Abstract
U.S internal security assistance to Latin America is a relatively well covered topic in Latin America Cold War historiography. However, much of the scholarship associated with this topic has been devoted to studying U.S military assistance, while very little has focused on examining U.S police assistance. This thesis fills an important gap in Latin American Cold War historiography by providing a much needed account of the structural and theoretical foundations of U.S police assistance programs in the Caribbean Basin. To this end, it examined late nineteenth and early twentieth century U.S internal security assistance programs in the Caribbean Basin in order to establish the foundations of the Kennedy administration’s Cold War era police assistance program. This thesis also surveys the relationship between modernization theory and the development of this program to reveal the theoretical foundations of the U.S government’s Cold War era police assistance program.
