A Path Not Taken: A Historical Interpretation of the Roots of Contemporary Crime in Central America (original) (raw)

Criminal Violence and Democratization in Central America: The Survival of the Violent State

Why does Nicaragua have less violent crime than Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras? All these countries underwent political transitions in the 1990s. Many explanations point to the legacies of war, socioeconomic underdevelopment, and neoliberal structural reforms. However, these arguments do not fully explain why, despite economic reforms conducted throughout the region, war-less Honduras and wealthier Guatemala and El Salvador have much more crime than Nicaragua. This article argues that public security reforms carried out during the political transitions shaped the ability of the new regimes to control the violence produced by their own institutions and collaborators. In the analysis of the crisis of public security, it is important to bring the state back. The survival of violent entrepreneurs in the new security apparatus and their relationship with new governing elites foster the conditions for the escalation of violence in northern Central America.

Understanding Central America -From Precolonial Times to Globalization

According to the geographical position Central America is the transition zone between the biggest in the world drug producers in South America and the world's largest consumers of illegal drugs in the United States. However, the landscape of violence in Central America changed in terms of a geographical transition. The Crisis States Research Centre examines changes in the geography of conflict in Central America on the example of Nicaragua. It argues that modern urban violence in the region can be seen as a continuation of past rural struggles in a new context. Migration from country to city in post-revolutionary Nicaragua due to changes in demographic, social, economic and political relations existing within cities are resulting in ‘urban wars’. Nowadays gangs act to ensure the proper functioning of the drug economy in the interests of gang members. They control a specific social order through the implementation of local regimes of terror.

Collusion, Co-Optation, or Evasion: The Politics of Drug Trafficking Violence in Central America

Comparative Political Studies, 2022

Why do drug traffickers sometimes decide to use violence, but other times demonstrate restraint? Building on recent work on the politics of drug violence, this article explores how Central American drug trafficking organizations' strategies impact their use of violence. I argue that three interrelated political factors-corruption, electoral competition, and the politicization of the security apparatus-collectively determine the type of relationship between traffickers and the state that will emerge. That relationship, in turn, determines the primary strategy used by traffickers in that country. Drawing on over two years of comparative ethnographic fieldwork in key transshipment points along the Caribbean coast of Central America, I show how co-optation strategies in Honduras have resulted in high levels of violence, evasion strategies in Costa Rica have produced moderate levels of violence, and collusion strategies in Nicaragua have generated the lowest levels of drug-related violence.

Violence, Peacebuilding, and Democratic Struggles in Central America

Latin American Research Review, 2017

After a long history of political instability and violence in Central America, especially during the 1970s and 1980s, many hoped that ending the region's major civil conflicts would also bring less violence and greater liberty to the region. Tragically this has not been the case for many. Instead, differences between the region's countries in conditions for the average citizen are much starker than a half-century ago, as recent scholarship documents. Of the seven works discussed here, four drill for deep understanding into individual cases (two on El Salvador, one each on Guatemala and Nicaragua) while the other three compare and contrast the region's six countries (none discuss Belize). Their thematic scope varies as well, some narrowly focused in terms of period and/or subject with others more comprehensive in their objectives. Combined they provide a sophisticated understanding of the extent (or lack) of progress in building more peaceful societies in the region; for many of them, in fact, this is a dominant concern. Given this mix of approaches, themes, and time periods analyzed, this review is organized chronologically, with periods characterized by the dominant theme emerging from these works-violent civil conflict, peacebuilding, democratic struggles, and social violence.

The violence work of transnational gangs in Central America

2018

According to international relations scholars, an important change taking place in the post-Cold War context concerns the lethality of non-state armed groups (NSAGs). Underlying this observation is the conventional assumption that non-state violence is intrinsically illegitimate. This article shifts the analysis of violence away from the terrain of legitimacy, which tends to moralise the difference between state and non-state forces, and towards the terrain of work, where their violence features as part and not separate from a shared political economy. I propose the notion of violence work as a resourceful analytic into the dialectics of everyday violence and the complex processes of value production in social life. Against the background of the extreme cruelty attributed to transnational gangs in Central America, I argue that their violence work is expressive of prevailing modes of accumulating wealth in the region. Drawing on multi-sited fieldwork in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, I show how gang violence work animates a system of economic cooperation that engages a wide array of subjects who traverse state/non-state and legal/illegal divides. (Published in Third World Quarterly, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01436597.2018.1533786)

The Decay of the Security Régime in Central America

International Journal, 1990

Not only was the old security regime in Central America experiencing decay in the ig8os but it was also being challenged by both regional and hemispheric states, variously supported by extra-regional actors., The situation was particularly complex and unstable because interstate disputes among regional and extra-regional states (including the dominant superpower in the area) were linked to major conflicts within the Central American nations. Consequently, any discussion of security r6gimes in the region has to begin with the recognition that the CentralAmerican crisis is made up of a series of overlapping internal, regional, and extraregional conflicts. Nevertheless, at the core of the crisis lay the issue of the declining hegemony of the United States and the legacy of the Reagan administration's attempts to reassert that hegemony against the will of various states and actors seeking alternative arrangements. The key parties to the conflict, which held opposing concep-LIISA NORTH is Director of the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, York University, Toronto. T IM DRAI M I N is Director of Development Policy at the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, Ottawa. i Many of the ideas and arguments presented here derive from the work of the research team involved in the preparation of Liisa North, ed, Between War and Peace in Central America: Choices for Canada (Toronto: Between the Lines i 99o). In particular, we wish to acknowledge the contributions of Steven Baranyi, John Foster, and Thom Workman, and the comments provided by Louis Lefeber. The authors also profited from participating in the Colloquium on Regional Conflict Management, jointly organized by the Centre for International and Strategic Studies (cils) and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC), York University, under the direction of Professors David Dewitt and Ed Dosman.

Organized Crime in Central America: The Northern Triangle

This publication attempts to create a better understanding of the nature, origins, and evolution of organized crime in Central America by examining the dynamics of organized crime in the three countries of the so-called Northern Triangle—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—as well as the broader regional context that links these case studies. The authors investigate the challenge organized crime poses to the state, its institutions, and governability in general. This publication is part of a series on the sub-regional dynamics of organized crime, focusing especially on the linkages between Central America, Mexico, and the Andean region as well as the growing insertion of Latin America in global transnational crime networks.