The books under review shed light on critical issues pertaining to violence, the state, and democracy in Latin America. A key contextual factor is the major disorganization of violence that has accompanied (1) democratization from authoritarian rule, which tended to position violent states against actors in society; and (2) liberal economic reforms, which have opened borders to the illegal as well as legal transit of goods and people. Under democracy, governments are under increased scrutiny by populations that demand more protections against violence and crime. And yet the security reality has presented new avenues for already weak states to become more corrupted by, and to carry out directly, criminal activities. Politicians, frustrated by police corruption and ineptness, have turned to the military for internal security services, but the armed forces, too, have proven corruptible. Assigning the military internal roles opens the door for excessive force against civilians while also detracting from basic military functions, such as defending international borders from incursions by other national armed forces. While we have much to learn about the ways in which new forms of violence and crime have changed the burdens on governments and states, questions still remain regarding the effects of violent conflicts prior to democratization on the quality of posttransition regimes.
This final topic is the focus of In the Wake of War, which investigates how internal conflict and peace processes have affected regimes and state performance in Latin America. The volume consists mainly of case studies of postconflict democracies, truth commissions, and international peace- and state-building efforts. In addition, Dinorah Azpuru presents a quantitative overview of the quality of democracy and the state in Latin America, and three pieces by Markus Schultz-Kraft; Ana María Bejarano; and José Miguel Cruz, Rafael Fernández de Castro, and Gema Santamaría Balmaceda use small-n comparisons to support their causal findings about variation in European peace efforts, insurgent demobilizations in Colombia, and the rise of gangs in Central America, respectively.
A central goal of the book, presented in Cynthia Arnson's introduction, is to bridge the literature on democratization—which has focused on procedural democracy—and research on conflict resolution—which emphasizes state performance. Although Arnson's proposed concept of “democratic governance” does place value on both democracy and the state, in fact contributors to the project successfully speak to these two concerns only by treating them separately. Azpuru's analysis suggests that post-conflict democracies are not less democratic, but that they do worse on measures of state performance relative to democracies without the violent past. Throughout the book, conflict and/or peacemaking are linked both to democratic institutions and to state performance, but via different mechanisms. Finally, authors find evidence of causal relationships between democracy and the state. For instance, Edelberto Torres-Rivas asserts that in Guatemala, basic citizenship is not protected, raising obvious questions about the quality of democracy in that country.
One alarming case of soaring violence threatening citizenship rights is Mexico. Bringing together scholars of anthropology, history, political science, and sociology, Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico debunks the flawed assumption that under the postrevolutionary dominance of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Mexico was ruled with little state violence. The project analyzes the different manifestations of violence in state-making in postrevolutionary Mexico, the ongoing state violence during the PRI's subsequent consolidated rule, and, with the fall of the PRI at the national level in 2000, the state's loss of control and spiraling levels of insecurity. Throughout all three periods, the volume traces complex interconnections between the state and criminal activities in society and thereby integrates Mexico's past with the recent surge in certain Mexican states of violence related to the illegal narcotics trade and to state responses to drug cartels.
If we move from the domestic context to the international arena, there, too, we observe interactions among democracy, the state, and violence. In their study of the 1995 Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru and the 1998 resolution of the countries' long-standing border conflict, David Mares and David Scott Palmer demonstrate that war broke out in spite of executives' efforts to avoid it, highlighting the influence of public opinion, military autonomy, and the military balance of power. In Peru, there was a commitment to the 1942 Rio Protocol, which offered an internationally recognized borderline. In contrast, Ecuadorians rejected the Protocol, as it denied Ecuador sovereign access to the Amazon. The countries slid into war following a change in the balance of power between two militaries that had substantial autonomy: taking advantage of its relative strength gained through recent professionalization, the Ecuadorian army deployed units to the disputed territory, and war broke out. The 1995 clash changed the strategic environment in ways that helped achieve the peace three years later. Ecuadorians became more focused on a serious internal economic crisis than on the border issue, and the Ecuadorian armed forces worried that a future loss against Peru could tarnish the positive reputation that they had gained through their Cenepa victory. In Peru, the public now favored accommodation, and the military, with little capacity or resources to fight another international war due to its internal security commitments, welcomed a resolution. In the end, Ecuador was given access to one square kilometer of Peruvian territory in the war zone in order to build a monument honoring its soldiers.
