Jose Miguel Cruz

What are the factors associated with approval for marijuana legalization? In the last three years, Uruguay and the states of Colorado and Washington in the U.S. have legalized the production, commercialization, and consumption of recreational marijuana. Such measures have opened a significant debate about legalization. Although the path of legalization and regulation have been different in Uruguay and the United States, these cases provide an excellent opportunity to explore the relationship between drug policy implementation and public opinion support for marijuana legalization in two very different contexts. Using data from the 2014 AmericasBarometer surveys conducted in Uruguay and the United States, this paper examines citizen views towards marijuana regulation and the political factors associated with the approval to legalization. It shows that although levels of public support on marijuana legalization are different in the United States and Uruguay, there are some similarities...

El propósito fundamental del artículo es mostrar que los elevados niveles de la violencia común y de la delincuencia que afectan en la actualidad a los países latinoamericanos, especialmente a los países centroamericanos de posguerra, constituye un obstáculo y una amenaza para los procesos de democratización. Esto porque la violencia criminal erosiona el apoyo ciudadano a los regímenes surgidos de las transiciones políticas y resta legitimidad al sistema político. El artículo parte de los resultados de una serie de encuestas llevadas a cabo con más de 6.700 ciudadanos en países centroamericanos en situación de posguerra (Guatemala, El Salvador y Nicaragua) en 1999 y se analiza la vinculación entre los niveles de victimización y de percepción de inseguridad pública con el nivel de apoyo político para el sistema.

What are the factors behind citizen support for the use of extralegal violence in Latin America? The prevailing argument is that, in countries overwhelmed by skyrocketing levels of criminal violence, people endorse the use of extralegal violence as a way to cope with insecurity. Other scholars believe that support for extralegal violence is the result of state withdrawal and failure. Few empirical studies, however, have tested any of these arguments. In this article, using regional data from the 2012 AmericasBarometer, we examine different explanations regarding citizen support for the utilization of extralegal violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. We developed a multi-item scale that gauges support for different forms of extralegal violence across the Americas, and we hypothesize that support for extralegal violence is higher not only in countries with extreme levels of violence but especially in countries in which people distrust the political system. Results indicate that ...

En este artículo, el autor hace un repaso de los factores sociales que explican la aparición de las macas o pandillas juveniles en los países del norte de Centroamérica. Para ello, se sintetizan las tesis más importantes que ayudan a comprender el fenómeno de las macas en la región, sobre la base de los resultados de los estudios académicos ya elaborados y se echa mano de los testimonios recabados de jóvenes pandilleros de alguno de esos estudios. Lo anterior implica no solo señalar los factores que parecen ser algunos de los más determinantes detrás de la problemática, sino también cuestionar algunos de los supuestos o planteamientos que se hacen en torno al fenómeno y sus actores: las y los jóvenes pandilleros. ECA Estudios Centroamericanos, Vol. 60, No. 685-686, 2005: 1155-1182.

What is the political impact of police corruption and abuse? From the literature, we know that police misconduct destroys people's confidence in police forces and hampers public collaboration with the criminal-justice system; but, what about the political regime, especially in countries striving for democratic governance? Does police wrongdoing affect the legitimacy of the overall regime? Focusing on Central America, this article provides empirical evidence showing that corruption and abuse perpetrated by police officers erode public support for the political order. Results indicate that, under some circumstances, police transgressions can have a greater impact on the legitimacy of the political system than crime or insecurity. They also show that police misconduct not only affects democratising regimes, such as El Salvador and Guatemala, but also consolidated democracies, such as Costa Rica.

La violencia que afecta a El Salvador en la posguerra es producto de la conjunción de varios tipos de causas. El presente artículo examina la construcción social de la violencia, en el país, a través del examen de las causas de tipo estructural y coyuntural, que han llevado a los elevados niveles de violencia social. Entre las causas estructurales se mencionan: la desigualdad socioeconómica, la historia de la construcción del Estado salvadoreño y lo que se ha dado en llamar cultura de la violencia. Estas causas estructurales constituyen la base para que las consecuencias de la guerra, como el aprendizaje universal de la violencia, la circulación de armas y las venganzas diferidas, junto con otros factores -la debilidad institucional y el consumo extendido de alcohol y drogas- hayan llevado al país a ser uno de los más violentos del hemisferio. ECA Estudios Centroamericanos, Vol. 58, No. 661-662, 2003: 1149-1171.

... View all notes. Despite the broad possibilities, two measures of human rights in political science dominate the field: the Political Terror Scale (PTS)28 28 M. Gibney, L. Cornett, and R. Wood, “Political Terror Scale 1976–2006” (2006), < http://www.politicalterrorscale.org/>. ...

