Modernity and Devolution: The Making of Police Death Squads in Modern Brazil

Abstract

Death squads in Latin America Have a notorious history. But they are much misunderstood. As Allan Nairn points out, they have been portrayed as totally informal and spontaneous—“as discrete bands of gangsters who roam the Latin American countryside randomly picking off victims.”² The impression is that death squads have no connections with one another nor with the state. According to this outdated view, death squads are throwbacks, atavisms, tied to traditional premodern Latin American forms of social control, where power aspirants—the poderosos—and their geographically localized gangs, militias, and paramilitary forces battled it out with one another for regional power. Where the state is weak and ineffective, local politicos and their armed retainers, along with occasional rebels and bandits, take police and judicial power into their own hands.

Thanks are due Malcolm Willison for editing various versions of this chapter and suggesting valuable theoretical insights. To Arthur D. Brenner and Bruce B. Campbell, organizers and co-presenters of the session on death squads at the American Historical Association meeting in Atlanta (January 1996), I am thankful for suggestions and encouragement. To my students Dena Mahar and Ericka Migliaccio, thanks for fact-checking, and to Carolyn Micklas for wordprocessing. This research was funded in part by my endowed Roger Thayer Stone Research Chair in Sociology at Union College. A version of this chapter was published as an article: From Bureaucratic Consolidation to Structural Devolution in Policing and Society 7, no.4 (1997): 207–34.