Albarracín, Juan, and Nicholas Barnes. 2020.

Criminal Violence
in Latin America. Latin American Research Review 55(2),
pp. 397–406. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.975

BOOK REVIEW ESSAYS

Criminal Violence in Latin America

Juan Albarracín1 and Nicholas Barnes2
1
Universidad Icesi, CO
2
University of St. Andrews, GB
Corresponding author: Juan Albarracín ([email protected])

This essay reviews the following works:

Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin America and the Caribbean. By Enrique
Desmond Arias. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 301. $75.00 hardcover.
ISBN: 9781107153936.

Sharing This Walk: An Ethnography of Prison Life and the PCC in Brazil. By Karina Biondi.
Edited and translated by John F. Collins. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.
Pp. vii + 194. $24.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469623405.

Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico. By Guadalupe
Correa-Cabrera. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. Pp. ix + 379. $29.95 paperback.
ISBN: 9781477312759.

The Killing Consensus: Police, Organized Crime, and the Regulation of Life and Death
in Urban Brazil. By Graham Denyer Willis. Oakland: University of California Press, 2015.
Pp. ix +192. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520285712.

The Politics of Drug Violence: Criminals, Cops, and Politicians in Colombia and Mexico. By
Angélica Durán-Martínez. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. 328. $29.95, paperback.
ISBN: 9780190695965.

Making Peace in Drug Wars: Crackdowns and Cartels in Latin America. By Benjamin
Lessing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. vii + 326. $34.99 paperback.
ISBN: 9781316648964.

En la niebla de la guerra: Los ciudadanos ante la violencia criminal organizada. By Andreas

Schedler. Mexico City: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, 2015. Pp. 282. $17.99
paperback. ISBN: 9786079367480.

Mano Dura: The Politics of Gang Control in El Salvador. By Sonja Wolf. Austin: University of
Texas Press, 2017. Pp. vii + 304. $29.95 paper. ISBN: 9781477311660.

Latin America is, by far, the world’s most violent region. Despite being home to just 8 percent of the globe’s
population, the region is responsible for about a third of all global violent deaths annually. Latin America
has seventeen of the twenty most violent countries and forty-three of the fifty most violent cities. Such
levels of violence are particularly surprising considering they have coincided with the spread of electoral
democracy and human rights throughout the region. The end of Latin America’s armed conflicts and the
transition from authoritarian political institutions has not brought about less violent societies. Instead,
many of Latin America’s democracies have given rise to a plethora of nonstate armed groups including
prison and street gangs, drug-trafficking cartels, smuggling networks, militias, and vigilante groups. Today,
these armed groups are present in virtually every country of the region and impact the daily lives of
millions of Latin Americans.
398 Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America

Unlike the predominantly rural guerrillas and insurgents of previous eras, Latin America’s criminal groups
are overwhelmingly urban. Rapid urbanization in the twentieth century produced densely populated cities
with sparse investment in public housing, infrastructure, and social services, extreme economic inequality,
and strained relations with policing institutions—the perfect conditions for the persistence and expansion of
criminal organizations. Even so, criminal violence is not ubiquitous. In fact, we observe incredible variation
across the region. In some cases, criminal groups engage in violence at the level of conflict, competing with
each other for territorial control and local dominance. Some criminal groups have even been known to
directly confront state security forces. In other contexts, one organization has become dominant or multiple
groups manage to cooperate, which often leads to very low levels of violence. Many of these groups have
also colluded with state representatives and agents to provide a high degree of stability and security. These
outcomes remain a puzzle for social scientists.

