Most books try to bring substance to a concept or place; these three books show how ephemeral and deceptive such categories can be. Amid the strong tides of Latin America’s economic and political progress over the past 20 years is an often invisible undertow of marginalization and violence. These detailed ethnographies closely examine three communities caught up in this undertow: Barrio Libre, a loose confederation of rebellious youth who move between Nogales, Mexico, and Nogales, Arizona; the low-income settlements of Cochabamba, Bolivia; and the violent poor hillside neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro, known as favelas.

The books chronicle how these communities, home to many of the developing world’s millions of hard-working but chronically poor workers (described also by economists like Hernando De Soto), struggle for economic footing amid the tumult of neoliberalism. But even a first step often proves too steep. In Bolivia, residents crave titles for land legally purchased but undocumented, or seek identity cards from a bureaucracy that keeps them out of reach by requiring birth certificates and other documentation that it never issued. Meanwhile, that country’s Identification Office has found a gold mine in the inflated issuance and fake renewal of licenses, ID cards, fines, registrations, and assorted certificates. In Mexico, similarly, Barrio Libre’s youth skillfully “navigate the complex terrain of the licit and illicit economy” (Barrio Libre, p. 109) but spend much fruitless time trying to acquire the credenciales to stay in the former.

The government gatekeepers for such benefits are examined in these studies through the distortions they cause, not through the structures they comprise. The regulations and authorities of the state, set out so cleanly in the law, often splinter into malleable rules and contradictory practices. Along with neoliberalism, that fragmentation has been accelerated by decentralization, which has accompanied democratization throughout Latin American and other regions. In the 20 separate municipalities that comprise the Rio metro area, for example, a “largely silent and underpaid labor force” living in poor areas provides the 24-hour services that make the rich neighborhoods run and make the city’s “accelerated rate of development of the industrial, service, and commercial sectors possible” (Living in the Crossfire, p. 15). In Bolivia, the least-serviced communities on Cochabamba’s edges are arbitrarily cut off from the larger urban agglomeration and its greater resources. Such divisions crisscross Latin America. In the federal districts of Venezuela, Mexico, and Argentina, municipal crime rates are often directly disproportionate to the quality of police services. The U.S.-Mexico border cuts right through the heart of Nogales. Rio’s favelas, as Living in the Crossfire documents, are largely devoid of health clinics and safe schools—even as an ongoing housing shortage (of 800,000 units in 2009) swells their populations. The resulting competition over scarce resources chops up even the smallest hillside barrio, with more recent arrivals scrambling for a space at the top of the hill and for the scarce opportunities that roll upward.

Attempts by the state to muster its legal and physical controls, as result, only engender more distrust, subversion, and marginalization. The police embody its “absent presence,” with ineffective and abusive actions tolerated only because of the public’s greater fear of crime. In Rio, even the heaviest police artillery seems to set back drug trafficking in the favelas only temporarily. In the Cochabamba barrios of Uspha Uspha, “there is not a single police station or barracks, nor any roving police patrols or police officers walking the beat” (Outlawed, p. 100). As in all Latin American cities, most calls go unanswered. And the contacts that people do have with the police “are typically negative, resulting in extortion, a sense that their concerns are not taken seriously, and a deepening sense of victimization rather than of restitution” (p. 102). In Rio, reporting a crime “is commonly regarded as a useless exercise, even a risk, because visits by the police to the home could set up a second robbery, this time by the police themselves” (Living in the Crossfire, p. 121). In these communities, as in all of Latin America, the state response is to create yet more forces, which multiplies the poor coordination and tense citizen relations that cause ineffectiveness in the first place. The Police Pacification Units (UPPs) introduced in Rio in 2009 are widely feared by its residents. Bolivia’s statescape is littered with special agencies—from crack forces like the Delta group to intelligence units and community policing forces—that are dismantled in the revolving door of police chiefs or mutate into unaccountable cliques. In a hierarchy that privileges obedience and administration, those who do connect to the community are roundly unrewarded. It is “precisely because they are so close to the community,” as one said in Outlawed (p. 113), “that they are the ones who are singled out for blame for the problems of insecurity.”

