Global Crime

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Governing crime and violence in Latin America

Markus-Michael Müller

To cite this article: Markus-Michael Müller (2018) Governing crime and violence in Latin America,
Global Crime, 19:3-4, 171-191, DOI: 10.1080/17440572.2018.1543916

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2018.1543916

Published online: 28 Nov 2018.

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GLOBAL CRIME
2018, VOL. 19, NOS. 3–4, 171–191
https://doi.org/10.1080/17440572.2018.1543916

Governing crime and violence in Latin America

Markus-Michael Müller
ZI Lateinamerika-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The last two decades turned Latin America into one of the most Crime; Violence;
violent regions in the world. While previously, violence in the Governance; Latin America
region has predominantly been associated with state repression
and military dictatorships, the “new violence” that emerged since
the mid-1990s is predominantly criminal. Related research has
been mostly problem-driven, implying that the focus has been
on how to improve security governance in the region. The multi-
ple ways in which governance itself is both shaped by as well as
contributing to the pervasiveness of this “new violence,” has
remained uncharted. This article offers an analytical framework,
inspired by the literature on governance, for assessing this issue.
To this end, it highlights different modes and instances of govern-
ance with, by, and through crime (and violence) in the region. In
doing so, the article offers a contextualization for this special issue
as well as an overarching analytical framework for the individual
contributions.

Introduction
In May 2015, an article that appeared in the British newspaper The Guardian referred to
Latin America as ‘the most murderous continent in the world’ (The Guardian,
6 May 2015). The statement was related to a discussion of the launch of the Homicide
Monitor website by the Brazilian think tank Igrapé Institute. Presented as ‘the most
comprehensive publicly available dataset on murder in the world’ on Igrapé Institute’s
website as of 29 August 2017, the data provided by Homicide Monitor undeniably paints
a bleak picture when putting Latin American homicides in global perspective. As the
website states, ‘[r]oughly 33% of the world’s homicides occur in Latin America and the
Caribbean, home to just 8% of the global population. When measured by homicide rate,
14 of the 20 most dangerous countries in the world are located in Latin America and the
Caribbean’. Other sources, such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s
Global Study on Homicide1 or the Inter-American Development Bank,2 confirm this
observation, as do recent academic publications. As one contemporary study sums it up:
Insecurity is a daily reality in Latin America and the Caribbean and has risen to the forefront
of civil society concerns and political agendas over the past several years. In aggregate
figures for the region and individually in 12 of the 18 countries studied by Latinobarómetro
(2013), crime and insecurity now precede unemployment and the economy as citizens’

CONTACT Markus-Michael Müller muellerm@zedat.fu-berlin.de

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
172 M.-M. MÜLLER

principal concerns. […] Of the estimated 437,000 global homicides in 2012, the highest
percentage (36%) occurred in Latin America and this was an increase of 8.5% over the 2010
rate. Central America has the highest regional average rate in the world (along with
Southern Africa) at 25 homicides per 100,000 population, while South America’s 23 per
100,000 put it in third place, and the Caribbean’s 16 per 100,000 is also significantly above
the global average of 6.2 per 100,000.3

Unsurprisingly, this ‘dramatic rise in reported criminality and changing perceptions of

crime’ in the region has triggered a wave of scholarly research.4 Starting from the early
2000s onwards, with, by now, ‘classic’ contributions of authors such as Kees Koonings
and Dirk Kruijt,5 Teresa Caldeira,6 Susan Rotker,7 Diane E. Davis,8 or Hugo Frühling and
Joseph S. Tulchin,9 researchers tried to assess the causes and consequences of rising
levels of violence in the region, including their historical embeddedness.10
Violence, indeed, is not a new phenomenon in Latin America’s ‘long’ twentieth
century. In Colombia’s two decades long internal civil war (1946–1956), known as la
violencia, for instance, more than 200,000 people were killed and the – frequently
extralegal – violence and death toll of the military dictatorships that,11 often with
external support by the United States (US),12 haunted the region throughout most of
the second-half of the twentieth century, converted Latin America into a veritable ‘killing
zone’,13 including episodes of genocidal violence as in the case of Guatemala.14
What in the light of Latin America’s violent past triggered a renewed scholarly interest
in understanding and explaining violence in the region, thus, was not just the persis-
tence of violence per se. Rather, it was what many observers perceived as a qualitative
shift from the supposedly ‘old’, political violence of the military dictatorships towards
a ‘new’, predominantly criminal form of violence.15 As Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt
already stated in the late 1990s:

It is perhaps cynical to argue that a certain ‘democratization of violence’ has been under way
in Latin America. Formerly, the use of violence was restricted to certain sectors: the aristoc-
racy, the elite, the army, the police. Nowadays most of Latin America’s urban society (and part
of rural society) has access to small arms equipment. The proliferation of violence, even in its
more anomic forms, has reached the stage of mass production and mass consumption.16

Their reference to ‘democratization of violence’ points towards the main puzzle that
sparked the renewed scholarly interest in violence in the region: the correlation between
deepening formal democratisation processes, on the one hand, and rising levels of
criminal violence, on the other. In fact, the apparent qualitative shift, which coincided
with the region’s transitions towards democracy, from the ‘old’, political violence of the
military dictatorships towards the ‘new’, predominantly criminal, violence was a troubling
observation for many scholars, but also politicians and practitioners, who had to realise
that in Latin America ‘there is no easy distinction between violence under authoritarian
and democratic regimes’.17 This holds particularly true for those scholars, politicians and
practitioners who were committed to the project of democracy promotion and supportive
of democratic transition processes in the region. These actors were generally enthusiastic
about the prospects for Latin American political development, including the region’s
human rights record, after the return to democratic civilian rule in the region from the
mid-1980s onwards.18 For these observers, the coexistence of democracy and persisting if
not rising crime, violence (and human rights violations) was particularly troubling.
 GLOBAL CRIME 173

