Office of Public Safety Totally Explained

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For the Public Safety agency see : Department of Public Safety The Office of Public Safety (OPS) was a US government agency, established in 1957 by US President Dwight D. Eisenhower to train foreign police forces (External Link

). It officially depended of the USAID (US Agency for International Development), and was close to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) . Courses were held in French, Spanish and English . It was dissolved in 1974.

Creation and dissolution of the OPS

The United States has a long history of providing police aid to Latin American countries. In the 1960s the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Office of Public Safety (OPS) provided Latin American police forces with millions of dollars worth of weapons and trained thousands of Latin American police officers. In the late 1960s, such programs came under media and congressional scrutiny because the U.S.-provided equipment and personnel were linked to cases of torture, murder and "disappearances" in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.
In Washington, D.C., the Office of Public Safety had remained immune to public embarrassment as it went about two of its chief functions: allowing the CIA to plant men with the local police in sensitive places around the world; and after careful observation on their home territory, bringing to the United States prime candidates for enrollment as CIA employees . Then, informed by Brazilian opposition members, US senator James G. Abourezk set about to disclose the OPS' program Until the early 1970s, selected candidates could also receive training from CIA officers at the U.S. Border Patrol academy in Los Fresnos, Texas, including the making of bombs and incendiary devices.

Operations

The head of the OPS, Byron Engle, sent Los Angeles Police Department officers to Venezuela in 1962 to train local police officers and assist them in repression against the Armed Forces of National Liberation (AFNL) .

Uruguay

The OPS operated in Uruguay since 1964, supplying the police with equipment, arms and training. This involved courses on explosives, assassination weapons, and riot control . Although torture was already used by the Uruguayan police, it became systematized under Mitrione's direction. In an interview to a Brazilian newspaper in 1970, the former Uruguayan Chief of Police Intelligence, Alejandro Otero, declared that US officers, in particular Mitrione, had instituted torture as a systemic method . According to A. J. Langguth's Hidden Terrors (Pantheon Books, 1978, p. 286), older police officers were replaced "when the CIA and the U.S. police advisers had turned to harsher measures and sterner men." Under Dan Mitrione's leadership, the United States "introduced a system of nationwide identification cards, like those in Brazil… [and] torture had become routine at the Montevideo [police] jefatura." Otero, who had been formed at the International Police Services in Washington, a front for the CIA, had opposed himself to Mitrione after a friend of him and sympathisant of the Tupamaros had been tortured in Mitrione's presence . He also opposed torture as he thought it led to radicalization of both parties.
CIA officer William Cantrell was based in Montevideo as an OPS member. He assisted in the creation, in the 1960s, of the National Directorate of Information and Intelligence (Dirección Nacional de Información e Inteligencia - DNII), to which he supplied equipment, including torture equipment. After the 1971 elections during which the left-wing Frente Amplio was defeated, Montevideo launched in September 1971 a DNII-led joint military and police force in counter-revolutionary operations against the Tupamaros. According to former police officers, death squads were run from the DNII .

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