As I began the research for this book, I approached the subject of police violence with some trepidation. Illegality and violence do not take well to transparency, and I anticipated some difficulty in producing information reliable enough to satisfy social scientific standards. And yet my personal experiences with the police during the Argentine dictatorship of the 1970s and the ongoing prevalence of state violence and impunity in the more democratic current period seemed powerful arguments in favor of addressing this issue in any discussion of the effectiveness of rights in Latin America. To complicate matters further, I believe we need to take seriously the notion of the legal system as a system with internal articulations among its various actors and institutions, and we must acknowledge the extent to which the legal system is articulated with its social, economic, and political context. Crafting responsive legal institutions in a context of social inequality and marginalization, on issues that raise powerful and conflicting emotions, is a complex, if not intractable, project. None of this is conducive to simple, elegant explanations.

As H. L. Mencken once said, however, “There is always an easy solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong.” As a result, I chose to use a broad brush on a large canvas to paint a more complete picture of how the legal system works, across a variety of contexts, to respond to police abuses.