An Emerging Research Agenda

A new generation of scholars has emerged to address these puzzles. In this essay, we review eight recent
book-length projects—just a small portion of those published on this topic in recent years—that build on
an already massive and sprawling literature. From the humanities and history to all the social sciences,
academics of nearly every discipline have used the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools at
their disposal to try to understand the origins, causes, and consequences of criminal violence. The books
in this review make significant contributions to these ends while demonstrating how criminal groups
throughout the region are fundamentally restructuring state-society relations and transforming the daily
lives of tens of millions.
Because of the large number of works to be considered, we do not offer complete summaries and
extended discussions of each book. Instead, we point to three overarching themes around which these
groundbreaking books can be organized and the various ways they illuminate these larger questions,
highlighting several ways that future research can and should build on them. First, each of the authors
confronts the existing categories and ontologies concerning criminal groups and violence. How should we
understand these organizations and their use of violence? What are the important differences among them?
And are they comparable to other nonstate armed groups such as insurgents? Second, another persistent
set of questions concerns the internal functioning of these groups and relations between them. How exactly
do criminal groups structure themselves? How much of their violence is dictated by the leadership versus
the uncontrolled behavior of their rank and file? And what kinds of inter-criminal dynamics lead to the
exacerbation or reduction of violence? Finally, each of the books struggles to understand the multifaceted
relations criminal groups maintain with the state. Under what circumstances do criminals and the state
work together to suppress violence? When and why do they confront the state directly?
Before delving into these themes, we begin by providing a brief overview of the breadth and scope of
these works. First, the books straddle a variety of disciplines and, therefore, build from wildly different
epistemological starting points. For instance, political scientist Benjamin Lessing, operating within a game
theoretic tradition, develops a highly instrumental and strategic account of when and where drug-trafficking
cartels engage in anti-state violence. Such a generalizable theory contrasts sharply with the approach of
Karina Biondi, a Brazilian anthropologist, who rejects the tendency toward oversimplification of Anglophone
social sciences, for which “the social comes to be a thing to be explained, constituted, and ‘invented’
instead of being approached as a series of relations in flux” (23). While such epistemological disagreement
creates inherent tensions in reading these works together, we believe these divergent perspectives offer
valuable insights for scholars who are willing to step outside their disciplinary echo chambers. In fact, cross-
disciplinary reading and dialogue should be a prerequisite for anyone working in this area because it will
force them to question their most basic assumptions and think across multiple levels of analysis.
Disciplinary differences aside, the authors share a common devotion to intensive, long-term fieldwork in
the region. Such dedication is commendable not just because of the significant time and resources spent in
difficult and, at times, dangerous field sites but because on-the-ground knowledge is especially important
in this area of research. In general, there is little reliable and accessible data on criminal organizations and
their use of violence. The capacity of criminal justice systems to register and record violent crime is uneven
at best. Many municipalities, subnational regions, and even entire countries do not systematically collect or
make such data available. Another confounding factor is that Latin American citizens have extremely low
levels of trust in their public security institutions and, as a result, a huge quantity of violence and crime
goes unreported. Moreover, criminal organizations are purposely clandestine. They actively prevent their
activities and whereabouts from becoming known, often going to great lengths to hide their more violent
Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America 399

activities. They frequently implement “laws of silence” to prevent citizens from divulging information to the
authorities or media in areas where they operate. As a result, there is much we do not know.
All the authors in this review have made incredible efforts to reveal the inner workings and violent behaviors
of criminal organizations. Most of the books include dozens if not hundreds of interviews with members of
criminal groups, politicians, activists, academics, and public security personnel. Some have done so while
also engaging in immersive participant observation in the anthropological tradition (Biondi, Denyer Willis),1
while others have conducted such interviews as part of extended case studies of cities, neighborhoods,
or organizations (Arias, Durán-Martinez, Correa-Cabrera, Wolf, Lessing). Several of the authors have also
combined quantitative data with their qualitative work through the use of government statistics (Durán-
Martinez, Lessing), public opinion data (Schedler), or content analyses of media outlets (Durán-Martinez,
Lessing, Wolf). In the end, each book incorporates different kinds of data to verify information on these
murky and sensitive empirical phenomena.

The Ontology of Organized Criminal Groups

The first key conceptual issue arises out of the exact terms that scholars use to refer to organized criminal
groups. The books employ a vast array of names to refer to them: gangs, clicas, combos, posses, bandas,
oficinas, pandillas, maras, factions, quadrilhas, comandos, militias, cartels, syndicates, movements, families,
and traffickers. The abundance of terms illustrates the remarkable proliferation of these groups across
the region. Although the labels often refer to their specific origins and characteristics, there is much
commonality across them. For instance, Desmond Arias in Criminal Enterprises and Governance in Latin
America and the Caribbean notes the diversity of names used to describe local-level criminal enterprises
but argues that what holds them together “is a willingness to seek to control and defend a particular
territory as an operational base for illicit activities” (20). Similarly, in Making Peace in Drug Wars, Benjamin
Lessing refers to the various drug-trafficking groups in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico as cartels because
they each have “the organizational capacity to engage the state in sustained armed confrontation” (2).
In The Politics of Drug Violence, Angélica Durán-Martinez refers to Colombia’s and Mexico’s cartels and
paramilitaries-turned-traffickers as drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs), another generalizable term.
In the end, using a single term makes some sense because of both the ubiquity and similarity of the
phenomenon across the region.
However, such a focus on what makes criminal groups similar can also obfuscate the very different origins
and activities within and across them. For instance, in Mano Dura, Sonja Wolf emphatically disagrees with
policymakers’ and scholars’ characterizations of the MS-13 and El Barrio 18 as “transnational organized
crime.” Although the maras have transnational origins and a significant presence in El Salvador, Honduras,
Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States, Wolf contends they should not be considered organized crime
or even drug gangs, both of which denote a more professional and highly coordinated group of criminals.
Instead, she argues, the maras are street or youth gangs that fulfill a variety of social needs for adolescents
and young men in impoverished and marginalized neighborhoods. Despite engaging in some violent and
antisocial behaviors, they are not clearly motivated by criminal imperatives or violence.
In Sharing This Walk, Karina Biondi similarly disagrees with attempts to categorize São Paulo’s Primeiro
Comando da Capital (PCC) as a criminal organization. Based on her ethnographic research, she argues
that the Brothers of the PCC consider themselves members of a movement or family and contends that
characterizations of the PCC as “organized crime” or a “parallel power” are misleading and counterproductive.
According to Biondi, “The PCC, when examined through the prism of so-called organized crime, gains form
and renown as a phantasmagoric figure that, in addition to revealing little about its actual workings, ends
up veiling and misrepresenting a variety of names, faces, histories, gestures, words, and desires, as well as
practices, collisions, struggles, strategies, plans, and wars” (97). Both Wolf and Biondi are cognizant of the
tendency of state officials, policymakers, and the media to criminalize young men and adolescents from
impoverished backgrounds. Therefore, they argue for greater differentiation between the various types of
criminal groups.
While we might forgive whatever disparities arise between the authors given their various levels of
analysis, cases, and specific research questions, the problem is not just an academic one. The terms we use
to refer to these groups matter for how we envision their behavior and the possible policies that can be used
to deal with them. For instance, understanding the maras as “transnational organized crime” called forth a

