Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Among the lacunae in the historiography of Latin America's relations with the United States is that class of Cold War-era "development assistance" that was aimed at modernizing the police forces of the region. Sired in the 1950s, adopted by the U.S. Agency for International Development (U.S. AID) in the 1960s when it was called the Office of Public Safety, liquidated by Congress in 1974 owing to its complicity in torture and murder but revived under more discreet auspices in the 1980s, the U.S. police-assistance program has bolstered the governments of at least fifty countries worldwide over the last half century. But police aid, unlike its mammoth sibling, military assistance, has attracted scant scholarly interest, even though like military aid it exemplifies one of the least-understood aspects of the Cold War: the internationalization of state-sponsored violence, particularly in what was then called the Third World. In Latin America alone through the 1960s, twenty-three governments received more than forty million dollars in equipment and services and had nearly 365,000 police officers trained by U.S. experts.

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While alluring, the topic poses two obvious hazards to the researcher: government secrecy, which still blocks access to much of the evidence, and the concomitant risk of imputing either too little or too much to the U.S. role in the construction of Latin America's police forces during the Cold War. Martha K. Huggins not only fails to navigate successfully around either hazard but has produced a book that contributes inappreciably to our knowledge of this subject, either as sociology or history. While it underexploits sociology's rich theoretical possibilities, the book's application of the historical method is so maladroit that its claim to be "reconstructing 80 years of history" should not be taken seriously.

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