This was the case because their commitment to democracy came with powerful
analytical baggage and normative implications. It mainly followed the legacy of moder-
nisation-theory-inspired thinking that conceived of democracy, or, ‘polyarchy’, as ‘a
system in which a small group actually rules and mass participation in decision-
making is confined to leadership choice in elections carefully managed by competing
elites’.19 In turn, the dominant understanding of democracy that underpinned much of
the scholarly work on, as well as political engagements with, democratising Latin
American countries put an analytical and normative emphasis on ‘the strengthening
of state institutions’, ‘human rights, the rule of law, meaningful civic participation, and
the peaceful resolution of conflicts’ as Arnson and Lowenthal put it in the foreword to
the recently published re-edition of the highly influential concluding volume of the
Transitions from Authoritarian Rule book project.20
However, it soon became clear, even to the ‘founding fathers’ of the ‘transition
paradigm’, that democratic Latin America was far from peaceful – as the ‘new violence’
debate clearly indicated –, that the region continued to grapple with weak state
institutions, including police forces and court systems, deeply embedded in informal
as well as extralegal practices and patronage networks, and that the rule of law unfolded
in the region mostly as an ‘(un)rule’,21 ‘misrule’22 or even ‘rule through law’.23
Moreover, in several cases, extralegal violence and human rights violations com-
mitted by Latin American democracies even exceed their authoritarian predecessors.
Take Brazil as an example. While the death toll of the military dictatorship that ruled the
country from 1964 until 1985, according to a report of Brazil’s National Truth
Commission’s website as of 1 August 2017 is ‘434 killings and political disappearances’,
the ‘democratic Brazilian state has killed more people in its recent “urban security
operations” than any war in Latin America since the 19th century (except perhaps
Colombia’s conflicts)’.24 Most of these killings are extralegal. As Robert Muggah pointed
out in a contribution to the Huffington Post website’s blog on 14 November 2014,
tellingly titled ‘Brazilian Killing Fields’:

The statistics on police violence are chilling. Each year, they are purportedly involved in
around 2,000 killings, classified in the sanitized language of criminal statistics as “resistance
deaths.” In Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, military police are alleged to have killed more than
11,000 people over the past decade. The United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial
killings has repeatedly observed that Brazilian police are among the planet’s most
dangerous.

Other Latin American democracies, such as Mexico, witnessed an outright militarisation

of public security within the context of the region’s drug wars. Since 2006, the latter
gave Mexico a demographic profile of a war-torn society with ‘121,669 homicides, an
average of over 20,000 people per year, more than 55 people per day, or just over two
people every hour’. In this regard, ‘[n]o other country in the Western Hemisphere saw
such a large increase either in its homicide rate or in the absolute number of homicides
over the last two decades’.25 As a consequence of the predominantly military response
by the government, ‘Mexican security forces have been implicated in repeated, serious
human rights violations – including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and
torture – in the course of efforts to combat organized crime’, as Human Rights Watch
observes in its country report on Mexico posted on its website as of 31 August 2017.
174 M.-M. MÜLLER

Yet, and notwithstanding the fact that the empirically observable persistence, if not
increase, of violence – public as well as private –, human rights violations and the unrule of
law in contemporary Latin American democracies are ‘[i]ncongruent with democratic
theory and decades of supposed transition’,26 rather than revising or questioning this
theory, the analytical and normative implications of the ‘democratisation school’ still loom
large in the related debates. In fact, the spectre of democracy in its polyarchic guise
continues to dominate the literature, which, in turn, tends to perceive crime and violence
in the region as a ‘challenge to democracy’,27 an ‘authoritarian legacy’28 incompatible with
democracy, an expression of ‘institutional weakness’29 or a general problem for ‘institu-
tional development’.30 Likewise, the related literature ‘continues to rely on generic pre-
mises and assumptions [about crime, violence, security governance and democracy] that
seem at best ungrounded, and problematic – if not flawed – at worst’.31
The dominance of what can be termed the ‘democracy paradigm’ has recently been
challenged by studies that point towards the analytical limitations of the democratisa-
tion-theory-inspired research and call for moving beyond the analytically and norma-
tively limiting ‘exclusive focus on elections, institutions and rights’. This call opens up an
analytical perspective that does not perceive of violence in contemporary Latin as an
expression of the ‘failure of democratic governance and institutions’. Rather, violence,
including in its more criminal manifestations, can be assessed as ‘an element integral to
the configuration of those institutions, as a necessary component of their maintenance,
and as in instrument for popular challenges to their legitimacy’.32
What this perspective allows for is an analytical understanding of the functional and
productive role of crime and violence as both a mode and goal of governance in the
region; aspects that due to the prevailing focus on formal-institutional ‘deficits’ and
democratic shortcomings have largely been neglected. This special issue seeks to
address this void. By bringing together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds
(anthropology, sociology and political science), the collection of articles critically inter-
rogates the connection(s) between crime, violence and governance in contemporary
Latin America through theoretically informed original empirical case studies that com-
paratively highlight different modes and instances of governance with, by, and through
crime and violence in the region – and their effects.
The remainder of this introduction will lay out the analytical framework that ties the
individual articles together and highlights their contributions to the debates on crime
and violence in Latin America. In conclusion, avenues for future research that might
potentially contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of crime,
violence and governance in the region will be presented.