1
For a discussion of the use of ethnography in this research area, see Diane E. Davis, “The Routinization of Violence in Latin America:
Ethnographic Revelations,” Latin American Research Review 53, no. 1 (2018): 211–216.
400 Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America

particularly violent and aggressive set of policies called Mano Dura (Iron Fist), which Wolf argues “glosses
over street gangs’ structural roots and overstates their criminal activity. The assumption that organized crime
and street gangs are similar, when they are in fact quite different, only leads to inappropriate forms of gang
control” (69). Not only did Mano Dura in El Salvador fail to dismantle the maras but, in fact, it increased the
number of men willing to join and facilitated their expansion throughout the country’s prisons.
While the search for generalizable terms and categories across Latin America’s countless criminal
organizations is admirable, this discussion should serve as a reminder of the very real differences across
these organizations. Scholars should be wary of applying off-the-shelf terms or categories adopted from
public discourse as they are often based on misunderstandings. Although the study of criminal violence and
organized criminal groups in Latin America has made great strides in recent years, a cohesive conceptual
framework has yet to emerge. Without further conceptual development in this area, it will be difficult to
bring together the fascinating and growing academic work, particularly country- or city-specific case studies.
Another conceptual question pertains to how we compare criminal organizations to other nonstate armed
groups with a similar capacity for violence. Many policymakers and scholars have argued that the violence
experienced by many Latin American countries—highly organized, territorial, and sometimes against the
state—justifies using “civil war” or “insurgency” as more than just a metaphor. Andreas Schedler’s book
En la niebla de la guerra makes this argument most emphatically, pointing out that the levels of violence
produced by Mexico’s drug-trafficking groups far surpasses the conventional threshold of annual battle-
related deaths (one thousand) to be considered a civil war. Although Mexico’s drug-trafficking organizations
do not seek regime change, they are profit-seeking, “greedy” organizations. Therefore, in Schedler’s view,
Mexico is an example of a “new” civil war, a concept applied to understand intrastate conflicts in the post–
Cold War era. Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera in Zetas Inc. also considers Mexico to be experiencing a civil war.
She argues that although the country’s well-armed cartels initially just fought each other to control access
to illicit markets, they eventually confronted Mexico’s armed forces after former president Felipe Calderon
began a militarized crackdown in 2006. Both of these authors believe that such armed confrontations
between nonstate armed groups and state security forces can and should be considered on par with other
armed conflicts around the globe.
Most of the other authors, however, disagree with such a direct comparison with civil war. Arias, for one,
suggests caution in applying the lens of war to contexts of extreme criminal violence because it “blinds us to
the real relationships state actors maintain with criminal groups and, as a result, reifies official claims that
a government is pursuing a war on ‘drugs’ or ‘organized crime’ even as its officials collude with criminals”
(10). Arias argues that the proliferation of criminal groups in Latin America coincides not with state failure
or fragility, as it does in most civil war contexts, but with relatively stable democracy. In fact, high levels
of violence and the presence of numerous armed groups in the region are produced by ongoing relations
between criminals and the state and not their breakdown.
Like Arias, Lessing differentiates between civil war and what he terms “cartel-state conflict.” In conventional
civil wars, insurgents and the state are locked in a battle for territory, in which conquest and the use of brute
force are the name of the game. Cartel-state conflict, on the other hand, is a war of constraint. That is,
criminal organizations use violence against the state not to take it over but in their effort to change state
agents’ behavior. They target politicians, bureaucrats, and judges to change de jure enforcement policy, or
public security personnel in their effort to deter de facto enforcement. In the end, Lessing argues that anti-
state violence by criminals has a very different logic than insurgency or ideologically minded terrorism, and
any comparison between the two misses this essential difference.
Neat separations between political and criminal forms of violence, however, are also misguided.
Conventional distinctions become especially muddied when criminal organizations regulate social life not
only by providing material goods and services but by adjudicating disputes between citizens. In The Killing
Consensus, Graham Denyer Willis explores how the PCC in São Paulo has become the dominant authority in
the city’s periphery, determining when violence can be exercised. By implementing such an informal though
effective rule in many impoverished neighborhoods, the PCC, like many other criminal groups, takes a form
analogous to the state. To argue that the PCC is merely a group of criminals with no political motives or
objectives misses essential aspects of this organization.
Moreover, several authors note how previous or ongoing episodes of political violence are deeply
implicated in the origins and makeup of the region’s criminal armed groups. Most obviously, insurgents
and paramilitaries in Colombia became increasingly active in illicit markets to maintain their political
projects. For example, Medellín’s paramilitary groups originally formed to combat the country’s guerrilla
forces but, over time, transformed themselves into a full-fledged drug-trafficking group, incorporating
numerous lower-level street gangs and criminal groups into their organization (Durán-Martinez, 128–138;
Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America 401

