Edge of the Knife: Police Violence in the Americas by Paul Chevigny, The New Press, 1995, 273 pp., $25 (cloth). Paul Chevigny's most recent book, Edge of the Knife, is the first study of police behavior to compare prob- lems of police brutality and accountability in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. As such, it is a ground-breaking study of official violence and impunity in the Americas. Chevigny compares and contrasts police violence in six major cities-New York and Los Angeles in the north, and Sdo Paulo, Buenos Aires, Mexico City and Kingston, Jamaica in the south. He vividly describes the social and political worlds within which the police operate in each location. This in- depth account of the political con- text in each country sets the stage for an exploration of one of his main arguments-that the structure and conduct of local police depart- ments closely reflect the social, political and economic order of the society at large. The chapter on Sdo Paulo offers a compelling exploration of the inti- macy of this connection between the dominant values of society and patterns of police behavior. "The one who gets beaten is poor," says one of Chevigny's interviewees from a shantytown in SHo Paulo. "The white collar doesn't get beaten, he makes a deal." Chevigny traces the evolution of the Paulista proto-military model of policing, showing how a force organized dur- ing military rule to fight "internal enemies"-i.e. political oppo- nents-has survived a decade of democracy unchanged. The only difference lies in the definition of the "internal enemy:' Today's tar- gets of police violence aren't polit- ical opponents of the regime; they are the poor, the black, the petty common criminals and the home- less children on the streets of Sdo Paulo. Chevigny's book is important because it takes the issue of police impunity-for both crimes of cor- ruption and crimes against human life-head on. He also raises important questions regarding the definition-or lack thereof-of the role of the police. Should police work, he asks, be solely dedicated to punishing criminals and restor- ing the "status order"? Or do the police have a responsibility to pro- tect the rights of all citizens? "The confusion," Chevigny says, "repre- sents a basic tension in governance between order and liberty, a tension that governments do not really wish to resolve." As his book dramati- cally documents, it is this unre- solved tension that haunts police work globally. Colombia: The Genocidal Democracy by Javier Giraldo, S.J. with an introduction by Noam Chomsky, Common Courage Press, 1996, 118 pp., $12.95 (paper). In his introduction to this coura- geous book by Javier Giraldo, Noam Chomsky strikes to the heart of the Colombian tragedy-the state's refusal to redistribute the land. "It is necessary to impose silence and spread fear in countries like Colombia," he writes, "a coun- try where the top 3% of the landed elite own over 70% of arable land, while 57% of the poorest farmers subsist on under 3%." A native Colombian and a Jesuit priest, Giraldo is an expert witness to the Colombian state's efforts to "impose silence and spread fear." Director of the Commission of Peace and Justice, an umbrella organization representing over 55 Catholic religious orders through- out the country, Giraldo uses the Commission's unique resources to gather, analyze and disseminate the casualty count of Colombia's "dirty war." In the pages of this slim volume, Father Giraldo has brought American readers an essential, meticulously docu- mented road map through the com- plexities and the horrors of Colombian state terrorism. Giraldo's book shows how suc- cessive governments have shielded themselves from responsibility for the criminal strategies that have resulted in the slaughter of almost 40,000 Colombian citizens since the early 1980s. From the first wave of terrorism in 1978 by hit- men of the underground "Triple A" (American Anti-Communist Action), to the paramilitary savagery raging today in over half the national ter- ritory, Colombia's "dirty war" has appeared to operate without authorship, strategy or objective. The state has always hidden its hand behind the twin masks of weak democratic institutions and the uncontrollable violence of guerrillas and drug mafias. Giraldo's book strips away those masks. His analysis of the strategy and modus operandi of the "dirty war" cuts through the self-serving confusion. Here are the chief pro- tagonists-army officers, in league with landowners, politicians and drug mafias-arming and training death squads and private merce- nary armies. And here are their methods-the use of "anonymous" civilian hitmen who go after mili- tary-designated "targets," and the disguised army agents who don civilian clothes, drive unmarked cars and use private residences as detention centers for torture and murder. With chilling clarity, Father Giraldo describes a vicious and extremely intelligent form of state terror. The concluding section, based in large part on the judicial confessions of army deserters turned informants, unravels the criminal connections between the executive, the legislature and the military-secret links that ulti- mately connect the paramilitaries to official state policy.