Analysing the crime – violence – governance nexus

One, often ignored, consequence of the democracy-theory-inspired thinking about
crime and violence in Latin America is the inherent state-centrism of the related debates.
Most scholarly work on the topic is firmly grounded in a Weberian ideal-typical per-
spective on statehood, which is at odds with Latin American realities. As Tina Hilgers and
Laura Macdonald recently put it, most of the related studies share a
 GLOBAL CRIME 175

Weberian assumption of power and violence located in the state. In Latin America’s and the
Caribbean’s violent democracies, state power is actively and violently contested by non-
state and para-statal actors who demand citizen loyalty […]. These groups are as much an
aspect of subnational politics and governance as the actors formally linked to parties, the
state, and state institutions.33

This situation reflects the historical legacy of the region’s state formation processes that
never culminated in the monopolisation of the means of violence by the state, nor in
related claims by ruling elites, nor in the emergence of ‘rational’ bureaucracies or
corresponding legal systems.34 As Jenny Pearce convincingly argued, and in contrast
to the democracy-theory-inspired literature’s perspective of the ‘failures’ or ‘shortcom-
ings’ of Latin American states, this situation was largely welcomed by Latin American
political elites who benefitted from the resulting possibility of crafting extralegal alli-
ances with a range of non-state actors in order to pursue their private, political and even
economic interests: ‘Rather than see this as a loss or absence of the monopoly of
violence, I would argue that the state [in Latin America] has never expired to exercise
such a monopoly, welcoming these indirect alliances’.35 The result of this has been the
constantly negotiated character of Latin American statehood,36 including the exercise of
violence and the ‘reach of the state’,37 between a variety of state and non-state actors.
Desmond Arias and Daniel Goldstein introduced the notion of ‘violent pluralism’38 to
capture the coercive dimension of this situation, a situation born out of historical
processes and resulting path dependencies that produced ‘systems of governance […]
that tolerate the activities of multiple armed groups and high levels of crime’, largely
due to the underlying as well as resulting functional, if not symbiotic, relationship
between Latin American states and non-state armed actors: ‘State actors and armed
groups accommodate one another and help each other to accomplish goals’.39
Violence in Latin America, including its criminal manifestations, thus, must be seen as
the product of a ‘relational making’40 that involves constant interactions and negotia-
tions between state as well as non-state actors who have stakes in the reproduction of
the violent (and criminal) orders they are embedded in. In order to unpack this relation-
ality, it is important to move beyond the state centrism of the related debates, including
the underlying normative assumptions about what ‘normal’ states should do and how.
This includes the related debates on informal institutions.
While the literature on informal institutions, undeniably, moved research beyond core
assumptions of the formal-legal universe of Weberian reasoning, it nonetheless takes
formal state institutions as the analytical and normative bottom line against which the
state’s ‘other’, informal actors and institutions, are assessed. While the latter can be of an
accommodating, complementary, substitutive or competing character with regard to
formal institutions,41 the ultimate reference point for assessing their specific function(s)
in a given context tends to remain the state as the embodiment of all that is formal, law-
bound; and usually democratic. In turn, and in particular when it comes to the topics of
crime, violence and (in)security in Latin America, informal institutions are often por-
trayed as the outcome of the failures or shortcomings of their formal counterparts.42
While, as several contributions to this special issue will demonstrate, the realm of the
informal is undeniably important for understanding how crime and violence are gov-
erned in the region, the formal/informal dichotomy is analytically too narrow for
capturing the involved complexities. Thinking about the governance of crime and
176 M.-M. MÜLLER

violence through the prism of the formal/informal dichotomy ultimately ties research
down to the state and its institutions. In turn, criminal and violent actors and, in
particular, practices are moved to the analytical backseat or explained as the quasi-
logical outcome of seemingly pathological institutional shortcomings such as ‘patron-
age’ or ‘corruption tolerance’.43 Again, this is not to deny that the ways in which formal
institutions work (or do not work) impacts on how crime and violence unfold in the
region, specifically by creating an opportunity structure for the emergence of informal
counterparts. However, as the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, there is
more to the story than informality or the problem of weak (formal) state institutions in
need of fixing.44 Politics of criminalisation, transnational knowledge production, immi-
gration policies, or the professional struggles amongst bureaucrats, to name just some
of the topics addressed by the contributions to this special issue, are equally, if often not
more, important for understanding the governing of crime and violence in the region
than the informal (as well as the deficient formal) institutional set-up of the region’s
democratic orders. In order to uncover these complexities, the special issue focuses on
the actual processes of how violence and crime in Latin America are governed, by whom
and to what effect.
To this end, this special issue applies the analytical lens of governance. Since the
1980s, the term governance has gained prominence in scholarly works and policy
debates.45 The rise of the ‘governance paradigm’,46 and this is what makes it relevant
for understanding Latin America’s ‘violent pluralism’, implies an analytical and practical
move away from, and sometimes even beyond, the state as the exclusive actor involved
in practices of governing. Governance, in this regard, can be seen as an analytical
‘signifier of change’; ‘a change in the meaning of government, referring to new pro-
cesses of governing; or changed conditions of ordered rule; or new methods by which
society is governed’,47 all of which implies a de-centring of the state:

Governance refers here to a shift in public action and public organisation. It suggests that,
since the 1980s, states and state actors become more reliant on varied private and voluntary
sector actors to devise, manage, and deliver policies and services. The state enters contracts
with other organisations, for example, to manage prisons and to provide security in war-
torn areas. Whereas government had consisted of bureaucratic hierarchies, governance
gives greater scope to markets and networks. Although there are debates about the extent
of this new governance, and the role of the state in it, there is general agreement that the
processes of governing now involve more diverse organisational forms and more diverse
actors.48