In Power, Institutions, and Leadership in War and Peace, Mares and Palmer effectively frame their study using a rational-choice institutionalist approach that incorporates domestic and international institutional constraints. However, personality traits of key individuals, rather than institutions or actors' rationality, catch the reader's attention as being particularly interesting, including the risk aversion of Ecuadorian President Sixto Durán-Ballén (1992–96) that prevented him from pushing back against popular sentiments regarding the Amazon. In addition, although the Rio Protocol may have been necessary to bring the two governments to the negotiating table, a diplomat serving as the US guarantor representative for the Protocol went above and beyond any institutional requirements, working almost full time to achieve the peace for a total of four years, including two years after he had retired from the US Department of State.
One theme addressed by all three titles under review is how low state capacity can facilitate violence. At one extreme, from Haiti we are reminded that a failed state is simply impotent in the face of widespread social violence (Johanna Mendelson Forman, In the Wake of War). Yet the authors mainly address a middle ground, where the state matters but does not enjoy a total monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In such cases, states have called on societal actors to carry out violence on their behalf, a well-known dynamic in Colombia, where paramilitaries aligned with the state have fought left-wing guerrillas (Marco Palacios, in In the Wake). National and subnational politicians in postrevolutionary Mexico relied on pistoleros, a type of “violent entrepreneur” (Paul Gillingham, in Violence, Coercion, and State-Making).
State building in Latin America can guarantee more centralized, predictable violence, as demonstrated by authors in the volume edited by Wil Pansters. Comparing the textile and railroad sectors in the 1920s and in 1959, respectively, Marcos Aguila and Jeffrey Bortz demonstrate that physical state violence against labor continued after the consolidation of corporatism, but in a different form. “[I]n the 1920s, private gangs carried out the murderous violence that gave victory to the government's labor ally…. In 1959, there were no murders, simply the federal army imprisoning thousands of striking railroad workers” (p. 188). Kathy Powell's research in the Los Reyes region of Michoacán stresses the coercion embedded in Mexican corporatism, specifically the clientelism contained therein. She writes that only those inside the clientelistic system get benefits is the system's “coercive lever” (p. 218). To avoid exaggerating state capacity in Mexico, it is crucial to note that, although at the height of the PRI the Mexican state effectively exercised control by enforcing corporatist institutions, even then the state merely regulated—rather than curbed—criminal activities, revealing weaknesses and corruption in the state apparatus (see chapters by Alan Knight and Mónica Serrano).
The state's ties to criminal activities ironically may expand when stateness in the form of established international boundaries becomes stronger, according to the following logic. First, well-defined borders encourage trade. The Ecuador-Peru border dispute was finally resolved in important ways due to economic interests in trade between the two countries (see Power, Institutions, and Leadership). Similarly, in his historical analysis of U.S.-Mexico border relations, David A. Shirk finds that as state-building advanced in the neighboring countries, border dynamics passed through different phases, to the point at which economic opening came with stronger states and more defined borders (in Violence, Coercion, and State-Making). Second, as Shirk observes for the case of Mexico, once established, those open borders can heighten insecurity and violence—to include anti-immigrant attacks, human trafficking, and gang violence. Third, state security forces can easily become direct participants in such activities. Using data from his research in one of Latin America's largest popular markets, located in Guadalajara, Mexico, José Carlos G. Aguiar (in Violence, Coercion) argues that NAFTA and the Mexican government's need to demonstrate commitment to international trade standards have led the corrupt national police to carry out a “performance” that has strengthened the market for pirated goods. In this performance, police officials provide tip-offs on upcoming raids to pirated goods venders, in return for a vender tax. Following raids (which are not entirely prevented by paying the taxes), venders obtain credit in the form of merchandise from their suppliers. Venders then sell merchandise at lowered prices to pay off their debts, furthering the purchase and thus production of pirated goods.