Filling the vacuum left by a state withering under the assault of violent crime—from street muggings to transnational narco-trafficking—is a burgeoning realm of nonstate alternatives. In Rio, “militias composed mostly of current and former police officers have grown dramatically in the favelas,” bringing “a structure of organized crime” that imposes security through “a stern regime of law and order” (Living in the Crossfire, p. 20), financed by monopolized market control over local goods and services. Organized and spontaneous vigilante justice, sometimes through lynchings, are used in the barrios of Bolivia and other countries to manage insecurity—justified by a combination of mythologized indigenous customs, vague law on local authority, and “the extreme levels of corruption among the police” (Outlawed, p. 155). These two localized examples are part of a larger and rapidly expanding nonstate security sector in the region. In addition to private security firms—which employ more personnel than the state in most Latin American cities—there are irregular militias, errant community policing councils, off-the-books police enforcers, social work organizations, small landowner armies, privately formed business-district protection units, and other entities. Their proliferation is fueled in part by more links among state and nonstate officials in the illicit economy. Channels of prohibited weapons through private firms; shared use of roads and farms among police, illegal loggers, and drug traffickers; and cross-border contraband are examples of this lucrative cooperation.

Navigating this terrain of crime and crime enforcers is treacherous, and physical movement in most barrios is limited. In Rio, the police’s Big Skull armored vehicles paralyze residents of the favelas in which they are deployed. In Honduras, massacres on buses have stopped people from venturing into other areas. Throughout Latin America, barrio residents retreat into their homes and into themselves, with social exclusion and individual alienation making neighbors “more a description of proximity than a statement of sociopolitical belonging” (Outlawed, p. 123). Many residents in poor areas even say that they need to have someone home at all times to prevent robbery, further depressing income and community life. Such conditions shrink civil society and intensify competition over the distribution of and access to a limited supply of resources, entitlements, and, increasingly, individual rights.

In many of the new democracies in the region, those rights are now being sacrificed up to the “right of security.” Widespread “hostility to international human rights promotion” in low-income areas of Latin America is rooted in the belief that it supports “the rights of criminals over the rights of barrio residents to make their communities secure” (Outlawed, p. 209). Due process and other basic constitutional guarantees seen as coddling criminals have been weakened by politicians eager to indulge the demand for a mano dura—an iron fist—with punitive measures like illegal searches and pretrial detention. In Central America, international criticism of harsh antigang laws often only prompted governments to double-down on them. Even community policing and community justice, the hallmarks of citizen security reform in Latin America, have been commandeered into repression and violence.

Violence runs like an electric current through these studies. Sifting out specific causes of violence from its contemporary chaos, many scholars (such as Mabel Morana and Juan Luis Londoño) highlight historical and sociological patterns, such as unhealed injustices; others (such as Caroline Moser and James Wilson) zero in on the structural violence of poverty, chasms in education and employment, and the resentments of neoliberal inequality. But these three books show how violence itself becomes the protagonist, spawning new forms that alter individuals and engulf communities. One harrowing example of what scholars such as Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Philippe Bourgois, or Johan Galtung might call psychic violence that can be an end in itself is the inhalation of paint and industrial chemicals by Barrio Libre youths. Breaking through the borders of rationality into a self-destructive “freedom” in order to render themselves “self-consciously abhorrent, repulsive, and irredeemable” (Barrio Libre, p. 116), they dare rejection even by the few who care about them—pathologies below even Giorgio Agamben’s concept of humans stripped down to bare life.

