The Arguments in Brief

In More Money, More Crime, Marcelo Bergman asks why crime increased in Latin America when inequality—long argued to be a determinant of crime (Fajnzybler et al. Reference Fajnzylber, Lederman and Loayza2002)—was falling. Bergman’s counterintuitive argument is that improved economic conditions foster the growth of “secondary markets” in stolen goods. Where states fail to stem secondary markets early on, criminal actors gain strength, expand into other illicit economies, and are more likely to use violence as part of their operations. The book marshals an array of existing and original surveys on secondary markets, violent crime, and Latin American police, prison, and judicial systems.

Benjamin Lessing’s Making Peace in Drug Wars argues that drug-related violence actually consists of contrasting types and logics of violence. Building on this conceptual contribution, Lessing focuses on cartel-state conflict. Why do state crackdowns on cartels sometimes produce dramatic surges in violence, whereas at other times they yield relative peace? Lessing argues that whether states make repression conditional on cartel behavior helps to answer this important question. Conditionality incentivizes cartels to scale back violence, which reduces state repression and allows for criminals to resume their illicit operations. By contrast, unconditional crackdowns prompt equally violent responses by cartels against the state. The book draws on interviews, archival data, and original violent-event data from Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico to construct cross- and within-case comparative analyses that illustrate the argument.

In Government and Governance of Security, Carlos Solar offers a case study of Chile’s responses to organized crime since the 1990 transition to democracy. Chile has one of the lowest levels of crime in Latin America. Solar assesses why Chile avoided the fate of its neighbors plagued by violence and organized crime. Solar argues that Chile reconfigured the institutional circuitry of governance into flexible and responsive policy networks operating at multiple levels of the state and capable of enforcing the rule of law. The networked governance of organized crime allows for institutional agility in mounting responses to nimble criminal actors. The empirical analysis uses interviews and government archives to trace the causal processes linking institutional change to the outcome of relative peace.

Anthony Fontes’s Mortal Doubt is an interdisciplinary analysis of state-criminal relations that draws on insights from geography, anthropology, and sociology. The book delves into the social construction of the mara phenomenon in Guatemala City, primarily from the perspectives of gang members and the state. Using ethnography, Fontes deconstructs the narratives that states and criminals build regarding crime, (dis)order, and the maras themselves. Throughout the book, Fontes reflects on how his own status as a foreign scholar influences the kinds of data that he pursues, the physical spaces and communities he is able to access, and the types of information that his research subjects are willing or incentivized to provide him. The analysis concludes that the violent adversarial relationship between the state and gangs in Central America is underwritten by intertwined narratives that each actor issues to claim and perform legitimacy, authority, and power.

State Responses to Crime and Criminal Actors

States-criminal relations are rarely zero-sum. Relations can instead assume varied forms, including cooperation, coexistence, and contestation (Arias Reference Arias2017; Durán-Martínez Reference Durán-Martínez2017; Moncada Reference Moncada2013). Recognizing that these relational configurations are variable allows us to see and theorize their distinct implications for patterns of violence, order, and governance. All four books contribute to this line of research with insights into the factors that drive state responses to crime and criminal actors, as well as their consequences for security conditions and politics.

For both Bergman and Solar, a key factor that shapes state responses is institutional capacity. Solar paints a picture of growing organized crime and illicit economies in Chile at the end of the twentieth century—features familiar to many of the country’s neighbors at the time. But while in most other countries crime and state corruption increased, Chile experienced relative peace. In the wake of Chile’s transition to civilian rule in 1990, Solar argues, the government had little knowledge of the nature of organized crime operating within its borders, including drug production, money laundering, and contraband that was fostering police corruption. But the Chilean government intervened before organized crime could take hold. Central government authorities built and strengthened state institutions tasked with enforcing the rule of law, from the police to the judiciary. More important, the central government reshaped ties between these institutions to facilitate coordination in detecting and prosecuting organized crime.

Solar uses theories of governance, policy networks, and historical institutionalism to explain how Chile’s central government steered state institutions to fulfill overarching policy objectives while connecting them via horizontal policy nodes to produce highly adaptable networks. States in Latin America have struggled to respond to crime, partly because security policymaking has fragmented across multiple institutions and at varying levels of government, where policymakers and bureaucrats compete for financial resources and political power (Eaton Reference Eaton2008; Hinton Reference Hinton2006). Networked governance, by contrast, encourages policymakers, bureaucrats, and enforcers to share resources and coordinate law enforcement and intelligence gathering. The network’s nodes invest actors and institutions in the task of maintaining order by subjecting them to top-down accountability to the central government and also “vertical accountability” (O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell and Juan1999). In the latter, each entity pressures the others to deliver security gains and help achieve common goals.

