Vol. 8, No. 3, Spring 2011, 362-368
www.ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente
Review/Reseña
Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein, eds. Violent
Democracies in Latin America. Durham, NC and London: Duke
University Press, 2010.
Understanding Violence in Contemporary Latin America
Charles D. Brockett
Sewanee: The University of the South
Violence has plagued Latin America for centuries and,
accordingly, has long been central to its academic study. Violent
Democracies in Latin America seeks to make a significant contribution
to our understanding of the region by not just analyzing the
perpetuation of violence among consolidating democracies but more
importantly by proposing theoretical explanations for its perplexing
continuation—and in some countries even increase—alongside the
region’s democratization.
This is an edited volume with many of its chapters drawn from
papers first presented at conferences in 2004 and 2006. The case
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studies are uniformly good—well researched and written on important
and interesting topics. For the most part, though, they have little
updating, in some cases beyond 2003. The chapters cover the most
important countries in terms of population size—Brazil, Mexico,
Colombia, and Argentina—along with a much smaller country, the
Dominican Republic. For Violent Democracies’ theoretical ambitions,
however, it is unfortunate that the case studies do not include those
with the highest homicide rates—the highest in the world since 2006
have been those of El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, Guatemala, and
Venezuela (order among them varying year-to-year).1
The volume’s theoretical ambitions aim high, featuring three
theoretical chapters and what appear to have been significant efforts by
the editors to provide theoretical direction to their authors. I applaud
these efforts but remain unconvinced by the purported significance of
what they propose. The editors—political scientist Enrique Desmond
Arias and anthropologist Daniel M. Goldstein—state their arguments in
a co-authored introductory chapter that are reiterated by Arias in a
concluding chapter.
Arias and Goldstein elaborate three main theoretical themes.
First, democratic consolidation has not diminished political violence,
contrary to expectations by some, yet this central contradiction, they
maintain, receives insufficient scholarly attention. This volume and its
core concept of violent pluralism is meant to redirect our attention to
the “multiple violent actors [that] operate within the polity and
maintain different and changing connections to state institutions and
political leaders, whether those states are officially democratic,
authoritarian, or otherwise” (21). (Some of the chapter authors,
however, seem to confuse the term as meaning something more like “a
violent polyarchy.”)
Second, rather than portraying violence as “a failure of
democratic governance and institutions” (5), violent pluralism “inverts
many of the assumptions of extant writings on politics in Latin
America” (26). Instead, Arias argues in the concluding chapter, “The
spreading violence in the region represents not so much a failure of
1 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_
homicide_rate>
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364
democratic institutions as, in many cases, the basis on which those
institutions function” (243).
Third, the editors contend that contemporary violence is not “a
social aberration” (5) but instead “has become so pervasive in much of
Latin America in part due to the particular ways in which trade
liberalization and neoliberal economic systems have interacted with the
political environment of postauthoritarian Latin America” (17).
Violent Democracies offers two chapters on Colombia, the
country whose experience seems to provide the closest fit for the
editors’ theoretical framework—at least through the period covered by
these case studies. Both chapters provide very good regional histories—
Mary Roldán for Antioquia and María Clemencia Ramírez for
Putumayo. Roldán focuses on a grassroots solidarity movement
(Oriente No-Violence Movement), claiming that this movement
“represents a microcosm of the difficulties in Colombia in the midst of
violence” (66). She makes her case well but leaves the story hanging at
the end of 2001.
Ramírez offers a much broader scope, as suggested by her title:
“Maintaining Democracy in Colombia through Political Exclusion,
States of Exception, Counterinsurgency, and Dirty War.” She does well
at portraying the relationships between the multiple violent actors
implicated in Colombia’s horrific violence, not just in contemporary
decades but going back to La Violencia of mid-century. She also writes
one of the two chapters that most fully embrace the editors’ framework,
arguing that “political violence and illegality in the periphery is intrinsic
to the maintenance of Colombia’s model of democracy” (85-86). There
can be no question about the connections between the paramilitaries
and the military and therefore it would be understandable to conclude
at the time the original conference paper was presented that “The
survival of the Colombian political system has been and remains
contingent on state and nonstate armed actors that impose plural
violences” (105). However, there is little in either chapter that
anticipates the extensive demobilization of the paramilitaries under the
recently concluded presidency of Álvaro Uribe.