Arias, 51–55). Similarly, El Salvador’s long-existing street gangs were once incorporated into the insurgent
networks of the FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) during that country’s civil war before
later being absorbed by the maras (Wolf, 9). In Rio de Janeiro, the Comando Vermelho (CV) faction famously
originated during Brazil’s military dictatorship when revolutionaries and common criminals interacted
inside of prisons (Lessing, 175–176). Finally, the Zetas, Mexico’s most violent criminal group, was originally
composed of former Mexican and Guatemalan special forces units that fought brutal counterinsurgency
campaigns before transforming themselves into the armed wing of the Gulf cartel (Correa-Cabrera, 21–22,
57–58; Durán-Martinez, 98; Lessing, 203).
Overall, we agree that direct comparisons between civil war and large-scale criminal violence conceal more
than they reveal, yet scholars should remain cognizant of the ways in which “political” and “criminal” violence
are not, in fact, mutually exclusive categories. Even if not motivated by regime change, criminal groups are
heavily involved in and shaped by local politics.2 Criminal groups frequently shift back and forth across the
political/criminal divide as circumstances change and opportunities arise. Hard-and-fast categorizations fail
to capture these fluid and evolving relationships. Finally, the region’s transition to democracy did not bring
an end to “political” violence within these countries. Authoritarian specialists in violence have continued to
act with impunity as members of state security forces or by providing cover to a variety of nonstate armed
groups.3 Scholars must continue to interrogate these categories and to develop new conceptual frameworks
for understanding the various ways in which criminal violence is shaped by political processes and vice versa.

Criminal Structures and Relations

The preceding discussion lends itself to a more concerted engagement with how criminal organizations are
internally structured and how they relate to one other. As many of the books contend, these structures and
relations are essential to understanding when and where violence explodes or is contained. Most of the
criminal organizations investigated in these books can be considered more or less hierarchical in nature.
The very use of the term “criminal organization” implies a hierarchical structure that can be differentiated
from other more networked or diffuse groupings or categories. For groups that must be willing and able
to forcefully defend their members and illicit interests against would-be competitors, a clearly delineated
command structure can facilitate decision-making and coordination while making leadership transition
less volatile, especially for groups whose leaders face high probabilities of arrest or death.
For Benjamin Lessing, such a highly centralized leadership structure is most apparent in his analysis of
the Medellín cartel and its total domination by Pablo Escobar. In fact, much of the anti-state violence in
which the cartel engaged was dictated by Escobar’s efforts to avoid his own extradition to the United States.
Seldom, however, are the activities and evolution of such a massive and sprawling organization dictated by
just one man. One of Lessing’s other cases, Rio’s CV, a prison gang turned drug-trafficking organization, is
composed of dozens if not hundreds of gangs located in the city’s favelas. Instead of a hierarchical structure
with a cohesive and centralized leadership that dictates gang policy on a local level, the CV faction is better
understood as a loose affiliation of gangs maintained through reciprocal and mostly horizontal relationships.
While Lessing spends little of his masterful book focusing on how these different organizational dynamics
impact anti-state violence, Angélica Durán-Martínez makes the organizational structure of DTOs central to
her analysis of drug violence in Mexico and Colombia. In five persuasive city case studies (Medellín, Cali,
Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and Culiacán), she argues that where violence truly explodes, it is due to the way in
which DTOs choose to source their violence. They can, alternatively, provide weapons and support to youth
or street gangs, what she refers to as “outsourcing,” or they can incorporate these individuals and other
specialists in the use of violence directly into their organization by “insourcing.” In the latter case, the DTOs
can more easily discipline and control the violence of these young men. In outsourcing, however, better-
armed and incentivized gangs will not just engage in violence against the DTO’s enemies but will use the
opportunity to combat their own rivals, thus leading to an explosion of violence.
Although Desmond Arias focuses little on the internal structures of criminal groups, he demonstrates
through six expertly researched paired comparisons of neighborhoods in Medellín, Kingston, and Rio de
Janeiro that where a single organization consolidates its control, it is able to expand its influence over local