This widely shared observation notwithstanding, the prominence and proliferation of

scholarly works on governance has not yet produced a commonly shared understanding
of the term and ‘confusion surrounding the concept’ persists.49 While it is beyond the
scope of this section to offer an in-depth discussion of the related debates, the most
general understandings of the term refer to governance as ‘modes of coordinating social
action in human society’50 or the ‘coordination of natural and social relations charac-
terised by complex, reciprocal interdependence’.51 More elaborate understandings of
governance, for instance, refer to it as ‘various institutionalized modes of social coordina-
tion to produce and implement collectively binding rules, and/or to provide collective
goods’.52
 GLOBAL CRIME 177

Much of the related literature assumes that governance takes places predominantly
through ‘non-hierarchical’ modes of coordination and is inherently peaceful.53 In turn,
governance is conceived of as ‘as the intentional regulation of social relationships and
the underlying conflicts by reliable and durable means and institutions, instead of the
direct use of power and violence’.54 If this would be the case, the term would be of little
analytical help for understanding how crime and violence are governed in Latin America.
The problem with such a ‘peaceful’ and ‘non-hierarchical’ understanding of governance,
however, is that it is blind to power relations and the fact that governance, as Mark Bevir
correctly put it, ‘refers to processes of rule, wherever they occur’.55 Moreover, and closely
related, a focus on non-hierarchical and non-violent modes of social coordination
ignores that coercion, as a main resource for imposing ones rule over/against the will
of others(ruling), is a key mode of governance. As David Lake reminds us: ‘With sufficient
coercive power to impose its will, an actor can set policy for others, presumably at or
near its preferred policy outcome’.56
One strand of governance research that has put a particular emphasis on this power-
laden and coercive dimensions of governing has been the literature on security
governance.
Reflecting multiple developments within the realm of security provision throughout
the last decades, such as the growth of the private security sector, the related out-
numbering of state police personnel by their private counterparts in many countries
around the globe, the emergence of new security partnerships between state and non-
state actors, the privatisation of security provision in gated communities and Business
Improvement Districts, as well as the growing role of private military contractors,
amongst other developments in an increasing privatisation and commodification of
security, a growing number of scholars shifted their analytical focus away from the
state and instead emphasised the new role of non-state actors for the provision of
security.57
As in other field of social and political inquiry, the term ‘governance’ has been
increasingly used to capture these processes, indicating an analytical as well as empirical
move beyond the state and its security forces, first and foremost the police, towards
a more messy and complex landscape of public–private security entanglements. As Les
Johnston and Clifford Shearing put it in one of the first contributions to this debate, the
‘conflation of policing with state police is now restricting our view of what is being done
to govern security under other auspices. In view of that, there are a number of reasons
why we opt for the term “governance of security” rather than the more conventional
term “policing”’.58 In a similar direction, Benoît Dupont and Jennifer Wood declared that
‘explanatory and normative accounts of [security] governance should not be confined to
the mentalities, institutions and practices of states’.59 In line with these reflections, the
same authors proposed the following influential definition of security governance: ‘The
term “governance” in this context refers to the conscious attempts to shape and
influence the conduct of individuals, groups and wide populations in furtherance of
a particular objective – in this case, “security”’.60
To govern in the field of security, according to this understanding, involves ‘power
struggles’, ‘ways of thinking’, ‘methods’, resources and an ‘institutional structure’.61
While coercion, undeniably, place a central role in this understanding of governance
as the ultimate sanctioning mechanism that is involved in many, although not all,
178 M.-M. MÜLLER

practices of shaping and influencing the conduct of others in the name of security, one
problem, when applying this approach to contemporary Latin America, is its normative
bias. Again, and not too different from the democracy-theory-inspired literature dis-
cussed above, most of the related studies share an analytical as well as normative
interest in the relationship between democracy and security that manifests itself in an
understanding of ‘the delivery and distribution of security as a “public good”’.62 Such
a perspective, however, ignores that security provision nowhere and never achieved the
quality of a ‘public good’, irrespective of the character of the political regime. Thus, as
Adam Crawford correctly stated, even in democracies, ‘the distribution of safety as
a “public good” is rarely just or even’.63
In addition to the mismatch between the normative ideal and empirical realities of
security provision, in more analytical terms, exclusively focusing on (democratic) security
governance also ignores that non-democratic actors, which often present the main
source of insecurity in a given society, such as criminal actors, actually govern.64 They
provide collective goods and services, including security. They establish institutionalised
rules and binding sanctioning mechanisms. And they coordinate social action. To this
end, they rely as much on ‘ways of thinking’, ‘methods’, resources and an ‘institutional
structures’, as do their democratic counterparts, with whom they often collaborate in
a ‘dirty-togetherness’.65 Classic studies, such as Anton Blok’s The Mafia in a Sicilian
Village,66 for instance, provide ample evidence for this as does recent work on Latin
America and beyond.67
Governance, in this regard, is not the privilege of actors and institutions committed to
democratic values. Moreover, actors who themselves claim to act in the name of
democracy are often engaged in forms of violent, extralegal and criminal governance.
Crime and violence, thus, must be seen as sources and modes of as well as resources
for governance, a fact that has escaped most of the literature on security governance
which tends to portray the former (crime and violence) as a problem for the latter
(governance). In unpacking the way crime and violence are governed and how govern-
ance is pursued through crime and violence in contemporary Latin America, the con-
tributions to this special issue move beyond this analytical straightjacket by critically
interrogating what can be termed the crime–violence–governance nexus in the region.
They offer theoretically informed original empirical case studies that comparatively
highlight different modes and instances of governance with, by, and through crime
and violence in the region, thereby providing for a deeper understanding of the place
and function of crime and violence in the governing of Latin America’s ‘violent
democracies’.