The three studies plumb these depths even further when treating the unspeakable pain of a child’s violent death. Living in the Crossfire relates the killing of eight-year-old Matheus Rodrigues Carvalho by a stray bullet on his doorstep in a Rio favela. In Bolivia, a seven-year-old named Wilmer Vargas was killed by a speeding taxi as he crossed a busy highway. In both cases, the state’s piecemeal and biased investigation revealed “the partial, selective nature in which law” descends unwelcome into people’s lives (Outlawed, p. 103). The taxi driver who killed Wilmer illegally bought the sticker verifying that he had the required insurance coverage, while the policeman who shot Matheus continued his patrols. These senseless deaths make the grand concept of justice as flimsy as the societies it is supposed to structure. The broken links are scattered everywhere. In the frustrated words of a Bolivian judge, echoed in nearly any conversation with criminal justice reformers, every judge “bases his decision on the evidence presented to him, the proof. And how do they get this proof? Through an effective investigation. If this investigative work is poorly done, obviously the result they get, the incriminating evidence, will be poor as well, and the final result will be impunity, the result of bad police work” (Outlawed, p. 115).

Unable to take effective action or garner trust, officials can easily redirect blame onto society by deploying the tensions and hatreds that already divide it. As one Rio teacher says of her favela, “There is this idea, as the governor says, that the Alemão complex is a den of bandidos, the ‘enemy of the State,’ This seems to me a highly exclusionist, even fascist, vision” (Living in the Crossfire, p. 36). In Bolivia, identity is “played out along axes of rural/urban, traditional/modern, and indigenous/not indigenous,” except for the lowly street criminals, called rateros, regarded “as monstrous, fundamentally different from normal people, lacking basic human relationship and therefore basic human feelings” (Outlawed, p. 126). In Nogales, the sewers from which Barrio Libre youth emerge and commit crimes are a fetid mirror of Bolivia’s rateros. These stereotypes travel easily up the political chain and take root in national policies, from the targeting of young men in Brazil to the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border: “Nightmares of drug traffickers, terrorists, and illegal immigrants weigh down on the new frontier; these dark fantasies legitimate the continuing and ongoing amplification of militarized regimes of social control” (Barrio Libre, p. 104).

Sometimes the treatment of national security by these books is overwrought: Outlawed transposes a Cold War version of security onto the contemporary era in ways that simplify the diversity of current policy debate, while Barrio Libre stretches the militarized right-wing view of the border over the American political spectrum. Such generalizations, though, are an exception, and overall these studies furnish detailed and profoundly human accounts of forgotten communities. They show well, for example, how being forgotten itself can clear the space needed for both new and traditional ideas to take root. In Bolivia, lynchings are often averted by producing witness testimony and establishing the suspect’s family relations (Outlawed, p. 196), and in the process frayed community relations are mended. In Rio, the nongovernmental Projeto Uerê works to document evidence of crime. As in other violent barrios in other countries, in fact, some of the most effective violence-reduction efforts involve citizen compilation of evidence, intervention with at-risk youth, neighbors’ ejection of drug dealers, and other initiatives that connect to, rather than compete with, the state. Living in the Crossfire’s description of Rio’s Rocinha shows the rich historical and cultural foundations that can be revived and marshaled on behalf of local security efforts, as well as for political action. Years before the 2013 mass demonstrations that rocked Brazil, mobilization in the favelas finally forced authorities to address the absence of basic services and safety there. While the governor of Rio de Janeiro state complains in his interview with the Living in the Crossfire authors of the “irresponsibility” of “allowing growth without planning” or adequate services (p. 204), he uses a fleet of helicopters—a flashpoint in the 2013 protests that rocked Brazil—while the state cannot legislate even basic fare relief, such as multiple-transfer tickets, for the masses condemned to insufferably long commutes on the streets below. Beyond squeezing limited concessions out of the state, such pressure can also lead to much-needed holistic reforms, such as Brazil’s 2008 National Program for Public Security with Citizenship, comprised of projects ranging from police training to social services. Many of these individual initiatives will collapse under the weight of politics and bureaucracy. But enough can survive to sustain a more holistic approach to deep-rooted but often ignored causes of insecurity—from fear and violence to employment and education—that these important books reinsert into anthropological, security, and Latin American scholarship.