"President #Dilma and Brazil's Politicos' Gender Crisis"
#feminism and #Impeachment  #Brazil #Politics

https://files-download2.acrocomcontent.com/api/ddx/assets/ticket?dlticket=g9HM398BR-yQws4qW-Vxhw&x-user-action-id=4bba767b-dff1-4337-98d3-c183f753c937&x-user-engagement=active&x-api-client-id=api-sendnow-2&x-user-action-name=download




                     President Dilma Rousseff and Male Politicos’ Gender Crisis

                                                Martha K. Huggins, Ph.D.

As votes accumulated for President Dilma’s lower-house impeachment, “Good Bye, Dear” (Tchau Querida!) spread across the placards gripped by political opposition’s men and some women.  Brazil’s Senate will soon try the country’s first woman president for “corruption” and if impeached Dilma Rousseff  will be stripped of presidential powers for some of the alleged crimes committed by lower-house and senate legislators.  The chutzpah of federal legislators should not surprise me having done research in Brazil for 40 years on police, crime, and corruption.   I was, however, stunned by the aggressive even visceral hatred against President Dilma demonstrated by her predominantly male attackers.  They showed none of the much-touted gentility and conciliation allegedly governing Brazilian cultural, social, and political life.

A Feminist’s Take on Dilma’s ‘Take-Down’
Simply put, Dilma Rousseff’s being a woman in Brazil’s highest political office violates a covert and highly male-coveted Brazilian norm:  A woman in Brazil’s presidency is gender ‘out of place,’ as one influential Brazilian journalist argues, unless she is ‘sexy and erotic.’ Condemned for favoring what sociologist Max Weber called “legal-rational” rule-based  interaction rituals, President Rousseff  apparently spurns Brazilian masculine  informality,  personalism, and  other patriarchically-favored ‘flirty” interaction rules.  They run counter to her Wikipedia page description:  a “detailed  technician, with the reputation of a workaholic, … lacking political tact… [she] turns… to technicians [for answers]”, not to politicians.

The upshot is that Brazilian politicos find themselves in a row boat without a paddle.  Unable to use masculine, sexualized, informal back-slapping, vigorous handshakes, and whiskey to grease back room negotiations and close deals, these men are also unable to ‘sexualize’ their way into Rousseff’s presidential circle.  Consequently male politicians cannot figure out what Brazil’s president is about:  If she’s on the take will she share contacts; if she’s not will she look the other way for those who are?  It’s surprising that, so far, no journalist, political or economic analyst, academic, or-- most curiously—any scholar on Brazil, has explored how much gender--the ‘elephant in the room’—contributes to calls for President Dilma’s her impeachment.

Denouncing Corruption/Neutralizing Risk
Why on earth would politicians risk denouncing a nation’s president for illegal activities when they themselves are under indictment for high-level politico-economic corruption? As sociologists Howard Becker and William Chambliss have argued for decades, a corruption system flourishes as long as all those involved are getting enough of what they want, and no one who wants in is being kept out. Unable to penetrate President Dilma’s inner circle, corrupt Brazilian politicos cannot assess her stand on extra-legal power brokering, rigged contract bidding, and kickbacks.  They are left wondering uneasily if this president will at least do nothing about their corruption.

Everyone in Brazil assumes that corruption there is as old as the country itself.  A Brazilian tabulation of “corruption scandals” from1974 through the end of President Lula’s two-term presidency (2003-2011) lists 202 such scandals over a 37-year period (1975-2011).  The scandal allegedly implicating President Dilma, “Petrolão,” is itself at least three decades old.  Odebrecht Construction, whose 2004 revenues were 31 billion, distributed political payoffs to five successive presidential administrations, as Odebrecht’s financial records reveal.  A former employee reports that the Brazilian conglomerate had a “Bribery Department," where she worked, and from which huge illegal payoffs were paid to ‘friendly’ political and government officials.  Such kickbacks go “back to the presidential term of José Sarney (1985-1990),” when “516 public officials, entrepreneurs, companies, institutions, and politicians, including Ministers, senators, congressmen, governors, were involved in “Petrolão”-style corruption.

Those who have reaped the spoils of this corruption apparently were able to control their self-righteous indignation during the five male presidential administrations prior to Rousseff’s.  So why is she being targeted? Apparently denouncing Dilma Rousseff’s “corruption” is worth the risk, as long as Brazil’s president can be made the unique case to redirect public anger and further investigations and away from themselves.

