The book aims to educate officials as well as students about the vicissitudes that accompany the development and execution of the government intelligence function. The authors demonstrate that national, strategic intelligence in any country of the Hemisphere can experience episodes of devolution as well as positive evolution, at the same time that the culturally modulated practices of government professionals can oscillate between periods of repression and democratic observance.

This book examines ways in which intelligence develops its characteristic standards of accuracy and duty. It considers the effects of formal legal codes and democratic oversight, but a principal conclusion emerging from it is the importance of professional training. Its implicit sub-text is indeed that standards of intelligence analysis and integrity should be properly taught, and not just caught by osmosis from one's seniors. It also examines intelligence professionalism in a laboratory almost completely unknown to Anglo-Saxon readers, certainly to this one. Intelligence institutions have evolved in the last decade in the new, democratic Latin America at roughly the same pace as the successor systems that developed at the same time in the former Warsaw Pact countries of Eastern and Central Europe; and the two sets of development are of comparable international significance. Yet hardly anyone in Europe knows anything about Latin American intelligence, and the same ignorance exists in considerable measure in the United States. The gap is filled here by accounts of intelligence structures and recent developments in seven of the Latin American countries, along with 5 three conceptual articles that relate these country-by-country accounts to the semi-hemisphere as a whole..