party members and suspected terrorists have been kidnapped, brutally tortured, murdered, and their bodies dumped in the streets of Lima. Yet few of the perpetrators from the Peruvian military, police, or intelligence agencies have been punished for these acts. And La Rosa's case, along with prison riots, street demonstrations, Peruvian Pres. Alberto Fujimori's shutting down of a Supreme Court-led investigation into government brutality, and the increasing public uproar among Peruvians in the weeks after the Embassy massacre have all gotten nary a blip of media coverage here in the U.S.

Instead of wailing over the savagery of Mike's little faux-pas in the boxing ring, people living in the U.S. should be asking the U.S. government why it's sending millions of dollars every year to Peru's dictator, ostensibly to fight the drug war (sorta like paying the Mafia millions of dollars and then asking them nicely to stop running numbers, infiltrating unions, evading taxes, etc.).

This money goes directly to Peru's military, so it can purchase the latest in high-tech armament from U.S. and European companies. (The U.S. arms, of course, are further underwritten by U.S. taxpayer subsidies.) Some of the funds are used to send Peru's own, home-grown Tyson-types to the School of Americas to learn surveillance, detainment and torture techniques--in order to control Peru's population and quell any kind of democratic dissent or reforms. The "Little Pentagon" that La Rosa describes above draws its name not just from its five-sided shape, but also from the fact that it was paid for by U.S. tax dollars.

As long as the U.S. media continues to show slow-motion replays of Mike Tyson calculatedly chomping Evander Holyfield's ears, there won't be time to show us images of the dead and broken bodies of activists in Peru or any of the other client states whose dictators are financed by the U.S. government. O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson are both poster children for the barely suppressed violence in U.S. culture. They serve as both light (well,actually, stereotypes of violent black male) entertainment and a subtle distraction from the covert, horrific mass violence that underlies much of U.S. politics, both at home and abroad.