What is the impact of crime on citizen support to the use of extralegal violence? While most of the contemporary empirical literature has focused on the impact of crime on issues of political legitimacy and citizen participation, few studies have explored the effects of crime victimization and insecurity on attitudes that advocate the use of extralegal violence by informal and state actors. The prevailing argument is that, in countries overwhelmed by skyrocketing levels of criminal violence and organized crime, people endorse the use of extralegal violence as a way to cope with insecurity. In explaining this phenomenon, some scholars believe that informal violence is the result of gradual withdrawal of the state from the public sphere while others believe that democratization has opened spaces for perverse citizen responses against insecurity. However, few empirical studies test any of these arguments in the extant literature. In this paper, using data from the 2012 Americas Barometer, produced by Vanderbilt University’s Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), we aim to test the relationship between crime victimization, trust in political institutions, and support for the utilization of extralegal violence
in twenty-two countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. We hypothesize that support for extralegal violence is higher not only in countries with extreme levels of violence, but especially in countries in which people feel alienated from the political system, regardless of the level of democratization. To test this argument, we have developed a multi-item scale that gauges people’s support to different forms of illegal violence across the Americas. These forms include social cleansing, extrajudicial killings, and torture of suspects, among others. Preliminary results indicate that support for extralegal violence is related to perceptions of insecurity in societies characterized by high levels of economic exclusion and low support for the extant political system.

Most explanations of the high levels of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean have focused on economic factors, cultural variables, and drug wars. In this article, I argue that it is necessary to bring the state back into the analysis of criminal violence by examining the many ways in which the state directly contributes to violence. State agents contribute to the escalation of criminal violence in the region by extending the legal limits of the use of legitimate force, by tolerating and supporting the employment of extralegal approaches to deal with crime and disorder, and by partnering with criminal groups and militias. They do this while seeking legitimacy and constructing political authority. The modern-day participation of state institutions in the reproduction of violence stems from the particular mode of state development in Latin America, which has tended to outsource and negotiate the means of legitimate force with different social actors.

In this chapter, I critically review the relevant history of regime change in El Salvador and Guatemala and suggest an alternative way of understand how their early twentieth century histories have led to today’s situation of violence.  I interpret the resolution of the transition period in the mid-1990s as the critical juncture that explains the development of post-transition return to violent crime in Central America—a ‘re-corruption’ of state-society relationships with antecedents going back at least a century. The emergence of youth gangs and their evolution into nation-wide criminal organizations in Guatemala and El Salvador provides an example of how these relations have perpetuated violence, and the all-powerful, state-centric model.

En este artículo, el autor hace un repaso de los factores sociales que explican la aparición de las maras o pandillas juveniles en los países del norte de Centroamérica. Para ello, se sintetizan las tesis más importantes que ayudan a comprender el fenómeno de las maras en la región, sobre la base de los resultados de los estudios académicos ya elaborados y se echa mano de los testimonios recabados de jóvenes pandilleros de alguno de esos estudios. Lo anterior implica no solo señalar los factores que parecen ser algunos de los más determinantes detrás de la problemática, sino también cuestionar algunos de los supuestos o planteamientos que se hacen en torno al fenómeno y sus actores.

What is the political impact of police corruption and abuse? From the literature, we know that police misconduct destroys people's confidence in police forces and hampers public collaboration with the criminal-justice system; but, what about the political regime, especially in countries striving for democratic governance? Does police wrongdoing affect the legitimacy of the overall regime? Focusing on Central America, this article provides empirical evidence showing that corruption and abuse perpetrated by police officers erode public support for the political order. Results indicate that, under some circumstances, police transgressions can have a greater impact on the legitimacy of the political system than crime or insecurity. They also show that police misconduct not only affects democratising regimes, such as El Salvador and Guatemala, but also consolidated democracies, such as Costa Rica.

Young Salvadoran immigrants, who returned to El Salvador in the early 1990s, after the civil war in their home country ended, initially brought the U.S. gangs to the region. However, some years later, young return-migrants also brought gangs to Guatemala and Honduras, and they were reinforced by the regional internal migration in Central America to which Salvadoran gangs contributed as well. My chapter focuses primarily on these Salvadoran gangs.  The combination of the early Salvadoran return migration and the internal flows in Central America contributed to gang expansion in the region. The transnationalization of the U.S. gangs has rested not merely on the return migration, but also on returnee accommodation to preexisting gangs and the appeal of their gang culture and lifestyle to socially and economically marginal non-migrants.

This paper reviews the trajectory of the Salvadoran gang truce and provides some reflections about the political conditions and implications of this unique process. It is mostly based on public information made available by different Salvadoran media outlets, in particular by El Faro news website, but it also draws on the author’s long-lasting research on Central American gangs, and on some private interviews with gang members and public officials between May 2012 and April 2013. The paper aims to draw attention to some of the most salient facts around the truce, and lays the groundwork for a range of potential theoretical explorations in future papers.