Organisation of the special issue

As with all research areas, there are also dominant issue areas and perspectives on
violence and crime in Latin America. In addition to the region’s police forces,68 most
studies focus on urban issues,69 the role of informal politics, notably clientelism,70
organised crime, in particular drug trafficking,71 gangs,72 prisons73 and vigilante
justice.74 While some of the contributions to this special issue speak to several of
these debates, all articles move beyond dominant perspectives and offer fresh insights
 GLOBAL CRIME 179

by assessing so far relatively unexplored dimensions of the entanglements between

crime, violence and governance in the region.
The contribution by Lirio Gutierrez Rivera reassesses a classic topic regarding the
transnational dimension of crime and violence in Latin America: migration. By focusing
on the interrelations between crime and violence, on the one hand, and forced internal
as well as external migration in/from Honduras on the other, she argues that victims of
violence and crime are entangled in a ‘cycle of violence’, a concept that she takes from
psychology and expands in order to analyse how immigration policies and the US-led
war on drugs interact with local forms of violence, often domestic and highly gendered,
and how these interactions reproduce a transnational cycle of violence in which many
Honduran immigrants are caught up. This cycle is fuelled as much by crime and violence
in Honduras as it is by the US-led war on drugs and immigration policies.
Gutierrez’ contribution points out that crime, violence and governance in the region,
as well as their consequences cannot be reduced to ‘endogenous’ developments. Latin
America’s crime–violence–governance nexus did not develop in isolation from the rest
of the world. Rather it should be seen as the outcome of external-local encounters and
interactions. External interventions, for instance, frequently upon the ‘invitation’ by Latin
American elites who framed domestic security problems in a language that resonated
with the geopolitical interests of external actors,75 often had lasting long-term effects on
the structures of crime, violence and governance in the affected countries. In cases such
as Mexico, for example, US geopolitical concerns during the Cold War as well as the
interests of the Mexican government in confronting domestic ‘subversion’ converged,
and led to the enlisting of drug traffickers, supported by the Mexican intelligence
service, as extralegal proxy powers to fight popular unrest.76 And in Central America,
the decades of US-supported counterinsurgency campaigns have been identified as
a key driver of contemporary violence (and crime). Mostly because they have ‘increased
the supply of guns in circulation, damaged social capital’ and established ‘violence as
a norm for conflict resolution’.77
That external actors and their interactions with Latin American counterparts continue
to play an important role in terms of the governing of crime and violence in the region is
illustrated by Peter Finkenbusch’s contribution. In assessing discursive changes in the
international policy discourse about drug-related organised crime within the context of
the Mérida Initiative, a transnational security governance effort by the US and Mexico, he
demonstrates how emergent discursive changes from a repressive military approach
towards a stronger emphasis on the role of civil society participation and good govern-
ance are driven by a convergence of interests of a heterogeneous, and inherently
transnational drug-policy coalition; a coalition that in addition to the US government
includes a variety of non-governmental organisations, academics, think tanks and influ-
ential advocacy groups on both sides of the border. This coalition has been capable of
‘routinely engaging with the most intimate affairs of Mexican security governance’, as
Finknebusch puts it. Thereby, these actors have been able of bypassing long-dominant
forms of bilateral security cooperation between the two countries. As a consequence of
this, Mexican foreign policy seems to move beyond its long-standing commitment to
national sovereignty and non-intervention by being ‘incorporated into a highly intrusive
international statebuilding dispositive’, with transnationally connected non-state actors
as key agenda setters.
180 M.-M. MÜLLER

Another dimension of the transnational character of the governing of crime and

violence in contemporary Latin America stands at the centre of the contribution by
Frank Müller and Andrea Steinke. They assess Brazil’s peacekeeping efforts within the
context of the United Nations Stabilization Mission to Haiti and the travelling back of the
related experience to Brazil where peacekeeping, as pacification, has become an influ-
ential approach to urban security governance. Müller and Steinke argue that Haiti serves
as a testing ground for improving Brazil’s military techniques and domestic pacification
strategies. By critically examining the consequences of peacekeeping-cum-pacification
abroad and at home, they point towards the underlying de-politicisation efforts that
accompany the transnationally connected pacification effort as both an urban military
strategy and a governance metaphor. The findings of their article question Brazil’s claim
of being a ‘better’, more locally attuned, non-Western peacekeeper and instead point
towards the fact that peacekeeping as pacification is based on the criminalisation of
entire populations, which ultimately justifies the presence of occupying military forces
be it in the marginalised neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince or the favelas of Rio de
Janeiro.
Criminalisation, as a form of ‘governing through crime’,78 is, indeed, one of the
mayor trends within the region’s contemporary political and penal fields. It is one of
the main drivers behind the ‘punitive turn’79 and the rise of a ‘penal populism’80 in
Latin America, as evidenced by the enacting of more, tougher, laws and policing
measures most of which are directed at the most marginal segments of the region’s
population. In turn, these practices have contributed to a dramatic rise in the region’s
prison population where in many countries incarceration rates now exceed imprison-
ment figures during the dictatorships;81 a trend that cuts across local and national
level-jurisdictions as well as ideological divides of the governing parties.82 Part and
parcel of this development is the political usage of crime as an effort of ‘making
crime pay’83 in political terms. Crime-centred talk and action, framed in the language
of security, as Guillermina Seri has shown with reference to Argentina, contributes to
the emergence of a particular dispositif, that is ‘a network articulating governing
practices, macro and micro, as they take place through society’. As she continues to
elaborate, this governing dispositif

articulates a governmental horizon portraying Argentina as what Murillo calls a “community

of the decent” under the siege of crime. Millions can imagine themselves as part of such
a community, free of corrupt politicians, criminals and vagrants. Furthermore, the consoli-
dation of seguridad as a governmental agenda teaches actors to frame their own claims in
order to be heard.84

