Customer Reviews

Political Policing: The United States and Latin America

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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.

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.

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."