With Latin America's streets becoming an increasingly popular arena of public expression, this book provides a much-needed framework to understand not only how such protests are regarded and controlled in their countries, but how they shape those countries themselves. Anchoring that framework are three fundamental questions often overlooked in the political frenzy surrounding protests: Who was involved in the wrongdoing? What were the specific acts of wrongdoing? And how should the wrongdoer(s) be held accountable? Through examination of responses to those questions by the main actors, police, government, media, and protesters, the book develops the concept of discursive accountability, which is the set of frames that define ‘what is deemed to be appropriate behaviour and acceptable consequences in a given society’. If repressive policing is seen as legitimate and ‘acceptable’, then there is no need for accountability, a core principle of democracy.
Extensive interviews show how such acceptance is rooted in often unrecognized but very powerful patterns of personal prejudice, institutional bias, socio-economic discrimination, and even historical legacies overlooked in other studies, such as formative influence of the eighteenth century's politicised policing. Bonner's critique of the media is particularly incisive, showing how skewed reporting of protests, from portrayals of ‘chaos’ to blatant partisanship, stems from journalists' physical positions at protests, reliance on police sources, and self-censorship, as well as the viability of an alternative press, ‘contempt for authority’ laws, and other influences. Interviews of police officers provide a sometimes harrowing picture of the sheer lack of planning, from failing to control violent officers to internal arguments over moving bodies of those shot during protests. The judiciary, for its part, fails to fulfil its responsibility to curb such abuses, instead opting for a passive role of ‘ordering police action without specifying how’ or an ‘active’ role of ‘favouring repression’ and ‘repressive laws’. Such positions reflect and further entrench accepted views of public protests. In Argentina, those frames encourage the courts in ‘providing space for, and, at times, encouraging police repression’ (pp. 78–9) such as by ordering the police to open a road; in Chile, they are further justified by criminal code and other legal provisions on offences and public order.
Under such frames, repressive policing can be adequately addressed through dismissal ‘of a few, preferably very few officers’ (p. 198). This time-worn excuse of ‘bad apples’, as opposed to the ‘rotten barrel’, lets governments avoid politically difficult reform of institutional practices that foster such abuse, as well as the politically sensitive task of raising the bar of responsibility into the upper levels of the police hierarchy. Only a fundamental re-thinking can upend such long-standing arrangements: discursive accountability, that is, ‘must emerge and law-and-order frames challenged before other mechanisms of accountability will be activated effectively’ (p. 119). The book's two case studies, the 2002 Pueyrredón Bridge protest in Argentina and Chile's 2006 student protests, demonstrate how this can happen. The killings during the protest in Argentina rippled throughout the country, from the provincial police to the presidency. In Chile, images of police brutality and a disciplined student leadership helped cast repressive policing, for the first time since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship, ‘as “wrongdoing” by the media, political leaders, and ultimately the Carabineros themselves’ (p. 181).
These and many of the book's other important insights, though, needed a common analytical and empirical structure to bring them together. The failed ‘escalated force’ used to control protests show that training is not just ad hoc and ineffective, for example, but manipulative as well, such as the apparent effort to have Argentine cadets ‘disassociate from the situation and the people who they might relate to. This way they could repress without having problems' (p. 76). So what actually happens in the academies? A look at specific courses, materials, and instruction on managing protests would have brought such disparate examples into their larger context, and also show how well academies integrate new strategies relevant for handling protests, such as non-lethal force and environmental criminology. Similarly, documentation of permit requests, denials, and reasons provided (or not) would have more objectively sustained the interviews in Chile indicating ‘that many groups seen as a threat to public order’, such as students, pobladores, workers, and indigenous groups, ‘are denied permits based on who they are or what their demands are’ (p. 147). More broadly, a typology of protest would have helped ground the book's assessment. The focus is on organised actions, but protests often elude clear parameters by swiftly changing, from sporting events that turn political to political gatherings that turn provocative. A typology specifying principal issues, geographic areas, tactics, and participants would have thus provided a larger frame for understanding the scope of protest in the region.
The book's discussion of ‘democratic policing’ would have likewise benefited from a clearer foundation. The book rightly points out that the police will not undertake reform if they perceive officials and society as ‘not entirely or consistently committed to democratic policing’ (p. 31), and mentions examples of watershed changes, such as the restructuring of the highly corrupt Buenos Aires provincial police and Chile's Plan Quadrante, which is one of the region's most developed municipal-based police reforms. The Buenos Aires reforms were later dismantled, though, and Chile's government failed five times to move the Carabineros from the Defence to the Interior Ministry. A definition of ‘democratic policing’, and of the catalysts towards and away from it, would have been useful analytical tools to understand these changes as well as the likelihood of progress towards discursive accountability on protest policing.
Even without these broader contexts, this study is a significant contribution to Latin American history, contemporary democratisation, and current public policy. Though it looks at two Southern Cone countries, their experiences are applicable to the rest of Latin America. As citizens increasingly spill out into the street in frustration on a range of demands, from corruption and elections to security and violence, the state's responses, which this book shows so well, shape how those rights and needs will be sustained and balanced in the future.