The chapter that most explicitly aligns with the editors’
theoretical claims is the volume’s lead case study by Diane E. Davis. She
provides an impressively packed account of the relationships in Mexico
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between corruption, violence and both state and non-state actors to
build the larger argument captured by her title: “The Political and
Economic Origins of Violence and Insecurity in Contemporary Latin
America.” Davis begins with the Revolution, stopping largely with the
century’s end, with her particular focus the police. Along the way are
numerous insights, such as how the democratization of Mexico City
governance “constituted part of the problem of accelerating violence
and insecurity” (51) as it disrupted the Partido Revolucionario
Institucional’s (PRI) complicity with police corruption. As a result,
“police turned toward citizens—and criminal gangs—for sources of
income, contributing to more impunity and violence, or failing to stop
it” (51). Her historical analysis of “growing levels of police and military
impunity and the rise of so-called political policing against enemies of
the state” (37) is embedded in a broader path-dependent set of
assumptions about Mexico’s “economic development, state formation,
and industrialization” (38). This part of her analysis leads her to the
dreary, unrealizable and contentious conclusion that to break “the
treacherous stranglehold of their developmental past” Mexico and its
neighbors “require a complete break with the global economic
connections and local social or spatial practices that sustain violence”
(58).
Each of the remaining case studies in Violent Democracies
exemplifies well the editors emphasis on examining violent pluralism,
that is the relationships between a multiplicity of violent state and nonstate actors. These authors, however, are less likely to attempt to
support the editors’ broader theoretical claims. Indeed, some highlight
factors that seem more in keeping with the more conventional emphasis
on state weakness rather than “democratic” states requiring violent
practices for their continuation.
Argentina is represented by two especially solid contributions.
Javier Auyero operates within a more limited focus than most chapters
but provides what I regard as the most useful theoretical contribution in
the volume. Examining the food riots that shook Argentina in 2001,
Auyero discovers in this “significant episode of disruptive collective
violence...semisecret political interactions located at the root of mass
insurgency” (109). Based on his interviews and journalistic accounts he
shows that seemingly spontaneous riot behavior actually was driven in
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366
part by “political entrepreneurs [active] in the promotion, inhibition,
and/or channeling of physical damage to objects and persons” (109). As
Auyero notes, that party leaders (in this case Peronist) “might be
behind—rather than against” such collective violence “should hardly
surprise students of Latin American politics” (112). Where his
contribution stands out is in rigorously analyzing the mechanisms
involved in these “clandestine connections among political actors”
(113).2
Ruth Stanley examines state violence in democratic Argentina,
primarily by interviewing family members of the victims of illegal
violence by state security apparatus in the city and province of Buenos
Aires. Not surprisingly the victims are overwhelmingly young men—
“indeed, boys” (136) and poor. Where Stanley excels is in understanding
and presenting the reactions of family members. As she shows
throughout the chapter, “It is not the experience of unlawful killing at
the hands of agents of the state that most undermines citizenship, but
rather the response of other state agencies to such acts, which leave the
victims feeling absolutely defenseless” (136-137). To this is added the
all-too frequent response of the media and public opinion supportive of
mano dura actions against purported delinquents. In contrast, some
family members and political activists who support them see “arbitrary
police killings as simply the most drastic expression of an inherently
exclusionary and violent system,” some believing that the integration of
the poor “is neither desired nor possible in the context of the neoliberal
economic model relentlessly pursued during the 1990s” (155).
The remaining case studies are of Brazil and the Dominican
Republic, two very different countries but as their authors show in their
superbly comprehensive chapters both are challenged by many of the
same sets of violent actors. Lilian Bobea begins by exploring through
interviews how “Dominicans living in the poorest urban areas of Santo
Domingo and Santiago experience violence and insecurity in their daily
lives” (161). They are clear: contemporary violence is blamed “on an
eruption of retail drug trafficking and consumption” (179). Not only do
the associated gangs dominate local barrios but also, as she shows, they
operate transnationally. Bobea’s analysis is deep but also broad:
A fuller account can be found in his Routine Politics and Collective
Violence in Argentina: The Gray Zone of State Power (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2007).