João Luis Vieira, an editor with Brazil’s national news magazine, Epoca—roughly like Time or Newsweek--wrote under his byline in its issue of August 20, 2015 that, “Dilma should have [begun her presidency by] eroticizing herself for the electorate.” (Vieira’s piece was later pulled from Epoca). Vieira explained that “Sexist and misogynist women [read: “feminist man-haters”] have produced and disseminated a series of ‘bumper sticker’ ideas that have extinguished feminine [erotic] expression.”  But Vieira doubts that President Dilma could even be ‘erotic.’
Admitting that he doesn’t know Brazil’s president “personally and has never seen her nude”-- apparently important for a man to assess the president’s political ‘sex attraction’--Vieira opines that Dilma’s sexual desire “ended at least a decade ago.” Comparing Dilma to Jane Fonda,  Vieira offers  a medical insight:   Jane Fonda “uses hormones regularly to maintain her over-the-top-sexuality.”  Dilma does not, “to her detriment,” Vieira says.   In fact, Dilma actively “extinguishes” her erotic side by wearing “clothes that cloud her sexiness:  identical pant suits with three-quarters sleeves, …always  covering her middle section.  She wears flat shoes without laces and almost no visible jewelry.”

President Rousseff’s penalty, for being a woman in Brazil’s highest political office, who keeps  politicos in line with her presidential formality, is being labeled “frigid,” hormone-deficient, without “eroticism,” ‘pig-headed,’ “authoritarian,” and, alas, corrupt as well.  Well yes, President Rousseff   is “corrupt”: Because she has corrupted patriarchy,  angry, frustrated male politicians want Dilma Rousseff  impeached.  As for Dilma Rousseff’s  other alleged  “corruption,” she is unlikely to have been involved directly in “Petrolão” or any other current corruption scheme because getting into corruption’s club requires male-understood schmoozing, a skill that Brazil’s president elects not to practice.

Martha K. Huggins, Professor of Sociology Emerita at Union College (Schenectady) and Tulane University (New Orleans), has researched Brazil for 40 years, with  seven books and numerous academic articles on crime, control, torture, and corruption in Brazil.  Her best-known books are Political Policing: The US and Latin America (Duke University) and Violence Workers: Brazilian Torturers and Murders Reconstruct Brazilian Atrocities (University California),  Huggins, who is still writing academic articles, also publishes news pieces on public sites.  See mdkhuggins@blogspot.com,  thebluepaper.com, Twitter (@mdkhuggins), and academia.edu (mdkhuggins).

The night the police came, stayed, and didn't arrest me
Key West and Brazil: Democracy and Police Accountability

http://thebluepaper.com/key-west-brazil-democracy-police-accountability/

What Fuels Protests in #Brazil?

                Brazil's Anti-Dilma Rouseff  Protests, Right-Wing Investment Capital and Associated  Stake-Holders:  No Socialism in Brazil---Especially When Oil is at Stake!

                                                      Martha K. Huggins

I have been wondering why none of my "Brazilianist" colleagues--Scholars of Brazil, I've been one for 40 years--have failed to ask who is behind the protests against President Dilma and her Presidency?  Given that "corruption"  has been  a constant in democratizing, post-military, Brazil (1985 to the present),  I assume that corruption itself cannot be the primary cause of the protests and associated demands for President Dilma's impeachment. And why is there no analysis of how doggedly local, state, and the federal governments have pursued and even punished some very high- profile actors in corruption?  My assumption (based on the US example) is that people in power will be corrupt if they can,  and will be increasingly corrupt, if they get away with it.  I applaud Brazil for impeaching one former president and for pursuing corruption relatively regularly at the local, state, and federal levels. 

But I am less interested in "corruption" than in why academics and journalists who write about  Brazil's current "crisis" have not asked,  'who is funding Brazil's national protests against President Dilma Rouseff and why'?  The answers are that funding comes from very, very wealthy Capitalist stake-holders whose political reach and 'dark money' spans national and international boundaries. They are using their considerable influence and money to undermine the Rouseff government.  Why are especially my academic colleagues 'shying away' from following the dark money behind Brazil's current crisis?  Because we could, or  already do, benefit at many of out academic institutions from the dark money currently being used to fuel protests against President Dilma Rouseff's government.   She needs to be stopped from turning Brazil into another 'socialist' conquest, in order to strengthen international capital's position within a Brazilian political-economy that the big money stake holders consider  a threat to their expansionist plans.

