JEREMY KUZMAROV. Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century.

Abstract

Jeremy Kuzmarov is a prolific young historian. Just three years after the publication of The Myth of the Addicted Army: Vietnam and the Modern War on Drugs (2009), he has produced this ambitious work, which examines U.S. police training programs throughout the developing world over more than a century. He is to be commended for setting his sights high. The result, alas, disappoints, as his book suffers from repetitiveness, sanctimony, and turgid prose. To be sure, Kuzmarov identifies an important and understudied dimension of American foreign policy. The cultivation of indigenous constabularies in trouble spots like the Philippines, South Korea, South Vietnam—and, more recently, in Iraq and Afghanistan—has attracted less attention than what Kuzmarov terms the “ephemeral pyrotechnics of the battlefield”: i.e., U.S. military operations carried out chiefly by American forces (p. 13). Yet the consequences of Washington's police training programs were often more enduring. As late as the 1990s, Haitian reformers advocating land redistribution suffered reprisals from the “Gendarmerie” established in 1915 at the direction of Woodrow Wilson, and Iran has yet to escape the legacy of the National Security and Intelligence Unit (SAVAK) set up by the Eisenhower administration at midcentury. Kuzmarov provides valuable information on these and other police programs, and he introduces a range of fascinating figures, notably the peripatetic Byron Engle, who rivaled Edward Lansdale when it came to orchestrating covert skullduggery but who had been lost to history until Kuzmarov began digging into his career as head of the U.S. government agency charged with training law enforcement officers in allied nations. There is grist for a significant monograph here.