2
See also Juan Albarracín, “Criminalized Electoral Politics in Brazilian Urban Peripheries,” Crime, Law, and Social Change 69, no. 4
(2018): 553–575; and Nicholas Barnes, “Criminal Politics: An Integrated Approach to the Study of Organized Crime, Politics, and
Violence,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 4 (2017): 967–987.
3
See José Miguel Cruz, “Criminal Violence and Democratization in Central America: The Survival of the Violent State,” Latin American
Politics and Society 53, no. 4 (2011): 1–33; and Guillermo Trejo, Juan Albarracín, and Lucía Tiscornia, “Breaking State Impunity in
Post-Authoritarian Regimes: Why Transitional Justice Processes Deter Criminal Violence in New Democracies,” Journal of Peace
Research 55, no. 6 (2018): 787–809.
402 Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America

life. While there are obvious downsides to consolidated criminal control, there are also significant benefits.
For communities that often maintain troubled relationships with public security institutions and in which
violence and confrontation between criminals can be frequent, the end to open conflict between criminals
dramatically improves the local security environment. Even though some violence with police may continue,
extreme episodes of violence are less common. Residents no longer need to fear shootouts, abuse at the
hands of competing groups, or cycles of revenge killings in their neighborhoods. Interestingly, such vast
improvements in public security often have little to do with the effectiveness of policing but are largely
dictated by shifting relations within and between these organizations.
Departing from these more unitary and hierarchical understandings of criminal groups, Karina Biondi’s
fascinating ethnographic account argues that the PCC maintains a radically horizontal structure. According
to Biondi’s history of the PCC, the group originated in the 1990s and rapidly expanded throughout São
Paulo’s prison system due to massive overcrowding, the brutality of guards, and pervasive violence between
prisoners. During its initial phase of expansion, the group’s original leadership attempted to dictate policy
and implement a set of rules and norms that were imposed from above. Over time, however, and especially
after a man nicknamed “Marcola” assumed the leadership of the group, the PCC transformed itself into a
more egalitarian and democratic organization. They added the word “equality” to their motto and moved
to construct a “command without command” (85). Biondi documents how the Brothers engage in frequent
debate and discussion concerning the application of norms and rules within prisons. Unlike more hierarchical
groups, discipline is never imposed from the top down but only arrived at through consensus.
In contrast to Biondi, Denyer Willis in his equally compelling book describes the PCC as a “fledgling but
covert bureaucracy” (62), capable of keeping detailed accounts of members’ “baptism” (initiation) dates,
place of residence, drug sales, violations of PCC norms, and the sanctions they received for such misbehavior.4
While Denyer Willis does not envision the PCC as a purely hierarchical organization in which the leadership
determines the behavior of local affiliates and members, he does depict an organization that is characterized
by greater organizational stability, bureaucratic capacity, and more institutionalized processes of decision-
making than Biondi would allow. For Denyer Willis, the cohesiveness of the organization is the cornerstone
of a system of governance in São Paulo’s prisons and urban peripheries that allows it to maintain a central
position of authority over life or death in Latin America’s most populous city.
The divergence in these two understandings of the PCC’s structure illuminates two of the enduring problems
in the study of criminal organizations. First, how much do the leaders of these groups really matter? While
the PCC does maintain a variety of different roles within the organization (pilots, housekeepers, brothers,
and cousins) and at least a nominal leadership (towers), the degree to which these men dictate policy and
control the behavior of other members appears, at least according to Biondi, to be minimal. For the maras of
Central America, Sonja Wolf likewise argues that “street gang leadership is typically more flexible and diffuse
than police officials portray. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the stereotypical gang leader is an individual
with a reputation for criminal activity or a willingness to engage in violence, who tends to have little actual
influence over other gang members. Rather, leadership is dispersed and shifts over time” (69). Together,
these accounts represent a dramatic departure from how the other authors in this review understand the
internal functioning of most criminal organizations.
The second issue concerns the evolution of these organizations. Criminal organizations are seldom stable
entities. Their structures and activities are constantly adapting to shifting circumstances. Biondi’s account
of the PCC demonstrates its capacity for rapid and significant evolution. Prison officials in São Paulo initially
attempted to combat the PCC by moving known leaders to other penitentiary units, often without warning.
The PCC responded by making all of the leadership positions temporary and easily replaceable, eventually
producing an organization that Biondi describes as constantly “in flux. [The PCC] is circumstantial, transitory,
situational, and in motion” (140). In the same vein, Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera argues that the Zetas in Mexico
developed an organizational structure characterized by a network of interconnected and decentralized cells
(or franchises) with further divisions (drug trafficking, human trafficking, extortion, piracy, etc.). Although the
Zetas had leadership posts that provided general guidelines to the organization, they granted considerable
autonomy to their different territorial cells and divisions. In this way, they functioned more like a transnational
corporation, such as ExxonMobil, than a hierarchically organized criminal group. Correa-Cabrera suggests
that this structure, akin to corporations (hence her title, Zetas Inc.), enables the organization as a whole to
survive after leadership decapitation or when problems arise within a cell or division.5