Though bureaucratic competition has not been totally eliminated, networked governance in Chile appears to have successfully minimized this major barrier to effective policy responses to crime. Those familiar with the bureaucratic infighting and political battles documented in the literature on the politics of crime will be struck by the bureaucratic agility of networked governance in Chile that Solar describes and its ability to stem criminal actors and economies early in their development. In Solar’s analysis, networked governance has produced order in one of the world’s most violent regions.

A welcome addition to Solar’s analysis would have been more explicit dialogue with the literature on state capacity. Presumably, Chilean authorities would have struggled to mount networked governance if they lacked the power to autonomously make policies about organized crime and the ability to enforce them, or despotic and infrastructural power, respectively (Mann Reference Mann1984). For example, should policymakers in settings with relatively less despotic or infrastructural power pursue the networked governance of organized crime? It worked in Chile partly because the central government was able to oversee the constellation of actors charged with tackling organized crime. States where criminal organizations have penetrated upper-level government institutions will have few incentives to challenge criminal interests. And limited infrastructural power would increase the chances of principal-agent problems, given the corruption of ground-level enforcers.

Solar’s findings resonate nonetheless with Bergman’s broader theory. Bergman argues that improved socioeconomic conditions indirectly account for increased crime. As demand for consumer goods rode the wave of growing prosperity in late- twentieth-century Latin America—particularly among low-income populations—secondary markets in stolen goods proliferated, including cellphones, cars, and car parts. But we also have to consider whether and when states respond to secondary markets. Bergman argues that where either limited capacity or complicity with criminal actors prevents states from dismantling secondary markets early on, countries slip into “high crime equilibriums (HCEs).” Here the demand for illegal goods surpasses state capacity to enforce the rule of law. This increases the incentives for criminal actors to capture territory and new illicit markets; recruit members, given the state’s inability to credibly threaten punishment; and pursue more violent practices. In Bergman’s account, Chile’s early and decisive steps to undercut secondary markets prevented the emergence of an HCE—a process that Solar traces in his case study.

In a thorough discussion of the different variables that scholars have identified in theories of crime, Bergman acknowledges that crime results from the complex interactions between multiple factors. Thus, in addition to an important empirical contribution, this book’s key theoretical contribution is less a comprehensive account of crime and more the identification of secondary markets as a crucial variable to be included in future studies. For example, future research should further specify the organizational ties between the relevant criminal actors. How do the architects of secondary markets link to those that coordinate the region’s illicit drug trade? The two probably have a reciprocal relationship, in which secondary markets not only contribute to more violent forms of criminality but also grow out of the diversification strategies of drug traffickers and other organized criminal groups.

Criminal actors are largely in the background in the two preceding books, but they are central to the books by Lessing and Fontes. Though cartel-state conflict is relatively rare, Lessing argues that focusing on this outcome avoids lumping together distinct types of violence governed by varying logics. In Lessing’s account, state repression of cartels is a necessary but not sufficient condition for cartel-state conflict. DTOs will not respond in kind to such policies when the state’s repressive capacity is conditional on criminals’ altering their behavior, including reducing violence against state actors. Holding some repressive capacity in check allows the state to “actively manage” criminals, as it did in Mexico under the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the 1990s. By contrast, “unconditional crackdowns” offer little room for brokering peace, an outcome that Lessing illustrates with the case of extreme cartel-state conflict in Colombia in the 1980s, among others.

In addition to theorizing state responses to crime, Lessing argues that criminals use two strategies to defend themselves and their interests: terror tactics to prompt a change in state policy (“violent lobbying”) and a combination of bribes and the threat of violence to stymie the enforcement of state policy (“violent corruption”). After carefully applying these new analytical and conceptual tools in the empirical chapters, Lessing’s book culminates in a series of useful policy implications for how states can tackle crime and criminal actors.

Extensions of Lessing’s argument should consider how societal actors influence cartel-state interactions. Though civilians are not the targets or main victims of cartel-state conflict, these clashes have broader societal and political repercussions, such as influencing the political preferences of voters. For example, during Mexico’s 2012 presidential elections, many voters expressed weariness with drug-related violence. Voters seemed to welcome a more conditional state strategy that could reduce overall violence when they elected the PRI’s Enrique Peña Nieto as president (2012–18); he had promised that his administration’s priority would be economic development. Lessing notes that Peña Nieto’s policy toward drug cartels was unclear and therefore difficult to measure (237–38). Future research on this period in the Mexican state’s engagement with organized crime should build on Lessing’s analysis to discern if and under what conditions policymakers incorporate societal preferences in formulating responses to crime and criminal actors.

