This book develops a comparative study on violence in Jamaica, El Salvador, and Belize based on a theoretical approach, extensive field research, and in-depth empirical research. It combines the Caribbean and Central America into a single comparative research that explores the historical (from the conquista onwards) as well as contemporary causes of violence in these societies. The volume focuses on forms of violence such as gang violence, police violence, every day forms of violence, vigilantism, and organized crime. The analysis provides a theoretical perspective that bridges political economy as well as cultural approaches in violence research. As such, it will be of interest to readers studying development, violence, political, Central American, and Caribbean studies.

Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world. It has suffered waves of repressive authoritarian rule, organized armed insurgency and civil war, violent protest, and ballooning rates of criminal violence. But is violence hard wired into Latin America? This is a critical reassessment of the ways in which violence in Latin America is addressed and understood. Previous approaches have relied on structural perspectives, attributing the problem of violence to Latin America's colonial past or its conflictual contemporary politics. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume argues that violence is often rooted more in contingent outcomes than in deeply embedded structures. Addressing topics ranging from the root sources of violence in Haiti to kidnapping in Colombia, from the role of property rights in patterns of violence to the challenges of peacebuilding, The Politics of Violence in Latin America is an essential step towards understanding the causes and contexts of violence-and changing the mechanisms that produce it.

This volume examines violence across Latin America and the Caribbean to demonstrate the importance of subnational analysis over national aggregates.

This book highlights historical explanations to and roots of present phenomena of violence, insecurity, and law enforcement in Central America. Violence and crime are among the most discussed topics in Central America today, and sensationalism and fear of crime is as present as the increase of private security, the re-militarization of law enforcement, political populism, and mano dura policies. The contributors to this volume discuss historical forms, paths, continuities, and changes of violence and its public and political discussion in the region. This book thus offers in-depth analysis of different patterns of violence, their reproduction over time, their articulation in the present, and finally their discursive mobilization.

According to media reports, Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world—a distinction it held throughout the twentieth century. The authors of Violence and Crime in Latin America contend that perceptions and representations of violence and crime directly impact such behaviors, creating profound consequences for the political and social fabric of Latin American nations. Written by distinguished scholars of Latin American history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume range from Mexico and Argentina to Colombia and Brazil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, addressing such issues as extralegal violence in Mexico, the myth of indigenous criminality in Guatemala, and governments’ selective blindness to violent crime in Brazil and Jamaica. The authors in this collection examine not only the social construction and political visibility of violence and crime in Latin America, but the justifications for them as well. Analytically and historically, these essays show how Latin American citizens have sanctioned criminal and violent practices and incorporated them into social relations, everyday practices, and institutional settings. At the same time, the authors explore the power struggles that inform distinctions between illegitimate versus legitimate violence. Violence and Crime in Latin America makes a substantive contribution to understanding a key problem facing Latin America today. In its historical depth and ethnographic reach, this original and thought-provoking volume enhances our understanding of crime and violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.

This book explores the impact of Latin America's political culture on the international politics of the region. It offers a general account of traditional Iberian political culture while examining how relations among states in the hemisphere — where the United States has been the central actor — have evolved over time. The authors assess the degree of consistency between domestic and international political behavior. The assessments are supported by case studies.

The fear of violent crime dominates Guatemala City. In the midst of unprecedented levels of postwar violence, Guatemalans struggle to fathom the myriad forces that have made life in this city so deeply insecure. Born out of histories of state terror, migration, and US deportation, maras (transnational gangs) have become the face of this new era of violence. They are brutal organizations engaged in extortion, contract killings, and the drug trade, and yet they have also become essential to the emergence of a certain kind of social order. Drawing on years of fieldwork inside prisons, police precincts, and gang-dominated neighborhoods, Anthony W. Fontes demonstrates how gang violence has become indissoluble from contemporary social imaginaries and how these gangs provide cover for a host of other criminal actors. Ethnographically rich and unflinchingly critical, Mortal Doubt illuminates the maras’ role in making and mooring collective terror in Guatemala City while tracing the ties that bind this violence to those residing in far safer environs.

"The transformation of politics in Latin America, the consolidation of a democratic consensus in the Anglophone Caribbean, and the able performance of many democratic governments in fashioning economic policies made this book intellectually possible. Most of Latin America's democratic governments have carried economic reforms more effectively than their authoritarian predecessors and have remained stunningly resilient despite many problems. The naysayers have not been proven right. Indeed, even if democratic governments were to be overthrown tomorrow, the history of democratic politics in the 1980s and 1990s is already noteworthy." -- from the Introduction In Democratic Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean, Jorge Domnguez focuses on the successful accomplishments of democratic politics in the region -- a process that nations in Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa seek to emulate. Domnguez considers the role of British colonial rule and United States policies. But he also examines the development of parties, other civil institutions, and competitive markets, which lend permanence to democracy. He also discusses the prospects for democracy in Cuba and Mexico. Despite recurrent problems, Domnguez concludes, the outlook is good for stable democracies in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean is no longer perpetrated primarily by states against their citizens, but by a variety of state and non-state actors struggling to control resources, territories, and populations. This book examines violence at the subnational level to illuminate how practices of violence are embedded within subnational configurations of space and clientelistic networks. In societies shaped by centuries of violence and exclusion, inequality and marginalization prevail at the same time that democratization and neoliberalism have decentralized power to regional and local levels, where democratic and authoritarian practices coexist. Within subnational arenas, unique configurations - of historical legacies, economic structures, identities, institutions, actors, and clientelistic networks - result in particular patterns of violence and vulnerability that are often strikingly different from what is portrayed by aggregate national-level statistics. The chapters of this book examine critical cases from across the region, drawing on new primary data collected in the field to analyze how a range of political actors and institutions shape people's lives and to connect structural and physical forms of violence.

Offers timely discussion by attorneys, government officials, policy analysts, and academics from the United States and Latin America of the responses of the state, civil society, and the international community to threats of violence and crime.