From the US, the Koch Brothers are actively  funding right-wing attacks on President Dilma. Jorge Paulo Lemann, a Swiss-Brazilian, and the most wealthy man in the country, is an investor and 'beer Entrepreneur.' Ranked the 26th wealthiest person in the world and wealthiest man in Brazil, Jorge  Lemann's Brazilian beer conglomerate (AmBev), which  merged in 2004 with Interbrew (Belgium) and in 2008 with Anheuser-Busch (US), made Lemann the "King of Beer," a designation that apparently enhances Lemann's existing status as a highly successful investor. The latter includes heading a multi-billion dollar investment firm, founded by  Lemann  in 2004 with three other investors.  3G Capital partners, which collaborates  with Berkshire Hathaway to carry out corporate acquisitions.  With offices in New York City and Rio de Janeiro, 3G Capital is a powerful boundary-spanner in fostering its vision for Brazilian political life.

Jorge Lemann's, Fundacao Estudar--through which money for some anti-Dilma protesters flows-- provides educational scholarships for Brazilian and US students.Lehman has endowed student fellowships at US universities, including, Columbia University's Lemann Fellowship for "students with a deep interest in the overall advancement of Brazil," and likewise at Harvard, MIT, UCLA, and Oxford University (UK)  among others. In a recent World Press Blog, the author maintained that the conservative forces behind getting President Dilma out of office include the Koch Brothers, Jorge Lehmann--a George Soros colleague, with Soros also funding some of the Anti-Dilma protests in Brazil. [1]

These stake-holders in Capitalism do not want Brazil  "to become another Venezuela."  Brazil's national oil company, Petrobras,  "has been eyed for some time by [George] Soros and the Rothschild banking family for whom he fronts globally, as well as the anti-government, libertarian-bent Koch Brothers" [2].  "The right-wing participants in Brazil’s protests are linked directly with the Koch Brothers, particularly the group, 'Free Brazil Movement' (Movimento Brasil Livre – MBL). The group is also financed by Warren Buffett’s billionaire Brazilian partner [3], Jorge Paulo Lemann,."

 In a recent Intercept article by Glen Greenwald [4], none of  the above actors' funding of  Brazil's anti-Dilma movement were even mentioned, even though Greenwald is respected for taking up tough political issues.  Perhaps, Brazil's current situation interests me because I have seen it happen before.  While Greenwald sees a relationship between Trump's candidacy in the US and the anti-Dilma movement in Brazil--both representing and reflecting a time of  institutional crisis--I see the similarity in Brazil's pre-Golpe (before 1964) political climate. 

Hopefully more on that later--if I have the time!

Why won't Brazilianists touch the international capital  that is driving protests?  Besides the funding that  Lemann gives to US and UK universities for student fellowships, Brazil's richest citizen also endows academic institutes (Lemann Institute at U of Illinois, Urbana-Champlain), opportunities for faculty scholars at Columbia's "Lemann Institute for Brazilian Studies," and endowed chairs at Lemann's alma mater, Harvard University, and Stanford's "Lemann Center."


References
1.  see http://www.telesurtv.net/english/analysis/Are-the-Koch-Brothers-Behind-Brazils-Anti-Dilma-March-20150313-0001.html; see also #2 below

2. https://seeker401.wordpress.com/2015/03/24/soros-and-the-kochs-team-up-in-latin-american-staged-protests/

3.  http://fortune.com/2015/03/25/3g-capital-heinz-kraft-buffett/; http://fortune.com/2015/03/25/3g-capital-heinz-kraft-buffett/


4.https://theintercept.com/2016/03/18/brazil-is-engulfed-by-ruling-class-corruption-and-a-dangerous-subversion-of-democracy/; http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/24/glenn_greenwald_brazils_democracy_is_under

 








e

State Torture: Interviewing Perpetrators, Discovering Facilitators, Theorizing Cross-Nationally: Torture 101

Paste Link into your subject heading

State Torture:
 https://www.academia.edu/17442903/State_Torture_Interviewing_Perpetrators_Discovering_Facilitators_Theorizing_Cross-Nationally_Torture_101

Urban Economics: What is a CAFR? Application to Internal Control Over Financial Reporting

To Monroe County Taxpayers and School Board:

How the Early Learning Center’s Shortfall Gets ‘Disappeared’

Martha K. Huggins

The $20K-plus ‘shortfall’ at Key West’s Horace O’Bryant School’s Early Learning Center (ELC) may not be much money compared to the millions in Monroe County’s school system budget but it is still taxpayers’ money that could have gone to early childhood education.  The newly discovered missing funds could signal much larger past losses and administrative failures that go way beyond the actions of  the now-terminated ELC manager.  The disappearance of taxpayer money should have been known about and reported in the School District’s 2014-2015 annual audit, but it is impossible to know if this was done since that audit is missing from the school district’s website. 