4
See also Benjamin Lessing and Graham Denyer Willis, “Legitimacy in Criminal Governance: Managing a Drug Empire from Behind
Bars,” American Political Science Review 113, no. 2 (2019): 584–606.
5
This is remarkably similar to the organizational innovations of many terrorist organizations.
Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America 403

We suggest two paths forward for this fledgling research agenda. First, perhaps even more than violence, we
continue to have little reliable and comparative data on the inner workings and evolutions of most criminal
organizations. Such a lack of data prevents us from understanding how internal structures and relations
between criminals influence their use of violence and other behaviors. In this regard, we believe further
research needs to be conducted not just on these groups but with their current and former members. While
most of the authors included here engaged in significant fieldwork and on-the-ground interviews, little of
the data come directly from members. Only Biondi, whose access to São Paulo’s prisons was facilitated by her
incarcerated partner, and Wolf, who worked with an NGO composed of former mara members, had significant
interaction with criminal group members. Such research obviously presents ethical and security concerns,
but the insights will help connect internal and external understandings of criminal group behavior, disabuse
scholars and policymakers of their biased analyses, and, ultimately, unlock a vast new area of research.
Second, we encourage scholars interested in Latin American criminal organizations to incorporate research
on armed groups from other regions. On the one hand, sociologists within the United States have long
studied how urban gangs organize themselves, and the role of leaders within them. While there are some
important differences between American gangs and criminal organizations in Latin America, so far there has
been little work to integrate these literatures.6 We believe that there is significant room for cross-pollination
here. On the other hand, while several of the authors have addressed comparisons between political and
criminal forms of violence, they have yet to fully incorporate the insights of the microdynamics of civil
war and rebel governance literatures.7 In particular, the recent explosion of research on the organizational
components of armed groups could be illuminating when applied to criminal violence in Latin America.8

Relations with the State

Contemporary scholarship on criminal violence in Latin America necessarily involves a discussion of the
role and actions of the state. Popular understandings view the absence and incapacity of the state as the
fundamental condition for the emergence of criminal groups. Within this perspective, violence results
from the inability of the state to effectively monopolize violence and suppress criminal groups. The works
reviewed in this essay challenge these assumptions and provide a more nuanced view of the relations
between the state and organized criminal groups.
First, the state and criminal groups are not necessarily antagonists engaged in zero-sum competition,
but often maintain multifaceted, mutually beneficial relationships. In Criminal Enterprises, Arias rejects
the notion that violence is a direct result of a breakdown of the rule of law and state absence or weakness.
As his previous scholarship has argued, the dynamics of criminal violence and (dis)order in Latin American
cities are better understood by exploring the way through which criminal groups and state actors compete,
cooperate, and negotiate. He describes how various law enforcement agents and politicians in Rio de Janeiro,
partisan groups in Kingston, and politically oriented armed actors in Medellín are incorporated into their
respective political landscapes. He delves into the microdynamics of crime and violence, arguing that higher
degrees of collaboration with the state lead to less public and indiscriminate forms of violence. However,
when criminal groups and the state clash, or in the absence of a stable agreement between them, public and
indiscriminate violence will erupt.
Along the same line, Denyer Willis attributes the dramatic decline of homicides in São Paulo over the
last decade to the PCC’s consolidated control over the city’s criminal underworld. Denyer Willis points to
an existing informal consensus between state actors (in particular, the civil police) and the PCC about “who
can die, where, and under what conditions” (31). By choosing not to investigate certain homicide cases that
bear the mark of the PCC, police forces tacitly accept the PCC’s authority to punish certain subjects who are
viewed as “expendable” by both sides. Sharing control over the right to kill—conceptualized by Denyer Willis
as “dual sovereignty”—contradicts conventional understandings of the modern state as the only institution
that should possess this right. Yet, in the case of São Paulo, it is this dual sovereignty that has led to a
considerable reduction in homicides.
Other authors focus on how the characteristics of the state shape relations with criminal groups. For one,
Durán-Martinez demonstrates how the fragmentation of the state security apparatus incentivizes criminal