Where does Mara Salvatrucha come from? How did the U.S.-born Eighteenth Street Gang become a powerhouse of the Salvadoran streets? The Mara Salvatrucha, also known as the MS-13, and the Eighteenth Street Gang, branded also as Barrio 18, are the two major youth gangs in El Salvador. According to different sources, between 2002 and 2006, both gangs comprised more than 87 percent of gang membership in El Salvador. These gangs are known not only because of their control of the Salvadoran neighborhoods and most of the prisons nowadays, but also because groups of street gangs using those same names are found in every country of the North American hemisphere from Canada to Honduras, and even some cliques have been reported in distant countries such as Australia, Germany and Bolivia. Yet, the common answer to the question as to why MS-13 and the Eighteenth Street Gang are the major gangs in this Central American country is usually narrowed to the backward-and- forward migration of Salvadorans to the United States. The evidence, however, points to amore intricate response.
Migration and deportation

Why does Nicaragua have less violent crime than Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras? All these countries underwent political transitions in the 1990s. Many explanations point to the legacies of war, socioeconomic underdevelopment, and neoliberal structural reforms. However, these arguments do not fully explain why, despite economic reforms conducted throughout the region, war-less Honduras and wealthier Guatemala and El Salvador have much more crime than Nicaragua. This article argues that public security reforms carried out during the political transitions shaped the ability of the new regimes to control the violence produced by their own institutions and collaborators. In the analysis of the crisis of public security, it is important to bring the state back. The survival of violent entrepreneurs in the new security apparatus and their relationship with new governing elites foster the conditions for the escalation of violence in northern Central America.

La violencia que afecta a El Salvador en la posguerra es producto de la conjunción de varias causas. El presente artículo examina la construcción social de la violencia a través del examen de las causas de tipo estructural y coyuntural, que han llevado a los elevados niveles de violencia social. Entre las causas estructurales se mencionan: la desigualdad económica, la historia de la construcción del Estado salvadoreño y lo que se ha dado en llamar cultura de violencia. Estas causas estructurales constituyen la base para que las consecuencias de la guerra, como el aprendizaje universal de la violencia, la circulación de armas y las venganzas diferidas, junto con otros factores --la debilidad institucional y el consumo extendido de alcohol y drogas-- hayan llevado al país a ser uno de los más violentos del hemisferio.

When we study human rights empirically, what do we mean to study? The existence of institutions that enable the realization of rights or the enjoyment of those rights? The absence of flagrant violations of some of the basic individual rights or the sense that one's rights will not be flagrantly violated? What theory of human rights should we use? Most positive theory of human rights—for example, empirical theories about the correlation between political institutions or economic conditions on human rights recognition—are based on the first kind of normative human rights theory, the one that defines rights outside of the struggle for them. This article puts forward a methodology for the empirical study of human rights from the inside: do people enjoy their human rights? Using the Latin American Public Opinion Project democracy survey database, the authors propose a new way to measure human rights.

Most of the empirical research on Central American street gangs, called maras, has been published only in Spanish. Reviewing that literature, the American scholarship on gangs, and my own research on Central American gangs from the mid-1990s, this article depicts the processes through which the maras (Mara Salvatrucha and the Eighteenth Street Gang) evolved from youth street gangs in the late 1980s to protection rackets with features of transnational organisations. Intense migratory flows between El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and the United States, and the hard-line suppression policies against youth gangs in institutionally weak Central American countries created the conditions that prompted networking and organisation among Central American street gangs. This article highlights the changes in the dynamics of violence and the transformations in the gangs' social spaces to illustrate the evolution of the maras.

This article looks at eight cities in Latin America and Spain and compares the chances of and variables associated with being a victim of various kinds of urban violence. The analysis was done using data from the ACTIVA Multicenter Study, which was coordinated by the Pan American Health Organization in 1996. The study sample consisted
of 10 821 persons who were representative of residents between the ages of 18 and 70 in eight metropolitan areas of Latin America and Spain: Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Salvador, Brazil; Santiago, Chile; Cali, Colombia; San José, Costa Rica; San Salvador, El Salvador; Caracas, Venezuela; and Madrid, Spain. The results show that the likelihood of being a victim of different types of violence varies from city to city. The variables associated with a greater likelihood of being a victim in most—though not all— of the cities are sex, age, and consumption of alcohol. (Article is in Spanish)

The objective of this chapter is to analyze the impact of criminal violence, measured both in terms of victimization as well as in terms of insecurity, on support for democracy in Latin America, particularly in Central America, taking into account the degree of consolidation and stability of democracy in those countries. In other words, the general hypothesis of this work is that crime erodes democratic political culture in Latin American countries, taking into account, above all, that many of these countries have a relatively recent history of democratization, as is
the case of most Central American countries: Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panama. The results show that although perceptions of victimization and insecurity play an important role in eroding democratic political culture in some cases, it is also necessary to
consider citizens’ perception on government performance regarding public security. This condition, how the government is perceived, seems to have a more important leverage in some democratizing countries.