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The Americas 58.2 (2001) 335-337



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Book Review

Political Policing: The United States and Latin America. By Martha K. Huggins. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp. xxi, 247. Appendices. Notes. References. Index. $50.00 cloth.

In 1974, the United States Congress eliminated the Office of Public Safety of the U.S. Agency for International Development that provided training for Latin American [End Page 335] police forces. Senate hearings in 1972 and 1973 run by Frank Church and James Abourzek revealed U.S. complicity with murder, torture, the suppression of free speech, and the overthrow of democratic governments. These findings were publicized by film maker Constantine Costa-Gavras in State of Siege (1973) and amplified by U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the imposition of the Pinochet dictatorship in October 1973, the subject of a more popular Costa-Gavras film, Missing (1974).

Despite the elimination of the Office of Public Safety, U.S. police training continues throughout the Western Hemisphere, much of it revived during the Reagan Administration. Although widespread, this aspect in the internationalization of state-sponsored violence is not understood as well as military assistance, primarily because the U.S. government hides its activities better than it used to and because participants are not usually willing to discuss their crimes against humanity. Thus, this is an important book. Huggins presents the first detailed synthesis of U.S. efforts to penetrate, de-nationalize, and militarize the internal security forces of Latin America under the guise of making Latin American forces more efficient, professional, and democratic.

Huggins begins her study with an overview on police assistance programs in the hemisphere from 1898 to 1964. Based mostly on secondary sources, this provides an excellent foundation for understanding what happened in Brazil in the 1960s and 1970s, the main focus of her study. Using the Freedom of Information Act to declassify over a thousand pages of OPS materials and interviewing numerous Brazilian officers who participated in the torture of their fellow citizens, she was able to piece together an incredible story despite the resistance of U.S. officials.

Although U.S. efforts to train police began in the early twentieth century, the cold war and containment doctrine provided a new impetus. Latin American police forces became an "early warning system" in the war against communism, as U.S. advisers were able to transfer their ideology to Latin American military and police forces. The main objective was to prevent threats to U.S. security from evolving by encouraging Latin American forces to professionalize, centralize, and to adopt U.S. technology and techniques.

The results of such efforts are well known. Between 1964 and 1972, Brazilian security forces murdered over three thousand Brazilians and tortured thousands more. As Brazilian security forces adopted more elaborate techniques for torture, repression increased, but accountability decreased, even as inter-agency conflict increased tensions within the Brazilian government. A by-product of this conflict became the "devolution" of the internal security apparatus, evidenced by the emergence of death-squads and the concomitant breakdown of order.

Although Huggins focuses on Brazil, one can extrapolate about the process in the rest of continent, particularly Argentina, Chile, and Central America in the 1970s and 1980s, when Latin American forces adopted U.S. security concerns, began to [End Page 336] see their own people as threats to security, and began killing thousands of them, both "legally" and through the use of death-squads. One of the ironies of all this activity is that U.S. interests were not advanced. None of the recipient nations were any safer, less crime ridden, or more free of drugs. Needless to say, democracy and concern for human rights were not advanced.

One would like the author to continue the story closer to the present. The end of the cold war and return to democratic governments in the past decade has eliminated the old justification for police assistance, but such activity has not decreased. Rather, U.S. officials now couch their requests for police training as a tool of the drug war. After reading...

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