Such tight-knit relations between state forces with limited capacity and the criminal activities that they support call attention to the potential for society—and not only the state—to manage and preempt violence. This focus takes us beyond the dynamic whereby armed, societal groups work on behalf of the state (see above). Bejarano contends that the social movement behind the Colombian Quintin Lame insurgency prevented other armed groups from intensifying their own violent activities after Quintin Lame demobilized (in In the Wake). Carlos Iván Degregori (in In The Wake) similarly notes how Peru's violent Maoist insurgency, Sendero Luminoso, was weaker where social movements were active.
If the volumes paint a grim picture for those hoping increased stateness in Latin America means greater respect for the law and basic security for citizens, they also show how democracy does not necessarily produce such protections. From Mares and Palmer we learn that, contrary to the democratic peace hypothesis, democracy can contribute to the onset of war. It was in a democratic environment that the Ecuadorian and Peruvian executives found themselves so highly beholden to popular demands to stand firm in 1995. In Mexico, democratization from PRI dominance eliminated the possibility for the centralized regulation of the drug industry and led to highly violent cartel turf wars (see chapters by Knight, Serrano, Shirk, and Cruz et al.).
Just as noteworthy as the effects of democratization on violence, violence can affect the shape and quality of democracy. Shelley A. McConnell, and Ricardo Córdova Macías and Carlos G. Ramos, respectively, show how in El Salvador and Nicaragua, the party system maps directly onto the two sides of the preceding civil wars (in In The Wake). Powell reasons that the coercion embedded in Mexican clientelism, which has continued since 2000, chips away at rights necessary for democracy: clientelism is “about the corrupt conversion of rights into favors—a conversion that disavows rights, constituting an everyday site of political injury,” where, for instance, “the right to a free vote [is] constrained by obligation” (Violence, Coercion, 219; emphasis in original). Examining violence and indigenous communities in Mexico across time, John Gledhill argues that since the 1990s, the state has used a “multicultural discourse” to legitimize its selective recognition of indigenous communal norms. In this way, “the state's justice system frequently reinforces the unequal power relations that exist within indigenous communities” (Violence, Coercion, 248).
In closing, it is worthwhile to reflect on what these books teach us about internal missions of Latin American militaries, as a window into the state, violence, and democracy in the region. The theme is timely. In Mexico, the armed forces have been used in the current democratic period to help fight the “drug war”; in Colombia and Peru, against insurgents; and in Guatemala and Nicaragua, for anticrime work, despite peace accords that have formally restricted militaries to external security (see Edelberto Torres-Rivas, and Ricardo Córdova Macías and Carlos G. Ramos, respectively, in In the Wake), to name a few examples of internal military missions.
Democratically elected leaders may bring the military into internal security work in response to popular demands for greater security in violent times, but in doing so those leaders create clear risks to the state and possibly to democracy. We know from Peru—where the military was deeply corrupted through its antinarcotics work (Power, Institutions)—and from Diane E. Davis's research on Mexico (in Violence, Coercion), that using the military to fight the drug trade does not shield against corruption. Peru's military was so heavily engaged in antinarcotics and counterinsurgency that it lost the capacity to defend the country's borderlines from other national armed forces (Power, Institutions). And assigning policing roles to the armed forces may grant excessive power to militaries that have retained autonomy vis-à-vis civilians in government long after democratization: as Mares and Palmer demonstrate, military autonomy under democracy has been sufficient to bring countries to war. Importantly, any alternative to calling on the armed forces requires a considerable increase in government knowledge about the security realm. Again, the Peruvian case is telling. Carlos Iván Degregori points out that in Peru the government failed to develop an effective counterinsurgency strategy and that instead, the army led that effort through experiential learning: “Strange as it may sound, in its own authoritarian way the repressive apparatus of the state learned more quickly than did Peru's civilian governments and political parties” (In the Wake, 378).
