The Third Wave of democracy in Latin America was expected to bring peace to a region that experienced violent conflict throughout much of the twentieth century. But today Latin America accounts for nearly one-third of the world’s annual homicides, despite being home to only 8 percent of the global population. With few exceptions, the region’s conflicts are no longer between states and political insurgencies. Instead, the protagonists of contemporary violence represent an array of criminal actors, including gangs, militias, and drug-trafficking organizations; alongside state actors, such as the police; and elements of society, including self-defense groups. In light of these developments, scholars increasingly seek to explain the origins, dynamics, and consequences of violence in the region. In this insightful and important book, Deborah Yashar contributes to this emerging literature.
The book opens by identifying regional trends using preexisting national and new subnational longitudinal datasets on violence. Among these trends are that countries with low national homicide rates (coded as < 10 annual homicides per 100,000 per capita) tend to remain at this level over time (e.g., Costa Rica); countries with very high homicide rates (> 40 annual homicides per 100,000 per capita) display significant longitudinal fluctuations (e.g., El Salvador); and levels of lethal violence often vary dramatically within countries (e.g., states across Mexico and cities across Brazil). This leads to the following overarching research question: what explains variation in levels of lethal criminal violence across space and time?
The book’s argument centers on the interaction between the geography of illicit markets, state capacity, and competition over territory by criminal organizations. While the drug trade occupies much of the book’s discussion on the geography of illicit markets, Yashar also considers illicit markets coordinated by gangs, particularly extortion rackets. The high profit margins associated with the smuggling and trade of illicit narcotics, as well as with criminal extortion, make it both lucrative and necessary for criminal organizations to control the territories in which these markets function.
But not all territories are equally attractive to criminal organizations. Yashar argues that criminal organizations are most likely to take root in territories with low state capacity. Here the argument focuses on the capacity of police and judicial institutions that are theoretically on the frontlines of state efforts to uphold order. Locales with high state capacity, by contrast, deter criminal organizations from setting up operations, given the comparatively greater risk that states will detect and stop illicit operations. But illicit markets and violence are not inextricably linked. Yashar argues that violence is more likely when criminal actors compete over territory, thereby building on several recent studies that show how the relationship between illicit markets and violence is conditioned by political institutions, the preferences of economic actors, the nature of civil society, and the strategies of state and criminal actors.
Yashar complements the large-N quantitative analysis in part 1 of the book with a small-n comparative case study in part 2. The empirical strategy leverages variation in levels of homicides across and within Central America’s three postwar countries, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua. Whereas homicide rates in the first two countries are high, Nicaragua’s homicide rate has been comparatively lower and stable—at least up until recent political upheaval, which Yashar addresses in a coda in chapter 7. In Guatemala and El Salvador, criminal organizations built illicit markets in spaces with weak police and judiciaries, and territorial competition between them produced relatively high levels of drug- and gang-related violence. In Nicaragua, by contrast, the end of the civil war was a critical juncture in the evolution of the country’s historically corrupt and repressive police institutions. The San-dinista Revolution led to the purging of the police and enabled institutional reforms that granted the police relative autonomy from political powers. These changes limited the incentives for police corruption and politicization, including the types of state-criminal pacts prevalent in the other cases in the book. According to Yashar, the emergence of a relatively robust and effective police institution in Nicaragua precluded the arrival of criminal organizations in the country and thus the possibility for the kind of territorial competition that is the proximate driver of lethal violence.
The book’s concluding chapter explores how the argument can help to explain relevant dynamics in other parts of Latin America and also makes an important call for more research on the police and policing, as well as on alternative forms of security provision that victims and those fearful of becoming victims increasingly turn to amid persistent crime and violence.
Among the book’s core contributions is to challenge researchers to consider how explaining violence may require developing more multilevel theories and frameworks. Yashar shows that existing theories can be strengthened when we consider how national and subnational factors interact either to foster or to inhibit lethal criminal violence. One potential way forward is to incorporate more microlevel analyses into the study of criminal politics. Scholars have shown that levels of crime, including violent crime perpetrated by criminal organizations, often vary dramatically across very small stretches of space. By zooming in on the microlevel, future research can complement and build on the insights that Yashar provides in order to advance our understanding of when, where, and why people opt to join or not to join criminal groups, engage in different forms of criminal violence, or resist their victimization. Insights into these ground-level dynamics can then be incorporated into multilevel frameworks that, although not necessarily parsimonious, can provide a more comprehensive understanding of the complex interactions between actors, institutions, and individuals at varying scales of analysis.
Yashar persuasively shows how the study of criminal politics can benefit by engaging and building on theories and debates about concerns historically at the center of political science, such as institutions. The empirical analysis of the Nicaraguan case, for example, is made all the more convincing by Yashar’s skillful use of a historical institutional approach. More broadly, the book makes an important conceptual contribution by urging scholars to disentangle informal from illicit institutions. This invites more theorization of the prominent yet often overlooked roles that illicit institutions play in shaping conventional political outcomes, particularly in the study of the political economy of development.
Linking criminal politics to the institutions literature also highlights the need to disaggregate illicit institutions and the power dynamics within them. For example, unpacking and differentiating types of illicit institutions could help to account for variation in their linkages to criminal violence. While the cocaine and heroin markets that Yashar focuses on seem closely linked to criminal violence, other drugs, such as marijuana, are evidently less so. And not all illicit markets with territorial roots are linked to comparable levels of criminal violence, such as the trafficking of endangered wildlife. Distinguishing illicit institutions in terms of the commodities they deal with, the actors who coordinate them, and the groups who benefit from their activities could help to address these types of questions.
At the center of Yashar’s argument are state institutions and criminal organizations. But social actors are also key for theorizing violence. The people and businesses that work and operate in the territories that criminal actors covet for illicit markets have incentives to shape local security conditions. Can civil society mobilization prevent the arrival of criminal organizations in territorial enclaves? Do social actors use strategies to defuse conflicts between criminal actors and thus prevent escalation in levels of violence? Moreover, people and communities can also encourage violence when they employ criminal organizations to provide informal order and justice by resolving disputes and supplying protection in the absence of effective formal institutions. Incorporating social actors into the book’s theoretical focus on state institutions and criminal organizations would yield additional insights into patterns of criminal violence.
Yashar notes several times that an important challenge in the study of criminal politics is the paucity of high-quality data on crime. This leads to the book’s focus on homicide data, which, although still imperfect, are arguably the most reliable type of data currently available to scholars of violence in the region. But better data are needed on the scope and modalities of lethal as well as nonlethal forms of criminal violence, such as extortion and sexual assault. Collecting these data will require the use of multiple methodologies, including ethnographic approaches that can unpack the dynamic nature of victimization. Such data will be indispensable for developing a better understanding of whether, when, and how different forms of violence interact and their potentially different political consequences.
With its macrocomparative framework, compelling argument, and rich empirics, this important book will be required reading for scholars of comparative politics in general, and particularly those researching criminal politics, institutions, Latin American politics, and democracy.