Fontes seeks to understand the social construction of violence, disorder, and criminal activity that states and gangs jointly produce in Guatemala City. The book’s chapters shift from an overcrowded prison to the trial of gang members in a courthouse and a gang-controlled neighborhood under siege by rivals. Throughout, Fontes maintains that the gang phenomenon in Guatemala is both an empirical truth and a social construct, in which criminals and the state build order amid socioeconomic and physical insecurity. By unpacking the gap between the truth and the construct, Fontes generates new insights into criminal politics. For example, he shows that gang members often embellished, if not outright lied about, certain aspects of gang life, including experiencing and perpetrating acts of violence. The author interprets these lies as part of the social construction of gangs and as a performance meant to affirm the idea of gangs as sources of danger and terror. Paradoxically, this same narrative enables the state to point to gangs as the source of disorder in Guatemala while avoiding discussion of corruption, poverty, and inequality.

This joint construction of the gang as the nucleus of disorder clearly comes across in Fontes’s description of one gang member testifying in a courtroom using half-truths and fabrications about gang members’ exploits, which nonetheless align with the popular notion of what gangs are and what gang members do. Thus, both the state and gangs need to sustain this narrative so that the former can point to gangs as the reason for social ills and gang members can maintain their mythic reputation.

The focus on narratives and how actors build and use them to justify particular forms of disorder is novel and provocative. But constructs are rarely the products of consensus. It would have been useful to learn whether and when these narratives are subject to critique and how actors both within and outside of the state negotiate the narratives. Have the narratives constrained the incentives or the capacity of civil society to contest the crackdowns on gangs by Central American governments in recent years? How do reformist elements within the state, such as human rights ombudspersons, negotiate the dominant gang narrative while also forming part of the state itself? Tackling these types of questions in future studies will help to specify the causal weight that narratives play in criminal politics.

Studying Different Types of Crime

Existing research on the politics of crime largely focuses on lethal violence, given Latin America’s staggering homicide rates. But these four books show the need to disaggregate lethal violence and explore its interlinkages with other types of crime.

Intense levels of drug-related violence in Latin America have prompted comparisons to civil war settings and the likening of drug cartels to insurgent groups. But drug cartels do not seek to overthrow the state (Lessing 2017, 50–51). This conceptual point enables Lessing to theorize when and why cartels fight the state. Tackling this question is possible only when we recognize that drug-related violence consists of different types of violence, and that the connection between them changes across time and space. In contrast to the conventional focus on violence associated with criminal competition over territory, Lessing shows that cartel-state conflict can occur alongside or in the absence of criminal turf wars. This should prompt broader study of when and how different types of crime are “concatenated” under the overarching category of drug-related violence (Auyero and Berti Reference Auyero and María2016). Two of the books discussed in this essay take up this task.

Bergman reminds us that most people in the region experience crime not through spectacular acts of violence between warring cartels or cartel-state conflict but through the everyday offenses of property crime. The trends and figures on property crime in Latin America that Bergman assembles and analyzes are often startling and will be useful for future research. But property theft also satisfies consumer demand by feeding secondary markets. Though Bergman uses survey and descriptive statistics to posit an association between secondary markets, violent crime, and other illicit economies, future research should clarify the origins, functions, and scope of these linkages. The challenge for generating this kind of data is that illicit markets, nonlethal forms of criminal victimization, and state-criminal collusion are often hidden and obscure. A number of recent studies illustrate nonetheless how ethnography, participant observation, survey experiments, and even the analysis of judicial files on state-criminal collusion can provide fresh insights into these issues (Denyer Willis Reference Denyer Willis2015; Magaloni et al. Reference Magaloni, Robles, Matanock, Díaz-Cayeros and Romero2019). Fontes’s study provides a powerful example along these lines.

Fontes invested in building trust with his research subjects through extended interactions in different settings and social contexts. The ethnographic approach pays off by unveiling the perspectives of an array of actors as they make sense of and attribute meanings to different forms of crime. This is particularly evident in chapter 4 of Mortal Doubt, where two findings are worth underscoring.