Key West taxpayers may want to declare their loss of confidence  in Monroe County School District executives, whose initial failure to fully implement US government auditing standards and practices system-wide has gotten the county into a financial conundrum.  To sort out this mess means spending more taxpayer money by hiring a forensic accountant, who undoubtedly will raise questions about higher-ups’ oversight, accountability, and credibility.   

Bottom line:  A government entity like the Monroe County School District is legally bound to transparency and honest reporting in its use of taxpayer monies.  County school executives may not have immediately uncovered or correctly reported the suspicious shortfall in its 2014-2015 year-end financial audit, but I wouldn’t know this because, as of today, I this document is  not available on the school system website.   

‘Disappearing’ a Shortfall

This analysis will use two different terms, not interchangeable with one another.  The ELC  budgetary “shortfall,” discovered in December 2014 by bookkeepers at Horace O’Bryant School, is said have occurred while just one ELC employee collected and recorded parents’fees.  This seems to contain the possible illegality right there by locating it in one part of the system as the act of one person.  Firing the ELC’s Manager then presumably punished the assumed transgression and helped protect taxpayers’ money in the future.  Not so! The ELC shortfall points to much larger problems in the school system’s supervisory oversight. If  Monroe County schools’ 2015 end-of-year audit does not explicitly address this shortfall, then the school system’s Superintendent and Finance Director must be accused of  ‘disappearing’ a dangerous irregularity that could signal more shortfalls in other parts of the system and potentially more cover-ups.

Bottom line:  Officials need not or cannot correct a problem if through poor supervision the problem is not uncovered; and these same officials can be held accountable if they learn of a shortfall and either ignore it or hide such information from the school board and taxpayers by ‘disappearing’ it from their annual audit’s report. 

Losing $20K+ in Taxpayer Monies

In  his very informative “Commentary” for The Blue Paper (11/30/2015), Dr. Larry Murray reported that Horace O’Bryant School’s Early Learning Center [i] ended the first half of the 2014-2015  fiscal year with “$20,036.79  unaccounted for.”  He pointed to ELC Manager Tina Godfrey’s role in the financial loss, arguing that, “It seems to me that the person to talk to is Tina Godfrey.”  It would indeed be very helpful if Ms. Godfrey could enlighten us about which county administrators failed to investigate the shortfall when it was revealed to them.

Certainly, the Monroe County officials who signed off on the school system’s 2014-2015 annual audit—Superintendent of schools Mark Porter and his Executive Director for Finance and Performance Jim Drake—bear considerable responsibility if they allowed the 2015 school system’s financial report to go to the Florida Auditor General, the Monroe County government, Monroe County’s School Board, and  the taxpayers without a specific indication of the occurrences, amounts, and causes of the Early Learning Center’s shortfall. It took almost a year  for this shortfall to become public, and then only because the media blew the whistle.  As of today, six months into the county school district’s 2016 fiscal year,  the 2015 audit is still unavailable to the public on the school system’s website.

Bottom line: Finance staff at Horace O’ Bryant School finally exercised due diligence in December 2014 and January and February 2015 by carrying out a “test” of the  ELC’s established criteria for examining its own ‘internal control’ over financial management and reporting.  It does not look like this can be said for Monroe County higher-ups,.[ii]  But this is getting ahead of the story.

Internal Control over Financial Operations

First of all, put simply, US public corporations and government bodies are required to use and demonstrate their having “internal controls over financial reporting.”  As Florida state’s Auditor General explains, “a deficiency in internal control [over spending and reporting] exists when the design and operation of a control does not allow management or employees, in the normal course of performing their assigned functions, to prevent or detect and correct misstatements on a timely basis.”[iii]  In other words, a reporting entity such as the Monroe County School System must demonstrate that it has mechanisms for detecting, testing, and preventing ‘fraud’ or other ‘losses.’