2
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the context of deprivation, social exclusion, institutional
indifference, and police repression is aggravated by the damage
to community solidarity caused by turf wars among drug gangs,
an influx of criminal outsiders and new criminal patterns. As a
result, traditional mechanisms of conflict resolution by
community organizations that restrained antisocial behavior in
the past have been lost. (181)
Meanwhile for the government, “the diminished administrative
capacities of the neoliberal state created vacuums that have been
gradually filled by nonstate actors” (166).
Robert Gay’s chapter on Brazil is quite similar in its approach
and virtues, examining, as his subtitle states, the “Causes and
Consequences of Violence in Rio de Janeiro.” Gay places drugs at the
heart of his analysis, with Brazil of increasing importance not just for
transshipment but also for its own consumption; indeed it is now
thought to be the second largest consumer of cocaine after the U.S.
(205). Competition among gangs—“and for market share and for the
millions of dollars in drug-related spoils”—has transformed Rio “into a
war zone” (206). Violence is not just between the gangs but “also
because of the violent nature of the response that their presence and
operations have elicited from the police,” with an average of one
thousand civilians killed each year by the police in Rio (208). And,
much of this police violence “is fueled by corruption” (211). Underneath
this violence, Gay claims, are the “broader changes associated with
neoliberalism and, in particular, the failure of neoliberal policies to
generate economic growth” (202).
The final contributor is Todd Landman, who provides the third
theoretical chapter, one explicitly supportive of the editors’ portrayal of
violent pluralism. Landman then “tries to move the debate forward”
(240) by offering a four-fold typology of forms of violence (illegal/legal
by state actor/nonstate actor) and another of five regime types based on
whether their political institutions are democratic and whether four
different types of rights are protected or not. Each of these distinctions
are certainly important but the chapter’s application of them to Latin
American cases and the editors’ broader theoretical claims is limited.
Violent Democracies makes an important contribution in
focusing our attention on the perpetuation of violence as Latin
American countries continue in their democratization process. Both the
editors and the individual case studies illuminate the many forms this
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368
violence takes and the multiplicity of actors involved, including state
actors acting outside of the law. However, the editors’ broader
theoretical claims remain largely untested by these contributions. In
large part this is due to case selection. As indicated above, the five Latin
American and Caribbean countries with the highest homicide rates—not
just in the region but in the world—are not included. Theoretically this
is critical, but their absence is mentioned only in passing. Also critically
missing is a second set of countries—those like Chile, Costa Rica, and
Peru—that have no less embraced neo-liberal reforms but have
considerably lower homicide rates than the countries analyzed in this
volume (with the exception of Argentina, which has a rate
approximately that of the U.S. and of Cuba). The absence of this second
set of countries and the relatively low homicide rate of Argentina do
receive one paragraph but one I found unsatisfying.
Contemporary data contradicts the editors’ broader arguments.3
Colombia’s homicide rate fell steadily under the conservative Uribe
while Venezuela’s rate has steadily climbed under leftist Hugo Chávez.
Estimates
show
that
homicide
rates
in
neoliberalism-rejecting
Venezuela surpassed those of neoliberalism-embracing Colombia
around 2006 with the gap continuing to widen as the decade closed.
Homicide rates did climb alarmingly in Brazil through the first third of
the same decade with Rio de Janeiro itself notorious for its violence.
Was this the result of neoliberalism? Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva became
president at the beginning of 2003, the year in which homicide rates
peaked. As his leftist critics have emphasized repeatedly, Lula
committed himself to maintaining neoliberalism's key fiscal constraints.
Yet Brazilian homicide rates continue to fall. They also have in Rio, with
2010 rates falling to the level of 1991 and the number of deaths of
civilians by the police to the level of 2001.4
Co-editor Arias concludes Violent Democracies with a well
stated call for “a stronger academic focus to deepen our understanding
of political process in the region” (253), certainly to include studies of
the many dimensions of violent pluralism. I heartily agree.
All national rates in the following paragraph are from the wikipedia
page listed above.
4 Joshua Goodman, “Río de Janeiro recompensa a su policia por la
caída de los homicidios,” El Nuevo Herald (Miami), February 7, 2011: 4D.
3