Martha Huggins still shudders when she recalls one of the trips she made while doing research on police vigilantism and death squads in Brazil.
“One time a guy I was interviewing about torture said he wanted to take me on a drive to show me something,” she says. “We were about an hour outside of town and going through a dark forest when he said, 'This is where we buried a lot of the people we killed.'
“I had told my friends exactly where I was going, so I wasn't really worried,” she says. “But, still, it was troubling.”
Episodes like this are not exactly rare in the research career of Huggins, who is the Roger Thayer Stone Professor of Sociology at the College. She began doing research in Brazil twenty-five years ago, when the country was under a military dictatorship, and her work has led to three powerful books. The most recent, Political Policing: The United States and Latin America (Duke University Press), is a study of United States penetration of Latin American police systems to control internal security. The book contains more than 400 sources, most of them primary, with many obtained through diligent use of the Freedom of Information Act. It won two prizes in 1999 — the Michael J. Handelang Award from the American Society of Criminology for outstanding contribution to research in criminology, and a best book prize from the New England Council of Latin American Studies.
In one sense, Huggins's research path is accidental.
She first went to Brazil in 1975, when she was a Fellow of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Her intention was to study labor unions, but a colonel in the military regime told her she wasn't going to be able to do that since labor unions were illegal. Quickly deciding to do historical research on slave labor, she received permission to work with the political police, who had the historical archives on crime.
“Working in the political police building I would see these big vans drive in and the police jerk people out,” she says. “It really was my first glimpse of military repression, and it got me interested. After a while, I started to work on vigilantism and the death squads — visiting morgues, interviewing people in the death squads. I was able to do it because I said I was 'doing a study of policing' in times of crisis and change,” she continues.
It was during this research that she had her first attack of high blood pressure — a condition she still has to fight.
“I was afraid,” she says. “You know they did awful things to people. But you also realize that these torturers and murderers are real people, too. Often, they were working class people who entered the police with some idealism, and they got funneled into the torture teams. They got trained to be true believers — and then they couldn't get out. They wound up doing the dirty work of the system while the higher-ups got off.”
Because she was an academic working on a book, she apparently was not considered much of a threat by Brazilian authorities (“The people who might harm me don't even read books,” she says). But her work and her opinions led to criticism back in the United States. In 1986, for example, she wrote an opinion article that was distributed nationally by The Los Angeles Times and internationally by the International Herald Tribune. In the column, she discussed U.S. training of foreign police, concluding that it “improved neither the security of those nations' citizens nor the democratic practices of the police and security forces.”
The column was denounced by various right-wing commentators and organizations.
In another sense, the kind of research Huggins has done seems perfectly suited for her. Since she joined the Union faculty in 1979, she has been involved in numerous social causes, both on and off the campus.
“I would have to say I do it for human rights,” she says. “All my research is about what goes on in the margins of society, where people don't usually look. I would much rather write about something happy. But I get pulled back to focus on power and repression and people losing their democratic freedoms.”
And, as a persistent defender of those she sees as downtrodden, she reacted strongly to the inequities around her.
“I've tried to decide over the years which parts of my research have upset me the most, and it was the street children” she says. “Young children, huddled on the streets, sniffing glue, living under blankets, getting victimized sexually, getting murdered by the death squads ….”
She pauses.
“To distance yourself with this kind of research, you have to become very cold, very hard,” she continues. “You can't react negatively when you talk to murderers, or they won't talk with you, and you certainly don't want to be positive. So you become a little bit frozen. It's narrowed my emotional range a lot.”
When the talk turns to the Brazil of today, however, she brightens. With the military regime long gone, Brazil is a “tourist-friendly place full of nice people who love Americans.” The Union students she takes there on a term abroad study women and economic development, Portuguese, and make a research trip to visit human rights groups in northeastern Brazilian cities. “These days it's a good place to visit, and our students have had some wonderful experiences,” she says.
It would be easy to dismiss the agonies she has written about as the product of a different and faraway culture, but Huggins feels that Americans should not be complacent.
“The research I did provides a kind of window into what could happen in this country if we don't protect the safeguards we have, ” she says. “In any society, when the police are encouraged to see themselves as involved in a war, you'll see abuses of power. Increasingly, with the spread of the drug 'war,' more and more police are becoming more and more militarized. And, of course, we're seeing an increase in private police forces — at malls, for example — where justice is determined by what nurtures a 'business climate' for them.”