Violence Workers: Police Torturers and Murderers Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (review)

Based on interviews with 23 policemen who tortured and murdered "subversive" suspects, Violence Workers studies police violence in Brazil during its military period (1964-1985). While it makes for difficult reading because of its topic and the content of the interviews, its value lies in the way that the authors point out the similarities and differences with other countries based upon the case studies in Brazil. Huggins (a Brazilianist), Fatouros (a researcher on police violence in Greece), and Zimbardo (well-known for his experiments on obedience and authority) emphasize the theoretical systems, particularly the organizational and ideological mechanisms or situational forces involved in police violence. How are ordinary men and women transformed into torturers and murderers? And how do they explain their involvement in their careers of violence? No evidence shows that torturers in Brazil and Greece were sadists or had serious personality disorders; they were very "ordinary" men before their training and involvement in atrocities. As revealed by previous studies of violence workers such as Nazi executioners, the most effective were those who were "rational" and cool-headed because they were the ones who could follow orders and be molded according to their superiors' plans.

The authors conclude that the main causes for transforming individuals into violence workers are to be found in external situational forces, that is, in socio-historical processes, especially historical and political, sociological and organizational, and social-psychological ones. Such forces coming together and focused on a mission can dominate individual dispositions and personal morality. Thus, in particular historical periods state bureaucracies carry out ideological imperatives. In Brazil and Greece, for example, the national security ideology portrayed the nation as locked in a war against leftists, communists, socialists, and liberals. To carry out the state's ideological mission various structures and organizations are then created or allowed to emerge, such as special police and military units, systems for training, finances, the courts, and so on. Eventually these bureaucratic systems set off social-psychological factors that shaped the values and actions of the various actors within them, resulting in the removal of moral restraints to the use of violence and, in effect, creating new moralities. An important insight is the authors' inclusion of the "facilitators" in the system of violence.These are the institutions and individuals who provide the conditions for violence to work. Facilitators are of three types:international governments (including the United States) and international corporations that supply torture technologies and resources; national governments that promote the ideology and mechanisms for committing atrocities; and the bystander communities, both national and international, that fail to condemn torture.

This systemic view of violence work explains why, as the authors warn, once atrocity contexts are allowed to function in surreptitious civil or military police operations, extreme abuses are bound to follow. This is a warning to those who in recent years have proposed that the United States legalize some forms of torture in the war against terrorism. The authors emphasize that external systemic causes rather than personal character are the major explanatory factors behind political violence. However, some might misinterpret this to mean that torturers or executioners do not have personal responsibility for their acts, even though the authors caution against this misinterpretation. Reinforcing this caution, the authors show from the interviewees' own words the toll that violence work takes on the personal lives of torturers and executioners. Their marriages and relationships suffer; they have many psychosomatic complaints and are generally burnt out from their violence work.

It is admirable that in the last chapter the authors advocate against the practice of torture, refusing to confine themselves to professional detachment. Their proposal that torture be seen as a public health problem merits wide discussion and study, especially today when more than 150 governments practice torture and the "war against terrorism" is often used to justify the legalization of torture. One cannot be neutral in the case...