The emphasis on gang-related homicides in Central America’s Northern Triangle has obscured the pervasiveness of another form of crime: extortion. Using interview data and close observation of both mundane and criminal gang activities, Fontes shows that criminal extortion is an inescapable facet of everyday life for most people in Guatemala City. These everyday interactions, in which criminals extract money in resource-scarce environments under threat of physical violence, is how people experience gangs. This regularized victimization has broader implications. Some people come to see their victimization as inevitable, fostering a sense of helplessness. It serves as a daily reminder that the state is unable or unwilling to enforce the rule of law. And gang members rationalize extortion as necessary in a setting where socioeconomic mobility is highly limited, and more broadly, where the social construct of gangs paints them as the cause and embodiment of disorder.

But Fontes also shows that the functions that crime fulfills shift over time. Previously, extortion by Guatemala’s gangs worked as a type of basic taxation: gangs provided businesses with a form of private security in exchange for payment. The inability or disinterest of the state in providing order made extortive arrangements a rational choice for both gangs and those who paid. But over time, extortion became predatory. The service of security became an empty promise, and the main threat that people faced was violence from the very gangs that had once protected them. Under particular circumstances, extortion may therefore be tolerated, if not welcomed, by elements of society and even the state—a point that aligns with Tilly’s tracing of the origins of modern states to protection rackets (Reference Tilly1982).

Solar’s analysis also highlights other forms of crime that have not drawn as much attention as lethal violence but are deeply entwined with it. Money laundering emerges as an important criminal phenomenon in Solar’s analysis of the Chilean case. This underscores the symbiotic relationship between licit and illicit economies. In turn, this should spur us to consider more carefully how criminal dynamics can alter the interests of the state in ways that run against the rule of law without outright collusion taking place.

Future Challenges

The four books discussed in this essay contribute to the growing research on criminal politics. They provide rich empirical and theoretical insights into how and why states respond to crime and criminal actors in different ways. And they should prompt us to broaden the types of crime we study and to specify them more carefully in our analyses. In this concluding section, I want to highlight three challenges for future research that emerge from these books.

A first task is to consider how the social embeddedness of criminal governance influences the strategies that criminals and states deploy in their relations with each other. Criminal groups, from gangs to DTOs, forge and sustain ties with the communities in which drug cultivation, processing, sales, and consumption take place (Venkatesh Reference Venkatesh1997). These relations are likely to influence the incentives and capacity of both state and criminal actors to wage conflict against each other, or, alternatively, to forge peace in particular territorial localities. Where criminal actors prey on the communities in which they are situated, states may find it easier to crack down on criminals, given the community’s willingness to cooperate with state authorities. By contrast, cooperative criminal-community relations could dissuade states from crackdowns because communities may refrain from providing information on the whereabouts and activities of criminals or even join them in resisting state repression. Future studies should leverage variation in the social embeddedness of criminal governance across and within subnational spaces, as well as over time, to test and refine the hypotheses to explain state-criminal interactions developed in the books discussed here.

Much of the growing research on criminal politics focuses on formal state policies to stem crime and confront criminal actors. But it is equally important to consider the informal practices that states use. In Guatemala and other parts of Central America, police and military forces have been found to participate in “extermination groups” that target alleged gang members for assassination and disappearance. Police in Rio de Janeiro regularly engage in extrajudicial actions against alleged criminals in favelas. State security forces in Colombia have also engaged in extrajudicial violence against criminals and civilians. When is extrajudicial violence by elements of the state a one-off occurrence, and when is it part of a more systematic but informal state policy? How would incorporating informal violence by the state influence our conceptualization and measures of state responses to crime? More research along these lines can help us to understand when and why state actors leverage the fog of drug-related conflict to carry out extrajudicial violence.

The important questions that the authors of these books pose are motivated partly by the tragic human implications of crime and violence in Latin America. But victims are largely absent in much existing research on criminal politics. Bringing victims more squarely into our analyses can generate conceptual and theoretical dividends, as well as raise new research questions. This is particularly evident in Fontes’s analysis of extortion, in which he shows that gangs in Guatemala City regularly compel family members, wives, and girlfriends to carry out extortion on their behalf in order to reduce their own visibility and exposure to arrest. These same individuals provide gang members with food and homes. What roles do these support networks play in sustaining and building the capacity of criminal organizations to control territory and wield violence? Should we consider them to be criminals in the same sense as the gang members who force them to extort under threat of violence? Upending the neat conceptual boundary between victim and criminal opens a fruitful point of departure for studying criminal politics.