This argument echoes basic findings of securitisation theory. Originally developed within
the field of International Relations,85 securitisation theory has more recently attracted
the attention of scholars working on crime and violence in Latin America.86 The theory,
in brief, assumes that security threats are produced through political speech acts that
‘securitise’ a particular issue by presenting it ‘as posing an existential threat to
a designated reference object (traditionally, but not necessarily, the state, incorporating
government, territory, and society)’.87
Defining a particular practice as crime, as security’s ultimate other, in this regard, is
a paradigmatic example of securitisation. In contemporary Latin America, practices of
 GLOBAL CRIME 181

securitisation/criminalisation are politically powerful for a variety of interrelated reasons

that boil down to the complex and place-specific convergence of neoliberalisation,
regime-transitions and an increase in crime (real as well as perceived).88 As Paul
Chevigny summed it up:

The pressures to draw upon the fear of crime for political advantage are enormous. Because
the governments adhere to neo-liberal policies, and usually cannot promise a large number
of jobs or other relief measures to their constituents, politicians are confronted with
constant social protest, to which they must make some reply, even if they cannot promise
relief. […] When the rise of crime is of great concern to voters, it would seem all but
irresistible for politicians to turn to the voters’ attention to personal security.89

In her analysis of criminalisation practices in Colombia, Alke Jenss, by drawing upon

insights from critical governance theory, assesses the discursive selectivity of the
Colombian state in its efforts of framing the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, FARC) as a ‘criminal enemy’. She
shows that the government’s war against guerrilla crime has a ‘productive’ function for
Colombia’s democracy as it ultimately helps the country’s elite to preserve the political
status quo. Along similar lines as Seri’s analysis of Argentina, Jenss demonstrates that
while the pursuit of security can be portrayed as an effort of improving the well-being of
every Colombian, the spill-over effect of the government’s criminalisation of the FARC is
that broader struggles for social transformations are ultimately curtailed in the name of
security.
Another set of contributions gravitates around the institutional and bureaucratic
aspects of governing crime and violence in the region. As argued above, the institutional
‘weakness’ of Latin American security institutions has long been identified as a key factor
behind the rise of crime and violence in the region. One aspect that has largely been
written out of these accounts, however, is the question how particular policies that claim
to govern crime and violence actually emerge inside these institutions. This is a question
of the micropolitics of policy formulation. The contribution by Paul Hathazy addresses
this void. In drawing upon Bourdieusian field theory, Hathazy criticises perspectives on
policy formulation that portray the latter as mere responses to rising crime, on the one
hand, or democratic values on the other. In focusing on the case of Chile, Hathazy
departs from an understanding of anti-crime related policy formulation as a competitive
and conflictive social field in which different agents struggle for dominance. In tracing
these struggles, his contribution turns the frequently asked question regarding how
institutional change for the better can happen on its head by instead inquiring into how
‘a conception of “democratic public security policy” emerged out from struggles for
police and criminal courts reform, leading to the institutionalisation of public or citizen
security as a “category of policy intervention” in democratic Chile’. In analysing these
processes, his contribution shows that agents of supposedly democratic reform projects
are (self-)interested actors. In turn, the policies that emerge out of their struggles within
a given field are not the often claimed impartial ‘best practices’ but rather the practices
associated with the dominant group of actors in the field.
Graham Denyer Willis’ analysis links up to this by offering a powerful critique of
another feature of the Weberian state centrism that defines current debates on crime
and violence in the region: the underlying ideal-typical understanding of bureaucracy.
182 M.-M. MÜLLER

Through the conceptual lens of intreccio, a space of ‘systemic forms of exchange and
interconnectedness’, his contribution decentres bureaucratic practices and actors by
inviting readers ‘to think about how a bureaucratic regime of truth, in a context of
violence, may work as an assemblage of violent actors, operating in a mutually under-
stood but tenuous set of negotiations and relationships – real or implied’. From the
vantage point of São Paulo, Denyer Willis teases out how the practices of violent state
and non-state actors are embedded in different, yet interrelated, everyday bureaucracies
and showcases how these interrelationships and resulting negotiations shape as well as
regulate violence in the city.
Will Pansters’ contribution speaks to Denyer Willis’ focus on co-produced order-
making. By analysing historical patterns of Mexican state formation, his contribution
points towards the ways in which actors and practices of political ordering that are
outside the (formal-legal) state exercise multiple forms of de facto sovereignty and
governance. These arrangements, including caciquismo (political bossism), accommo-
date distinct crime-governance connections, and have been an essential feature of
Mexico’s one-party authoritarian regime. As such, Pansters argues, they played a key
role in the establishment of (sub-national) systems of order and the process of Mexican
state formation. In developing the concept of ‘informal order’, he states that caciques
and criminal sovereigns alike find their origins inside the process of Mexican state-
formation, a claim which he substantiates with an analysis of the relationships between
caciques and criminal narco-projects of (subnational) governance and sovereignty as
well as their ordering effects in the Mexican state of Michoacán.
The co-production of order and governance also stands at the centre of the con-
tribution by Enrique Desmond Arias. He argues that in order to fully understand crime in
contemporary Latin America, we need to understand not just the challenges that it
poses to governance but the ways in which crime produces different forms of govern-
ance. Far from solely a source of anarchy, powerful criminal groups engage with the
state to produce systems of order and to govern social life. While this focus resonates
with the contributions by Denyer Willis and Pansters, Arias proposes a different analy-
tical vantage point for assessing the consequences of this co-production of governance:
policymaking. By drawing upon research conducted in Rio de Janeiro, Medellín and
Kingston, his contribution discusses the impact of different types of armed actors
operating under varied conditions on the policy process. He shows that four basic
dynamics emerge based on the general power of the armed actors involved, and their
relationships with state officials.

