The article analyses an important but scarcely known aspect of Usaid's activity in Brazil: the advisement in order to train and modernize brazilian police corporations. Although already in activity since the fifties, the programm of police advisory was intensified after the Cuban Revolution and reinterpreted according to the modernization theories that prevailed in the sixties, promising the poor countries a better alternative of development than that offered by the revolutionaries. The text tries to synthesize the main aspects of this program (active in Brazil from 1960 to 1972) and to comprehend the objectives of the both sides involved, in the belief that this approach may help us to avoid superficial assessment.
modernization; anticommunism; police
