The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces

[Judi Lynn]

August 27, 2014

A Warning

The Latin Americanization of U.S. Police Forces

by COSME CAAL


Guatemala City.

From Guatemala City I have been keeping up with the events in Ferguson, Missouri and my heart goes out to those United States citizens who are actively resisting a brutal local police state. I sit awake at night and contemplate how one of the greatest nations in the world has become militarized and despotic. Impunity is now normalized in most police departments across the United States and in the minds of many Americans. I did not know I would live to see this phenomenon, yet, the more I peruse online news feeds, the more evident it is to me that Americans, especially minorities, are in great danger of militarized suppression as a matter of state policy.

From our experience in half a century in Latin America I can tell you that, once the human rights of a minority are compromised, it is only a matter of time before they are compromised for an entire nation. From that same experience I can tell you it will take decades before they can be regained. Militarized police forces take on a life of their down, at the expense of the society’s well-being. The social contract that gives the state the duty to organize police forces itself becomes obsolete, almost a joke. Citizens begin to obey agents of the state not out of respect or cooperation, but out of fear of those sworn to protect them. Eventually, the militarized power of the police reaches such magnitude that political leaders lose all ability to rein them in. We experienced this USA-backed militarized transformation of the police in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Chile, and Colombia. What the U.S. helped do to Latin America, it is now doing to itself.

Even when there will officers who want to adhere to the law, militarized policing organizations become an unstoppable and despotic force. The very ideologies that give them life become obsolete, as do all existing laws that protect citizens. Central American dictatorships backed and armed by the United States government in the 1970’s built police forces, outfitted them with military gear, and allowed them to brutalize and kill with impunity. The murder or incarceration of progressive democratic leaders who resisted this transformation was sanctioned by United States intelligence agencies.

I call out to white United States citizens, and those police officers that believe in democracy and the rule of law, to unite with racial minorities who are now being suppressed, and to resist the catastrophic militarization of police forces across the United States. For white Americans to think that their race makes them immune to police brutality is a mistake that cannot be afforded. Central American urban mestizo masses ignored the genocide of hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples. They saw these massacres as not their problem. Today we all suffer militarized suppression. Racial division was our greatest weakness.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/08/27/the-latin-americanization-of-u-s-police-forces/

[enough]

1. An extremely important perspective, thank you. (nt)

[Judi Lynn]

2. To See The Danger Of Militarizing America’s Police Forces, Look South

To See The Danger Of Militarizing America’s Police Forces, Look South
by Steven Cohen - Guest Contributor Posted on August 22, 2014 at 10:55 am

Neither the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager shot six times by a white police officer, nor the events that have since unfolded in Ferguson, Missouri have taught us anything about American race relations that hasn’t been abundantly clear since for decades. What Ferguson has done is expose, in unprecedented public fashion, the shadowy osmosis of military tactics and equipment into local and state police departments. And one needs only look to one of America’s closest allies in the hemisphere for how badly this could turn out.

The tactics used in Ferguson are not a particularly new phenomenon, but images of armored vehicles spewing tear gas and Army-grade assault weapons being pointed at civilians, combined with the momentum the story has built on Twitter, has turned police aggression into a national issue, even for people who aren’t moved by the simple fact of Brown’s death. In that sense, June’s ACLU report on the subject seems rather prescient. “By invoking the imagery of war, aggressively funding the enforcement of U.S. drug laws, and creating an over-hyped fear of siege from within our borders,” it reads, “the federal government has justified and encouraged the militarization of local law enforcement.”

What the study doesn’t discuss at length is that the federal government has already experimented with similar approaches in countries across the world, affording all manner of political support and military aid to repressive autocratic regimes from Indonesia and Iraq, to South Africa, Egypt, and Guatemala, sometimes with even less oversight than has been exercised back home. These and other historical examples provide the best indicators available of what unchecked fear-mongering and the continued militarization of law enforcement could mean for U.S. democracy over the long term.

In no place are the lingering effects of this “paramilitary police juggernaut” more evident than Colombia, which has, for at least the last 20 years, been by far the biggest recipient of U.S. military aid, equipment, training, and tactical guidance of any country outside the greater Middle East, and which remains — some would say as a result — one of the most entrenched human rights crises in the world.

Since the mid-1980s, Colombia has been a key staging ground for the so-called wars on drugs and terror, but U.S. military involvement in the country actually predates even the 50-year armed conflict often used to justify it. Regardless of the true motives, the reliance of institutionalized right-wing paramilitary violence as an institutionalized strategy in the Colombian conflict has been more or less consistent — from the mid 1960s, when U.S. “special advisors” began advocating for the creation of just such a “guerrilla/terrorist” counterinsurgent structure, all the way up to the early 2000s, when Presidents Clinton and Bush both waived human rights restrictions on massive Plan Colombia aid packages, despite overwhelming evidence that the Colombian state was working hand-and-hand with narcotrafficking death squads throughout much of the country.

More:
http://thinkprogress.org/world/2014/08/22/3474309/colombia-ferguson/