Contesting the Iron Fist: Advocacy Networks and Police Violence in Democratic Argentina and Chile. By Claudio A. Fuentes. New York: Routledge, 2004. 256p. $75.00.

Police violence has become an all too common reality in Latin America. Most scholars have chalked up the problem to authoritarian legacies, ones inherited from colonialism, from nineteenth- and twentieth-century caudillo's or more recently from military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s. Most of these studies fail to explain why police violence can vary so widely from country to country or from one time period to another, nor can they account for genuine reform efforts. Fortunately, Claudio Fuentes's book departs from these formulas and offers a more plausible theory of police abuse in Latin America.