Let’s see how these stipulations were tested  by financial staff at Horace O’Bryant School and what its  investigation disclosed? In December 2014, an internal memorandum--with no signatories, specific departmental attribution, or intended recipients--stated that “the Principal” (presumably at Horace O’ Bryant School) had just discovered a $20K-plus shortfall in ELC daycare funds.  Great!   That’s how accurate and corrective financial reporting ideally begins.  Then, in January and February 2015, according to the same internal memorandum, “Finance staff”—likely at the Horace O’ Bryant School--further investigated the $20K-plus loss and found two shortcomings in ELC financial operations. Most worrisome is that these shortcomings violate two very basic “Business Management 101” principles that secure money management requires:  “all physical cash transactions have been correctly recorded during a specified period”—this ‘internal control’ mechanism known as “bank reconciliation” was violated by the ELC Manager and those who supervised her and did nothing about making sure that the money collected was accounted for.  The second internal control mechanism, that, no single employee receives fees/payments, records them, and then deposits them at the bank—relating to “segregation of duties,” was partially violated in by the ELC Manager:  her supervisors allowed her to be in control of “taking attendances, collecting fees, and entering both attendance and fees into student records.” Godfrey apparently did this for a relatively long period without being told that this was inappropriate. 

 

Bottom line:   Jim Drake, the Executive Director of Monroe County Schools Finance and Performance Department, is responsible for “supervising and collaborating with subordinate professionals District-wide in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of District and school financial operations and programs.” [iv]   Given his central financial administrative position within the school system’s structure, it is highly probable that Drake knew--and certainly should have known, perhaps as early as December 2014—about the internal memorandum that formally reported irregularities in ELC financial management.  If Drake disregarded the breach of two very basic ‘internal controls’ over financial practices at ELC, then he too must be held  accountable for the ELC loss of taxpayer monies.  And as  Professor Rosemary Nurre teaches her introductory accounting classes at California’s San Mateo Community College, failure of  ‘internal controls’ enhances the probability of  “employee theft, robbery, and unauthorized use [of funds],” [v] a negative outcome for taxpayers that should be the responsibility of Superintendant Mark Porter as well.

 

Internal Control  Over Financial Reporting

Is the ELC financial shortfall wholly absent from the Monroe County school system’s 2014-2015 “Certified Annual Financial Report” (CAFR, 2015)? [vi]  The County Commissioners declared themselves shocked at not being notified by Superintendent Porter about the shortfall so I assume that they have not seen the school district’s CAFR yet.  But is it possible that latest school system end-of-year audit (CAFR) has no notification of the ELC shortfall?  How will Commissioners feel if the shortfall has been ‘finessed’ out of the school system’s 2015 audit, for which they must assume responsibility?  Superintendent Mark Porter and the audit’s likely co-signatory, finance director Jim Drake, could avoid mentioning the district’s missing funds by using the boiler plate language found in all CAFRs:  “management has established a comprehensive internal control framework…designed to protect District assets from loss, theft or misuse….”  This phrasing does not appear to require admitting that the government entity’s  inner controls were found to have been breached.

But there’s an even more serious problem with the Monroe County School’s annual audits: Their financial materials are organized and financial statements assembled and reconciled by, guess who? : The Superintendent’s in-house CPA, Executive Director for Finance and Performance, Jim Drake.  Most U.S. city and state CAFRs explicitly indicate in their Certified Annual Financial Report that it was audited by  a CPA or  accounting firm ‘independent’ of the government entity being examined.  

Bottom Line:  Using an executive officer of Monroe County Schools to audit the organization that employs him, and whose finances he himself supervises, could end in the school system’s sending a compromised report to Florida’s Auditor General.  Jim Drake’s potentially conflicting positions—being finance manager of county school operations and end-of-year auditor of his own performance and fiduciary outcomes--invite malfeasance that could be difficult to track, since Drake himself controls what can be tracked.  And let’s not forget that such a non-segregation of duties is what led in the first place to the long undiscovered shortfall at the Early Learning Center.[vii]  [viii]

 

Recommendation:  Hire An Outside Auditor and Use Her Annually

Taxpayers should energetically support immediately hiring an independent forensic accountant to examine all Monroe County’s school system’s finances for the last five years, comparing them with what officials have reported in their annual CAFRs for the same years.  We should also demand that the Monroe County School System (and each of the County’s other government entities), contract with  an independent auditor to research and prepare the county’s annual CAFR for the school system.  It is bad accounting to let the fox guard the hen house!  Maybe that’s why a whole year after the Horace O’Bryant Principal discovered the ELC’s financial shortfall and initiated an internal examination of the organizational sources of this problem, the public still knows very little about the problem’s paper trail.    

