Eduardo Moncada’s Resisting Extortion breaks new ground in the study of crime, political economy, and state-society relations in Latin America, with implications for other countries struggling with criminal exploitation and weak rule of law. Moncada focuses on criminal extortion, a constitutive dynamic of criminal governance and of citizens’ and businesses’ daily realities in many countries, which has until now been undertheorized and understudied. By using a multisited, multimethod approach—including interviews, ethnography, analyses of judicial archives, focus groups, and mapping exercises in five sites within three Latin American countries—the book presents a compelling and uniquely granular analysis of the varied strategies victims employ to resist extortion.

Moncada identifies three strategies of victim response: everyday resistance, vigilantism, and the coproduction of order. When victims engage in everyday resistance, they negotiate the terms of their victimization without seeking to end it by reminding criminals of their shared social ties, appealing to their humanity, and skirting extortion through verbal resistance. Victims are limited to these minimal quotidian strategies of resistance whenever criminals have what Moncada calls long time horizons—when criminal governance is stable and established because criminals do not face governmental or rival criminal attacks. When criminals have short time horizons—when their control is actively challenged—victims may be similarly limited in their ability to challenge extortion depending on their organizational capacity and the availability of local police to partner with them. If the local police are captured by rent-seeking criminals, and relevant local political economy renders the victims atomized, they will not be able to mount coordinated resistance to extortion nor challenge the underlying exploitative relationship. Moncada illustrates these dynamics in Medellín, Colombia, where recyclers who sell their wares in a central market lack an organization or union to coordinate and articulate their interests, and the local police force often assists criminals in punishing those who don’t pay.

When criminal organizations have shorter time horizons, Moncada finds that they may engage in some form of vigilantism to try to end their victimization depending on their own organizing resources and the nature of local policing. But all vigilantism is not equal: Moncada differentiates between piecemeal and collective vigilantism. He shows how farmers in El Salvador partnered with a weak and underfunded police force to weaken their criminal victimizers. By identifying and recruiting allies within low-level (and chronically underresourced and discontent) police forces, they received crucial support—weapons and knowledge of the state’s broader activities—that enabled them to target and kill members of the criminal gang extorting them with impunity. This vigilantism remains piecemeal, however, because of the lack of organizational cohesion and capacity of the victims. These limitations make it impossible for them to develop or sustain an overarching strategy to upset the criminal order and practice of extortion.

Turning to collective vigilantism, Moncada pivots to two chapters that center the emergence and consolidation of self-defense groups in Michoacán, Mexico. In a context of brutal DTOs with short time horizons who have fully captured the local police, we see the highly organized avocado producers successfully oust their criminal extorters using the deep social and economic ties and organizing structure of the avocado growers’ union (what Moncada calls an “encompassing political economy”). Their strong social ties are juxtaposed with their berry-producing neighbors, who in the absence of similarly well-formed social and economic ties and organization, are consistently fragmented in their efforts to oust their criminal victimizers. We see that while they ultimately succeed in ending their own extortion, their victories are more complicated, as they navigate the continued efforts of criminal actors to traffic drugs within their territory. While extortion and kidnapping effectively end, self-defense groups are unable to resist criminal incursions, largely a result of their segmented political economy. The organized avocado producers, however, are able to engage in the “centralized co-production of order”—effectively controlling the outcome of a municipal election and bankrolling almost half the local police’s budget to shape the security environment to both guarantee that their self-defense groups can continue to operate and prevent criminal groups from regaining power. These findings about coproduction are fascinating, with broad implications for imagining how violence and exploitation might be curbed in areas with unable or unwilling local police and criminal dominance. However, the cohesiveness achieved within the avocado growers union seems rare and raises questions about how widespread this maximalist form of resistance is.

This is a book that is jam-packed: from the nuanced and multilevel theory explicitly engaging a wide range of literatures to the multisited analysis, with each requiring historic contextualization and insider access and knowledge, to the incorporation of the extensive and diversified evidence. These multiple layers of evidence convince the reader that there is meaningful variation among resistance strategies; that local political economies condition the organizational and resistance capacity of victims of extortion; and that understanding the incentives, motivations, and actions of different state actors, most importantly the police, is fundamental to explaining victims’ resistance.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of the book is Moncada’s tailored, triangulating methodology and courageous fieldwork. Moncada’s nuanced and careful analysis of each field site drives his methodological choices: Because the security environment permits more openness from victims in Medellín than other sites, for example, he offers focus group participants who might not have spoken up during the group conversation an opportunity to draw their work environment and to include aspects that generate security or insecurity. When the security context is tenser, however, he backs off of this methodology, opting to use judicial records and anonymized interviews instead. Moncada’s ability to employ these methodologies is, in and of itself, a striking contribution to our understandings of how crime, informal economies, and citizen resistance interact on the ground. Accessing these sites, which are dangerous by definition and rife with mistrust and suspicion, is exceedingly difficult. In an excellent methodological appendix, Moncada details how he leveraged his positionality and thought strategically about how to enter these sites—reaching out to potential respondents prior to his research trips and meeting with families in the United States in some cases, and in El Salvador, where gangs have been classified as illegal terrorist organizations, working through pastors in small communities to identity both victims and former perpetrators of extortion. This agility in navigating the security and methodological challenges that these research sites and this topic pose are extraordinary—making the text uniquely valuable if difficult to replicate.

The density of the argument and evidence did make me, at times, yearn for space for some of the evidence to breathe. In the thick of this evidence, there are nuggets that could spawn further discussions. I found the police focus group in El Salvador fascinating, with discussion of how being chronically underresourced undermined their sense of professionalism but did not push them into the pockets of the criminals because they were being targeted by them as well. Chapter 4 is particularly rich: Moncada discusses the ways in which victims summon ideas of rights and citizenship in the face of criminal domination in Medellín and as a way to assert dignity amidst humiliation—a fascinating finding. Indeed, the role of social domination and humiliation as a form of criminal control is a thread that runs throughout the text, and one that merits further research and elaboration.

Picking up this thread could strengthen one of the few underspecified concepts of the book. While Moncada lays out three strategies of domination—material, social, and political—we see in the cases wide variation in not only the modalities of domination but also the severity. Within each of these categories, the extortion amounts range from manageable to crippling; the physical violence and humiliation to being roughed up and insulted, to disappearing and assaulting victims and their families. I wondered whether there were thresholds of the severity of domination, for example, in which victims were compelled to end their victimization through riskier vigilantism. We learn that there is a correlation between the time horizons and brutality: Criminals with long time horizons will be comparatively less brutal. But in all the other scenarios, what role does the severity of the victimization play in shaping victims’ responses?

Resisting Extortion provides a theoretically innovative and empirically compelling account of the dynamics of resistance to extortion. Scholars of criminal violence, citizen participation, and qualitative methodologists will all find invaluable insights within this carefully structured and argued book. Moncada succeeds in bringing victims back into the study of crime and governance—a significant contribution with potential to reshape future scholarship in each of these areas.