6
Two exceptions are John M. Hagedorn, World of Gangs: Armed Young Men and Gangsta Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2008); and Dennis Rodgers and Jennifer M. Hazen, eds., Global Gangs: Street Violence across the World (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2014).
7
For an extended discussion of how these two literatures might be combined, see Stathis N. Kalyvas, “How Civil Wars Help Explain
Organized Crime—and How They Do Not,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 59, no. 8 (2015): 1517–1540.
8
For an excellent recent review of this topic, see Sarah E. Parkinson and Sherry Zaks, “Militant and Rebel Organization(s),” Comparative
Politics 50, no. 2 (2018): 271–293.
404 Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America

groups to engage in highly visible violence. The inability of state actors to coordinate indicates to criminal
groups either that they cannot get credible and predictable protection from the state or that enforcement
actions against them will be inefficient. In these contexts, committing highly visible acts of violence is a way
for criminals to demonstrate their power to rivals and local populations as well as a way to pressure the state.
Durán-Martinez argues that democratization generally reduces the cohesiveness of the state by creating
greater turnover and competition between different factions within the state. For example, during the seven
decades of authoritarian rule by the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional), the party was able to provide
credible protection to criminal groups while also regulating their behavior, leading to less frequent and
visible forms of violence. With the emergence of opposition parties and increasing political competition,
however, the PRI lost its ability to credibly protect criminals and deter their use of violence, which led to
exponential increases in visible violence across numerous subnational states and cities.
For other authors, it is less the characteristics of the state itself and more the types of public security
policy that shape criminal-state relations. Overwhelmingly, Latin America’s governments have responded
to criminal violence by militarizing their public security apparatuses and, in some cases, mobilizing their
armed forces to more forcefully confront criminal groups. In many cases, they have focused their efforts on
capturing and killing the leaders of these organizations. However, despite billions of dollars and hundreds of
thousands of police and military personnel brought to bear, they have largely been incapable of defeating,
dismantling, or even effectively controlling the violence of criminal organizations. Many repressive public
security policies and decapitation efforts have, in fact, contributed to the escalation of violence and,
paradoxically, to the strengthening of some criminal groups. Wolf and Biondi, for example, discuss how
crackdowns and hardline incarceration policies facilitated the expansion and influence of criminal groups in
El Salvador and São Paulo. According to Correa-Cabrera, militarized responses to criminal violence in Mexico
led to the fragmentation of the drug-trafficking cartels and exacerbated violent conflict between them.
Lessing’s book also demonstrates how unconditional and repressive approaches to policing tend to trigger
or worsen conflict between criminal groups and the state. Policies that condition the state’s enforcement
efforts on criminal groups’ behavior tend to have violence-reducing effects. If such strategies of conditional
repression effectively incentivize criminal groups to restrain their use of violence, why then are governments
in the region mostly engaging in unconditional crackdowns or mano dura strategies? Lessing focuses on
two factors: first, for conditionality to work “authorities must credibly threaten to correctly identify and
attribute cartel violence, and respond to it swiftly and proportionally” (245). This requires a high level of
coordination from state agencies and considerable capacity for intelligence gathering, two characteristics
many Latin American states lack. Second, there are acceptability constraints. Dealmaking with criminal
groups is generally viewed as immoral. Toleration of criminal groups and some criminal activities are
vehemently rejected by large sectors of civil society and the general public. Office-seeking politicians are
thus less inclined to implement these strategies.
Lastly, understanding the role of public opinion in the formulation of public security policy is key. Andreas
Schedler provides important insights as to why civil society in Mexico has been so reluctant to make drug-war
related violence (narco-violencia) an important topic of public discussion and why, as a result, it has failed
to shape political competition. He argues that evaluations about perpetrators and victims are ambiguous
for this type of violence. Victims of narco-violencia, for example, are assumed to have some association with
criminal conflict. According to Schedler, this helps explain the low levels of empathy and trust expressed
toward victims’ organizations. Moreover, traditional mechanisms to address violent situations—such as
reporting acts of violence to the state and operating through the justice system—are generally seen as costly
and ineffective (194–195). This is unsurprising given the extremely low levels of public trust in policing
institutions and perceptions of generalized impunity.

