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.
