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Political Policing: The United States and Latin America [Paperback]

Martha K. Huggins (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)


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Book Description

June 29, 1998
Reconstructing eighty years of history, Political Policing examines the nature and consequences of U.S. police training in Brazil and other Latin American countries. With data from a wide range of primary sources, including previously classified U.S. and Brazilian government documents, Martha K. Huggins uncovers how U.S. strategies to gain political control through police assistance—in the name of hemispheric and national security—has spawned torture, murder, and death squads in Latin America.

After a historical review of policing in the United States and Europe over the past century, Huggins reveals how the United States, in order to protect and strengthen its position in the world system, has used police assistance to establish intelligence and other social control infrastructures in foreign countries. The U.S.-encouraged centralization of Latin American internal security systems, Huggins claims, has led to the militarization of the police and, in turn, to an increase in state-sanctioned violence. Furthermore, Political Policing shows how a domestic police force—when trained by another government—can lose its power over legitimate crime as it becomes a tool for the international interests of the nation that trains it.

Pointing to U.S. responsibility for violations of human rights by foreign security forces, Political Policing will provoke discussion among those interested in international relations, criminal justice, human rights, and the sociology of policing.


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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Huggins clearly demonstrates the dangerous unintended consequences of U.S. police training.” - Dennis M. Rempe, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs


“With vivid narrative and sharp analysis, Martha Huggins puts the police in its rightful place at the center of Latin American studies. . . . [A]ny look at the future requires an understanding of the past, and no such understanding is complete without the invaluable and pioneering contributions of Political Policing.” - Mark Ungar, Political Science Quarterly


[A] scathing indictment of the Office of Public Safety in general and its particular application in Brazil. . . . Her three chapters on OPS and its relationship to the Brazilian military dictators who seized power in 1964 are . . . extraordinary.” - Stephen G. Rabe, The International History Review


“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.” - W. Michael Weis, The Americas


Political Policing is a superb analysis, lucidly and compellingly written, of the US role in creating, training, and guiding Latin American police forces. - Kenneth Paul Erickson, Luso-Brazilian Review


“Martha Huggins has written a major exposé of the CIA’s and AID’s promotion of state terrorism through political murder, disappearances, and institutionalized torture by civil and military police, and their affiliated death squads in Latin America. Every American concerned about our country’s role in the world should read this book.”—Philip Agee, author of Inside the Company


“Written with scholarly precision and patriotic outrage, Political Policing is the most comprehensive investigation we have of the long and detestable U. S. involvement in police training in Latin America. Anyone who cares about the future of this hemisphere will want to read Professor Huggins’s brilliant exposé.”—Jack Langguth, Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California

About the Author

Martha K. Huggins is Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Sociology at Union College in Schenectady, New York. She is the editor of Vigilantism and the State in Modern Latin America.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 272 pages
  • Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 29, 1998)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0822321726
  • ISBN-13: 978-0822321729
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #636,556 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent expose of Dark Side of US Foreign Policy, June 14, 2010
This is a very well-researched expose of the covert and dark side of American foreign policy. Based on research in US archives and in Brazil, Huggins traces the history of US police training programs in Brazil and how these programs were designed for explicit political objectives, to counter the growth of leftist political movements which threatened US power and interests, and to prop up the military regime that was imposed following the 1964 CIA backed coup. Huggins traces how American advisors with the US Agency for International Develpment's Office of Public Safety (OPS), headed by CIA agent Byron Engle, worked closely with Brazilian police who ran the dirty war against the leftist underground. They provided weapons and modern police technologies, and helped them to set up an elaborate surveillance and social control apparatus that resulted in systematic human rights abuses, including the torture of suspected "subversives" and the growth of death squad activity under Operation Bandeirantes, a parallel to the Phoenix Operation in Vietnam.

Huggins book sheds important light on a dark corner of American foreign policy influence. Her book is especially relevant today, as police training programs have emerged as a staple of American counter-insurgency strategy in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are also being revived in Latin America under the guise of the War on Drugs. The history of these programs which Huggins traces in Brazil, and the violence that they engendered, provides a cautionary tale, which should be heeded by policy-makers and citizens alike.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Book, February 12, 2010
Scholarly and well documented, this is an essential work on US support for foreign police and paramilitaries in Latin America. It's also useful for scholars and students of other regions.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Political policing made boring, January 14, 2012
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This review is from: Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Paperback)
Political Policing is what one might expect from a textbook for a college course in political science, but it pales in comparison to the riveting work on the same subject by Naomi Klein, "The Shock Doctrine."
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