Conclusion
The books reviewed here reflect a much larger trend. The number of studies seeking to understand the
high levels of violence in the region and the criminal groups involved has grown considerably over the last
few years. This new generation of studies offers novel ways to explain the rise in violence by interrogating
existing conceptualizations of criminal organizations, investigating how and why they organize themselves,
and outlining their various relations with the state. In the process, many of them contribute to ongoing
debates concerning the role of the state in Latin American society and how political and social order is
constructed and sustained.
As this agenda moves forward, it is key that the interdisciplinarity and the diversity of methods that
has so far characterized this research area be preserved. No single approach can provide a comprehensive
understanding of the dynamics of criminal groups and their violence. We believe that part of the considerable
Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America 405

progress that has occurred in this area is due to the (unusual?) willingness by scholars to constructively
engage with work outside their fields. Research by political scientists has been enriched by the nuanced,
critical, and contextualized understanding of criminal groups developed by anthropologists. At the same
time, this deeply contextual work is complemented by generalizable theories and comparative analyses
that demonstrate the similarity of the processes surrounding violence across the region. Interdisciplinary
engagement, however, has some trade-offs: it might make it harder to reach a basic consensus about the
ontology of criminal groups and their violence and, therefore, agree on the concepts and definitions upon
which future research can build. These conversations, in our opinion, are worth having.
The study of criminal groups and their violence is marked by the difficulty of obtaining information.
Scholars have responded to this challenge with multiple sources and creative strategies of data collection:
interviews, ethnography, media reports, surveys, official documents and data, criminal archives, and original
data sets. We need, however, to be especially mindful of how the sources we use affect the claims we make
about criminal groups and their behavior. Secondary sources or media outlets, for example, will often
reproduce bias and widespread assumptions about criminal groups and their behavior. Directly talking
to members of criminal groups, while more dangerous and ethically complicated, may provide a more
contingent, less monolithic understanding of these organizations. Searching through documents produced
by criminal groups themselves may offer an alternative, less fluctuating view of the criminal group.9 We
need multiple sources of information but also consistent reflection on how our sources impact what we
are seeing.
Finally, the research profiled here not only helps us understand and explain criminal violence but also
provides important—lifesaving—insights about public security policies. The unconditional crackdowns
and the militarization of public security that have become the dominant policy option of Latin American
governments tend to increase violent conflict between criminal groups and between criminal groups and
the state. Unfortunately, this same research helps explain why Latin American governments continue to
pursue these strategies. Repressive policies can be very popular and are generally favored by elites who
control institutions and media, hindering the possibility of organized civil society to advance alternative
policy programs (Wolf). Public opinion seems unwilling to support victims of criminal violence and hold
the state accountable, or feels these efforts are ineffectual with a corrupt and incapable state (Schedler).
Normative constraints on public security policy, combined with states’ inability to coordinate their own
agencies, hinders the possibility of implementing violence-reducing strategies (Lessing). If under “normal”
circumstances the cards are stacked against new policies and public security sector reform, they are becoming
increasingly unlikely with the rise of right-wing populist governments in several Latin American countries.
Their heightened and popular mano dura discourse foresees an intensification of violence, threatening the
lives of tens of millions. The books reviewed in this article serve as a solid foundation for scholars to build on
and, with any hope, encourage a set of public policies capable of securing a more just and peaceful future
for Latin America.

Author Information
Juan Albarracín is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Director of the Political Science Program at
Universidad Icesi (Cali, Colombia). His research interests include criminal and political violence, criminal
governance, transitional justice, police and public security forces, political parties, and elections. His work
has been published in the Journal of Peace Research and Crime, Law, and Social Change, among other
academic outlets.

Nicholas Barnes is a Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews
in Scotland. He was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Grinnell College and
a Postdoctoral Fellow (2017–2019) at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public
Affairs. His research interests include criminal and political violence, criminal governance, public security
policy, urban inequality and informality, and social movements in Latin America. He has conducted
extensive fieldwork in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and his work has been published in Perspectives on Politics and
Current Sociology, among other academic outlets.

9
See Lessing and Denyer Willis, “Legitimacy in Criminal Governance.”
406 Albarracín and Barnes: Criminal Violence in Latin America

How to cite this article: Albarracín, Juan, and Nicholas Barnes. 2020. Criminal Violence in Latin America. Latin
American Research Review 55(2), pp. 397–406. DOI: https://doi.org/10.25222/larr.975

Submitted: 11 June 2019 Accepted: 11 June 2019 Published: 23 June 2020

Copyright: © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.

Latin American Research Review is a peer-reviewed open access OPEN ACCESS

journal published by the Latin American Studies Association.