Conclusion
This special issue aims at moving beyond what can be termed the ‘democratic security
paradigm’, including its underlying normative assumptions and inherent state centrism,
that dominates research on crime and violence in contemporary Latin America. To this
end, this introduction offered an analytical framework inspired by governance
approaches. This framework, in addition to de-centring the state, points towards the
multiple ways in which crime and violence are goals, modes and resources through
which a variety of state and non-state actors govern in contemporary Latin America. By
analysing the resulting as well as underlying interrelationships between crime and
 GLOBAL CRIME 183

violence in contemporary Latin America, the contributions to this special issue, when
read together, point towards several underexplored areas that deserve more empirical
as well as analytical attention. Three points seem particularly relevant in this regard: First,
the contributions point towards the multi-scalar dimensions of the dynamics of what
I termed the crime–violence–governance nexus, which, in turn, cannot be reduced to
endogenous Latin American developments. Second, and closely related, they highlight
the co-production of order in Latin America that involves governance efforts by local as
well as external actors, violent state and non-state actors as well as ordinary citizens.
Third, the contributions offer new theoretical perspectives and approaches to the ways
the interrelationships between crime, violence and governance in Latin America can be
studied, including, for instance, new theories of sovereignty, Bourdieusian approaches or
assemblage thinking. And they question the usefulness and applicability of Western-
centric understandings of Latin American realities, first and foremost in their Weberian
form.
These three aspects are useful starting points for a new research agenda that begins
rethinking the ways in which crime and violence in the region are studied, a rethinking
that can also contribute to a different and broader normative understanding of the
complex dynamics of crime and violence beyond the limits of the ‘democratisation
theory’ paradigm, which, as all contributions to this issue explicitly or implicitly demon-
strate, is an inadequate analytical tool for assessing Latin American realities and thereby
also for improving the livelihoods of those affected by the multiple forms of violence
(transnational, local, physical, symbolic and structural) adressed by the contributions to
this special issue. Contributing to the latter by offering an alternative way of seeing
these realties in their complexity and ambiguity is the underlying normative agenda of
this special issue.

Notes
1. UNODC, Global Study.
2. Inter-American Development Bank, “Violent Crime.”
3. Hilgers and MacDonald, “Introduction,” 2.
4. Bergman and Whitehead, “Introduction,” 1.
5. Koonings and Kruijt, Societies of Fear.
6. Caldeira, City of Walls.
7. Rotker, Citizens of Fear.
8. Davis, “Undermining the Rule of Law.”
9. Frühling and Tulchin, Crime and Violence.
10. Buffington, Criminal and Citizen; Piccato, City of Suspects; Salvatore, Aguirre and Joseph,
Crime and Punishment; Sozzo “Policía y Prevención.”
11. Roldán, Blood and Fire.
12. Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre; Huggins, Political Policing; Rabe, Killing Zone.
13. Rabe, Killing Zone.
14. See Brett, Origins; Grandin, Last Colonial Massacre; Sanford, Violencia y Genocidio. For
a regional perspective, see Esparza, State Violence.
15. Koonings, “New Violence,” 12.
16. Koonings and Kruijt, “Introduction,” 15.
17. Hilgers and MacDonald, “Introduction,” 10.
18. See Guilhot, Democracy Makers. On the geopolitical context, see Robinson, Promoting
Polyarchy.
184 M.-M. MÜLLER

19. Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy, 49. On the Cold War modernization-theory inspired origins
of this reasoning, see Gilman, Mandarins of the Future.
20. Arnson and Lowenthal, “Foreword,” x.
21. Méndez, O’Donnell and Pinheiro, (Un)Rule of Law.
22. Holston, “Misrule of Law.”
23. Hathazy and Müller, “Rebirth of the Prison.”
24. Amar, “Operation Princess,” 515.
25. Heine, Rodríguez Ferreira and Shirk, Drug Violence, 2.
26. Denyer Willis, Killing Consensus, 11.
27. Bergman and Whitehead, Criminality.
28. Denissen, Winning Small Battles.
29. Costa, “Police Brutality.”
30. Blanco, “Impact of Insecurity.”
31. Bonner, Kempa, Kubal and Seri, “Introduction,” 12.
32. Arias and Goldstein, “Violent Pluralism,” 5. See also Denyer Willis, Killing Consensus; Müller,
Punitive City; Pansters “Zones of State-Making.”
33. Hilgers and MacDonald, “Introduction,” 21.
34. On these issues, see, for instance, Centeno, Blood and Debt; Holden, Armies; Müller, Public
Security, Riekenberg, Geteilte Ordnungen; Stepputat, “Insecurity”; Pansters, “Zones of State-
Making.”
35. Pearce, “Perverse State Formation,” 298.
36. Müller, Public Security.
37. The term is borrowed from Shue, Reach of the State.
38. Arias and Goldstein, “Violent Pluralism.”
39. Arias, “Conclusion,” 245.
40. Auyero, “Clandestine Connections.” See also Denyer Willis, Killing Consensus.
41. E.g. Helmke and Levitsky “Informal Institutions”; Informal Institutions; Azari and Smith,
“Unwritten Rules.”
42. E.g. Brinks, “Rule of (Non)Law”; Uildriks, Mexico’s Unrule of Law, 204; Sabet, Police Reform.
43. Sabet, Police Reform, 29.
44. Bonner, Kempa, Kubal and Seri, “Introduction,” 7.
45. For overviews, see, for instance Bevir, Key Concepts, Czempil and Rosenau, Governance
Without Government; Draude, Vielfalt; Levi-Faur, Oxford Handbook.
46. Ikeanyibe, Ori and Okoye, “Governance Paradigm.”
47. Levi-Faur, “From ‘Big Government,” 7.
48. Bevir, “Decentering,” 228.
49. Risse, Börzel and Draude, “Governance,” 9.
50. Ibid., 9.
51. Jessop, “From Governance,” 80.
52. Risse, Börzel and Draude, “Governance,” 9, emphasis in original.
53. See Risse “Hierarchical and Non-Hierarchical Modes,” for an overview.
54. Jachtenfuchs, “Governance Approach,” 246.
55. Bevir, Governance, 3.
56. Lake, “Coercion,” 300.
57. E.g. Abrahamsen and Williams, Security Beyond; Global Crime, Decentering Security Hönke,
Transnational Companies; Krahmann, “Conceptualizing Security Governance.”
58. Johnston and Shearing, Governing Security, 10.
59. Dupont and Wood, “Urban Security,” 99.
60. Wood and Dupont, “Introduction,” 2.
61. Ibid. 4.
62. Dupont and Wood, “Conclusion,” 244.
63. Crawford, “Policing and Security,” 119. See also Bonner, Kempa, Kubal and Seri, Police
Abuse; Fassin, Enforcing Order; Comaroff and Comaroff, Truth About Crime; Reiner, Politics
of the Police.
 GLOBAL CRIME 185

64. Arias, “Criminal Governance”; Berti, “Violent and Criminal.”

65. Wedel, “Corruption and Organized Crime,” 9. See also Denyer Willis, Killing Consenus, 11.
66. Blok, The Mafia.
67. E.g. Arias, Drugs & Democracy; Criminal Enterprises; Branović and Chojnacki, “Logic of
Security Markets”; Critical Asian Studies, Illicit Economies; Denyer Willis, Killing Consensus;
Heyman; States and Illegal Practices; Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience; Volkov, Violent
Entrepreneurs; Wilson, Government of the Shadows.
68. Hinton, State on the Streets; Sabet, Police Reform; Ulidriks, Unrule of Law; Ungar, Policing
Democracy.
69. Auyero and Berti, In Harms Way; Davis, “Modernist Planning,” Kruijt and Koonings, Fractured
Cities; Violence and Resilience; Müller, Punitive City; O’Neill and Thomas, Securing the City.
70. Auyero, Routine Politics; Gay, “Clientelism, Democracy, and Violence”; Goldstein, Spectacular
City; Hilgers and Macdonald, Violence in Latin America.
71. Bagley and Rosen, Drug Trafficking; Bunk and Fowler, Bribes, Bullets and Intimidation; Carey,
Women Drug Traffickers; Watt and Zepeda, Drug War Mexico.
72. Bruneau, Dammert and Skinner, Maras; Cruz, “Central American Maras”; Levenson, Adiós
Niños; Rodgers, “Slum Wars”; Zilberg, Space of Detention.
73. Biondi, Sharing this Walk; Garces, “The Cross Politics”; Hathazy and Müller, “Rebirth of the
Prison”; Macaulay, “Modes of Prison Administration”; Müller, “Rise of the Penal State”.
74. Godoy, Popular Injustice; Goldstein “Flexible Justice”; Risør, “Twenty Hanging Dolls”;
Santamaría, “Legitimating Lynching.”
75. Maihold, “Intervention by Invitation”; Müller, “Punitive Entanglements”; Müller and
Hochmüller, “From Regime Protection”; Tickner, “Intervención por Invitación.”
76. Watt and Zepeda, Drug War Mexico, 93–95; Scott, “Drugs.”
77. Demombynes, “Drug Trafficking,” 1.
78. Simon, Governing through Crime.
79. Müller, Punitive City.
80. See Duro con el Delito?
81. Müller, “Rise of the Penal State”; see also Crime, Law and Social Change, The Rebirth of the
Prison.
82. Hathazy and Müller, “The Rebirth of the Prison”; “The Crisis of Detention.”
83. Seri, Seguridad, 56.
84. Ibid., 57.
85. The classic formulation can be found in Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, Security. For an
overview, see Balzacq, Securitization Theory.
86. E.g. Gledhill, New War; Hochmüller and Müller, “Regime Protection”; Melgaço and Arteaga
Botello, “Introduction”; Müller, Punitive City; Tickner, “Securitization and the Limits.”
87. Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde, Security, 21.
88. For an overview, see Hathazy and Müller, “Rebirth of the Prison.”
89. Chevigny, “Populism of Fear,” 83.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Markus-Michael Müller is an assistant professor in political science at the ZI Lateinamerika-Institut,
Freie Universität Berlin where he is currently working on transnational security governance in Latin
America.
186 M.-M. MÜLLER

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