This excellent collection of meticulously researched, well-written articles offers insight into how it can be that the central factor shaping the lives of people in Latin America and the Caribbean today is the uncontrolled and seemingly uncontrollable violence that appears to come at citizens from every side. To be sure, it would be hard to pick out a historical moment when the region was not marked by violent encounters. Over the centuries before the appearance of Europeans on its shores, the region was home to small-scale societies but also to powerful empires that had been built on the violent subjugation of assorted pre-Columbian peoples by their more powerful neighbours. Moreover, the violence perpetrated before the conquistadores appeared on the scene would soon be followed by what Eric Wolf referred to as the “Great Dying” that was the direct and indirect outcome of the imposition of colonial rule, a project that had the largely unintended, but no less tragic, consequence of causing the death of nine in ten indigenous people within the first hundred years after the “encounter.”
In the centuries that followed, the wars of independence gave way to armed conflict between Liberals and Conservatives; intra-Latin American border wars, such as the one unleashed in 1864 by Paraguay against its three powerful neighbours at the cost of more than half the Paraguayan population; and the 1910–17 revolution that decimated the Mexican population. These events—along with the US invasions of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Panama; military coups; violently contested elections; the everyday savagery of long-running dictatorships like those of the Somozas, Trujillo, Batista and Stroessner; military rule of the 1970s in Chile, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay; the 1980s civil wars in Central America; and peasant uprisings, workers’ struggles, and rural and urban guerrilla wars—have meant that the people of the region have never been strangers to violence.
And yet, notwithstanding all this, the editors of this book and their 12 colleagues persuasively argue that the violence that afflicts the majority of Latin American and Caribbean countries and their citizens today has created a situation that makes “normal life” more and more difficult to sustain and has left the governments in the region unable to guarantee safety or tranquility to their people, irrespective of social class.
Possibly the most significant way in which the violence of today contrasts with the horrors of the preceding centuries, as Hilgers and Macdonald explain in their introduction, is its random nature. They note that in recent periods of civil war or state-led terror, people felt that they might cheat death by avoiding certain neighbourhoods or areas of their country or by keeping their political thoughts to themselves. But now they feel threatened on all sides, and this is not paranoia—that is, an unfounded fear. Indeed, Central Americans account for only 8 per cent of the global population but suffer 42 per cent of all gun-related homicides. This is the highest homicide rate in the world, with tiny El Salvador registering the highest numbers on earth, followed, in the hemisphere, by Venezuela, Honduras and Jamaica.
In their introduction, titled “How Violence Varies”—a chapter that, alone, would make the book worth reading—the co-authors prepare us for the impressive range of contributions to follow by working through some of the perplexing conceptual problems that challenge anyone who would try to make sense of how, when and why violence in the region has grown so pervasive. They note that apart from ongoing “structural violence,” an increase in violence resulted from the fall of authoritarian regimes of the 1970s that had “monopolized violence.” With democratization, “power … devolved and, with it, violence,” as state agents, paramilitary forces, political parties, organized criminals, gangs, private enterprises, landowners, civil society groups and individuals increasingly imposed their will on others though violent means (4). Importantly, in the chapter that follows, Jean Daudelin cautions us that conflicting explanations for the high levels of violence in the region can be traced to problematic methodology—above all, the use of homicide rates “as a proxy” (55) for violence, victimization and perceptions of insecurity.
The collection is geographically broad, including insightful contributions on violence at the “subnational” level made by Kent Eaton and Juan Diego Prieto in Colombia, Pablo Lapegna and Hugues Fournier in Argentina and Gaëlle Rivard Piché in El Salvador. Julián Durazo-Herrmann's chapter on the relationship between clientelism and violence in Bahia, Brazil, sets up interesting comparisons with Markus-Michael Müller's work on the role of clientelism in police violence in Mexico City, which, in turn, complements Lucy Luccisano and Laura Macdonalds’ exploration of the role of social programs in violence reduction in Mexico. This study brings to light the fact that the Mexican capital is probably the safest setting in the entire country, due both to the “Pax Mafiosa” among warring drug cartels whose families make their home in the capital and the success of programs first put in place by Andrés Manuel López Obrador during his term as mayor (2000–2005).
The link between clientelist politics and lethal violence is explored by Yonique Campbell and Colin Clarke in a riveting study of garrison communities in Kingston, Jamaica. Here “violent political tribalism” (93) between supporters linked to the rival Jamaica Labor Party (JLP) and the People's National Party (PNP) have created war zones where political opponents fear to tread. Both JLP and PNP are multiclass parties with a huge base of desperately poor people dependent upon patronage doled out by their party in the form of public housing and protection from violent policing in exchange for their votes and for their participation, if necessary, as shock troops at election time.
Finally, Robert Gay's impressive longitudinal research traces the transition of favelas in Rio from the relatively joyful period of urban popular mobilizations to the infiltration and takeover of these previously well-organized favela communities by warring, prison-based criminal factions, whose power rested on their control of the drug trade. This development, in turn, provoked violent responses by local state “forces of order,” which then prompted an effort to build local militias to “retake” control of low-income neighbourhoods. It is stunning to consider that Gay has followed all these developments in the course of 30 years of ethnographic study made possible by the remarkable level of access that he originally established with the denizens of one particular favela, following them from the heady days of community activism through to the appearance of the Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora (UPPs) created to “pacify” the poor neighbourhoods during the 2016 Olympic Games.
In all, this book is a landmark in the study of violence, an achievement that is all the more important given the flight of millions that pervasive violence has prompted in our hemisphere and the political and social blowback against refugees from violence that has come to dominate politics from North America to the Southern Cone.
