This book argues that the more the US can help entrench respect for human rights among Latin American militaries the better its overall security situation in the region will become. As such, the author, a Latin American analyst for the US government, has set himself the task of correcting a well-established caricature of his employer, and its military in particular, as the key foreign facilitator of human rights abuse on the continent. He largely succeeds in this ambition.

The research presented consists of interviews with over sixty officials – in NGOs, think tanks, militaries, and governments – in nine countries, and numerous secondary sources. His case studies are Bolivia, Colombia, and Venezuela, afforded a chapter each. Here he documents the wealth of initiatives that the US military has deployed and is deploying to educate its own soldiers and their Latin American peers of the “strategic imperatives of respecting human rights on the battlefield” (1). In so doing, he provides a needed corrective to the assertion that Abu Ghraib – cited on the dust jacket and discussed in the text (116–19, 130, 138) – is representative of US military conduct in the war on terror. The more we read here the more aberrant that scandal appears. The war on terror, Laurienti assures us, is better advanced not by suspending but by entrenching a human rights ethos among soldiers. For this reason, the US military should submit to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. “If US military human rights promotion in Bolivia is to succeed,” argues Laurienti plausibly, “it cannot come with a simultaneous message of ‘do as I say, not as I do’” (61).

His observations differ according to national context and, quite obviously in the case of Venezuela, according to the condition of the relationship each country has with Washington. The Bolivian military, he concludes, despite a “strong desire,” “significant incentive,” and “honest effort,” is too “underdeveloped” an instrument to promote both human rights and counterterrorism (52–53). Weak civil–military institutions within the state leave the army with too free a role. Only more US engagement, not less, can correct this. The Colombian military, in contrast, represents something of a “human rights success story in Latin America … unmatched in the region” (62). US human rights promotion, writes the author, deserve most of the credit for this. Venezuela, predictably, given the posturing of its current President, is a less happy story. As Chavez has militarized Venezuelan society, respect for human rights has weakened. This trend is compounded, argues the author, by the collapse of Washington–Caracas relations in recent years. With no formal way of influencing the Venezuelan military, in contrast to its neighbours, respect for humans rights and democratization generally will slow.

The author does not duck the pernicious legacy, for human rights, of US Cold War anticommunism in Latin America. He does urge us to get over it. The relentless tabulation of US “crimes” tends to miss the bigger picture, painted here, of growing military-to-military engagement that, despite setbacks, has increased, on balance, respect for human rights among Latin American soldiers and their leaders. The clear import of the book is that if US interference in one era can retard human rights, in another it can advance them. But interference and engagement, rather than withdrawal and neglect, should remain central to US strategy. Sceptical leftists will beg to differ but the author deserves credit for opening up far more avenues of debate than his opponents will be able to close down.