Here’s what I want to know: Was there a disconnect between  the ELC shortfall,  the investigation of this shortfall by Horace O’Bryant “finance staff,” and  the Monroe County School System’s Superintendent and Finance Director being informed of the local “finance staff’s”  findings?   How exactly was the  shortfall ‘finessed’ into the school system’s 2014-2015 CAFR’s by Monroe County’s  School District’s Finance Director?   Did the county’s Finance Director ‘disappear’ the shortfall? 

Clearly, the existence of only one end-of-year CAFR report (2014) on the Finance Director’s website suggests that financial “transparency” is the last thing on his mind.

Bottom line: The ‘buck’ for not earlier launching a full and open examination of the ELC shortfall stops with School Superintendant Mark Porter and his Director for Finance and Performance Jim Drake.  Fellow taxpayers:   this disgraceful matter cannot pass the ‘smell test,’ rendering it very unlikely to pass fiduciary ‘muster’ and honesty.

---

[i]    Dr. Larry Murray, Key West the Blue Paper, 11/30/2015 (http://thebluepaper.com/superintendent-releases-finance-departments-review-of-missing-20000-in-hob-daycare-program-funds/)

[ii]     Informal, in-house “Finance staff” memorandum (http://thebluepaper.com//wp-content/uploads/HOBFinanceReport.pdf)

[iii]  “Comprehensive Annual Financial Report Monroe County School District,” Florida, For

      the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 2014, P. 160-161

[iv]     See job description (http://www.keysschools.com/schoolBoard/agenda_folders/12-13_Agenda_Folders/April%209/Exec%20Dir%20of%20Finance%20and%20Performance%20REVISED%2004092013.pdf

[v]     http://accounts.smccd.edu/nurre/online/chtr7fa.htm

[vi]     See the school district’s 2013-2014 CAFR to get an idea of what one contains (http://www.myflorida.com/audgen/pages/pdf_files/2015-126.pdf)

[vii] According to common practice across the US, a local or state government’s end-of-year finances are audited by an outside CPA or by a CPA accounting firm.  Such auditors are not already employed by the organization they are to audit.  Not so for the Monroe County School system, where the system’s Director of Finance conducts an audit essentially on himself and his organization. 

[viii]  Of course, the Florida State Auditor General (AG) reviews the annual CAFR that is submitted to him by Monroe County Schools, after its financial statements have been assembled and reconciled by the school system’s finance director Jim Drake.  (See AG Report example in 2014 CAFR (Auditor General State of Florida, Independent Auditor’s Report, CAFR 2014, p.  173-179 (Roman vi for link to CAFR report)

 

Ten Years of Police Training in Iraq

Ten Years of Police Training in Iraq

Invited Article:  History News Network 2013

Martha K. Huggins

Ten years ago, in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq and that country's descent into anarchy, the United States began assisting, training, and equipping the Iraqi police.

In doing so, it was following a grand -- and deeply morally unsettling -- historical tradition. The United States had already been arming and training foreign police throughout the world for over eighty years -- especially in Latin America. One of the major components in these foreign police programs is assisting in the creation of heavily armed, paramilitary, SWAT-type police units, which left recepient nations with police forces with military mentalities deeply ingrained in their institutional culture.

In Iraq, this counterinsurgency-type training of police for military-style operations still scarrs the landscape ten years after the outbreak of war.

As a scholar of Latin America, especially Brazil during its military period, and a historical sociologist of U.S. assistance to Latin American police, I continue to be struck by the similarities between police training in Iraq between 2003 and 2013 and police training programs in Latin America from the 1950s through the 1980s -- the era of Argentina's "Dirty War" (making headlines again thanks to the new pope).

U.S. assistance to foreign police has been more harmful than positive, both to recipient nations and to the United States -- in Afghanistan today, relations between U.S. advisors and the Afghan police gone well beyond the breaking point. It has failed to implant the rule of law, partially because American police advisors have had to break U.S. laws and conspired to hide those illegal activities from Congress and the press to keep police programs funded --even though much of such funding is black-booked for national security purposes anyway.

Of course, international police assistance is lucrative -- greasing career mobility for academics who get government grants, for private contract corporations providing labor and material for police assistance, and for U.S. military and intelligence officials who "activate" such programs. Power, status, and income are derived from the business of police assistance. Ironically, those in the police assistance industry need not succeed at implementing law and order to be successful. In fact, a failure to implant even the roots of the rule of law has been the most consistent outcome of previous police assistance initiatives.

The sculptors of  Iraq’s counterinsurgency program, a quadrumvirate of  long-time U.S. government counterinsurgency promoters -- Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Colonel James Steele, and General (and now disgraced ex-CIA director) David Petraeus, a mentee of Steele in El Salvador -- ignored this history.  In what was dubbed the “Salvadorization” of Iraq -- which in the 1980s had been labeled,  the “Vietnamization” of El Salvador—made Steele and Petraeus the go-to men for creating a national commando force in Iraq  Interestingly, the U.S. had historically acted in Haiti, Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Germany, and Japan to break up national police organizations, seen as vulnerable to political manipulation by indigenous national leaders. Therefore, the Iraqi commando forces, initially dubbed “Special Police Commandos” (SPCs) and officially subordinated to Iraq’s Central Interior Ministry, represented a break with some prior traditions.

In any case, when police assistance is first initiated in a country, "old guard" police are usually discharged; thereafter there is a U-turn in which selected violent "old guard" police are reinserted into the police system. In Iraq, members of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party were first expelled from the Special Police Commando units and then selectively reinserted as social conflict increased in Iraq beyond the ability of U.S. and Iraqi internal security forces to control it. 

An increasing inability to reduce conflict is usually followed by creating additional paramilitary forces -- Iraq is now said to have at least twenty-seven brigades of Special Police Commandos, all recruited and trained by the United States  Yet even with -- or more likely due to -- an emphasis on commando paramilitary police, internal conflict and violence continue to increase. Rebel units and militias (the latter usually with Iraqi police collaboration) continue to challenge U.S.-linked internal security forces. 

Trained in counterinsurgency, the SPCs -- now designated “National Police” -- have set up clandestine detention centers where torture has been regularly carried out. The tortures and atrocities that go on in those detention centers has been well-documented by The Guardian and by the Oregonian, in its series on the Oregon National Guard troops who saw Iraqis being tortured at an Iraqi prison in Baghdad and intervened to protect and medically treat victims. When the National Guardsmen’s actions were reported to senior U.S. officers, the guardsmen were ordered leave and keep what they had seen a secret. Evidence of torture and assassinations by the U.S.-assisted police and commando forces inevitably leak out, followed by U.S. government and military denials.

Increased armed security is launched to address a recipient country’s “insecurity,” with each move generating counter-moves by violent actors. U.S. government and military officials discredit evidence of wrong-doing by U.S.-trained police -- even as this continues to become public. Congressional hearings vet claims of police violence and, in some cases, accept such evidence, leading to the temporary shutdown of police and associated counterinsurgency assistance. But such assistance usually continues under different institutional rubrics, tightly concealed by the secrecy legitimized by “national security.” This formula applies just as well to Iraq during the ten years that the U.S. has been involved in creating ‘new’ Iraqi police forces, as it did for Latin America, especially between the 1960s and the end of the 1980s. Police assistance to an already divided society has resulted in deeper divisions within the population, as one sectarian Islamist group is played off against another. 

As The Guardian documented, in Iraq “the long-term impact of [US] funding and arming [of the commando] paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorized the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.” 

This is the status of Iraq after ten years of training and operational collaboration between Iraqi counterinsurgency forces and U.S. advisors. What lessons can be derived from the history of US assistance to other nations’ police? A country deemed important to US interests is said to be a experiencing a threat -- it matters not if the threat is real or a WMD-like fabrication. Ideological justifications for providing police assistance are then promoted nationally and internationally.

Today,  Iraq remains in the throes of a low-intensity war and most people’s personal security is lacking. The majority of Iraqis distrust their police and prospects for democratic policing and the rule of law are grim. The damage to Iraq from ten years of American police assistance, and the lives ruined by torture at the hands of American-affiliated Iraqi police, has left its scar on victims and on U.S. legitimacy. Will the lessons of this history be remembered and applied?

- See more at: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/151093#sthash.YKpL6T6G.dpuf