Guest Lecture for SYG3630 - Latin American Societies

1. CRIME,
VIOLENCE,
AND
CULTURE IN
LATIN
AMERICAStudies
Rachel Mourao
M.A. Latin American
’12
rachelmourao@gmail.com

2. Topics
 How violent is Latin America?
a) Crime X Violence
Victimization: a crime as it affects one individual person
or household.
 Costs: political and economical
 Organized crime
 Crime Culture
a) Media
b) Religion
c) Pop Music

3. How violent is Latin America?
 It varies within countries, between countries, between regions
 Homicide Rates (per 100,000): Peru (3.8), Argentina (5.7), Chile
(8.5), Costa Rica (7.6), Cuba (6.2) and Uruguay (5.5) have
homicide rates that are comparable to that of the United States (5.6)
 Mexico (11), Panama (11.6), Nicaragua (13.2), Bolivia (14.9)
 Haiti (21.6), Brazil (26.6), Guatemala (36.4), Honduras (39.2),
Venezuela (40), Colombia (50.4), Jamaica (51.6) and El Salvador
(59)
 Central America: most dangerous region in the world
 ―Moisés Naím (2007) noted that in the four years between 2002 and
2006, 1,857 minors were murdered in Rio, compared to 729
Palestinian and Israeli minors who died as a result of violence
during the same period. The streets in some Latin American cities,
he concluded, have become more dangerous than war zones.‖
(Wood & Ribeiro, 2011)
*Data sources: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC),Homicide Statistics (2004). Retrieved
from: http://demlab.wordpress.com/)

4. How violent is Latin America?

5. Characteristics of crime in Latin
America
 Each region has its own specificities
 Multiple types of violence—focus groups in
Latin America have identified as many as 70
different types of violent behavior (Prillaman,
2003)
 Homicide rates: higher in urban areas and
border cities
 Organized crime: smaller networks

6. Costs of violence in Latin
America
 Economic
a) Foregone foreign investment, as business executives calculate that the costs of crime make
expanding operations in the region prohibitively expensive.
b) Reduced tourism, particularly in Central American and Caribbean
c) Reduced worker productivity through increased absenteeism and labor incapacity
d) Increased insurance costs for firms operating in the region that leads the world in kidnappings-for-
ransom cases.
e) Reduced commercial transactions limited to certain neighborhoods or regions known to be safe.
f) Mounting crime has forced the private sector throughout Latin America to turn to private security
firms to protect physical property and business executives.
 Political
a) The delegitimization of state institutions
b) The public’s growing willingness to turn to heavy- handed or antidemocratic ―solutions‖
c) The degenerative effects on civil society: fear of crime
(Prillaman, 2003)

7. Organized crime
 FBI: ―organized crime is any group having some manner of a formalized
structure and whose primary objective is to obtain money through illegal
activities. Such groups maintain their position through the use of actual or
threatened violence, corrupt public officials, graft, or extortion, and
generally have a significant impact on the people in their locales, region, or
the country as a whole.‖
 Political-criminal nexus: relationships of various levels of collaboration
between politicians and criminals at the local, national, and transnational
levels (Gárzon,2008)
Why?
Simple exchange: criminals demand privileges and special treatment from the
police and courts, and politicians ask for votes, money, or the elimination of
their competitors. (Gárzon, 2008)

8. Organized Crime
 Entire sectors of the population have come to depend on the
resources provided by criminal structures and by those hybrid
actors, small or large elite groups, who are related to crime.
 Citizens have no other alternative than to submit to a political-
criminal elite that manages and distributes favors and
privileges.
 Criminal economies are globalizing: As world markets
become increasingly open and borders become more blurred,
criminal structures are also enjoying the benefits of economic
integration.
(Garzon, 2008)

9. Crime Culture in Latin America:
Media
The social construction of fear, more or less independent of the reality of crime,
has been attributed to the media, which exaggerates the prevalence of
criminality and is biased towards particularly gruesome images of crime.
Crime on the Streets X Crime on TV: how are criminals, victims and the police
portrayed in comparison to reality?
Summer 2010: Manaus – AM, Brazil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YS20TxUFgUI

10. Religion
Santa Muerte (Mexico)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgQftFWM41Q&feature=player_embedded
―set of ritual practices offered on behalf a supernatural
personification of death. The personification is female,
probably because the Spanish word for death, muerte, is
feminine and possibly also because this personification
is a sort of counterpart to the Virgin of Guadalupe.‖
(Freese, 2010)
PHOTO: ANGELOUX

11. Pop music
“A corrido is a musical story taken from real life. It can be
about a tragic accident or praising a person. A lot of
songs used to be about migration and smuggling.
Narcocorridos are based on cases related to drug
trafficking [...] What happens is that the people in the
cartels may be bad people doing bad things, but they
also help people in the countryside, and give them what
they don't get from the government. In the small ranches
that they use for cultivation and packing, the capos
make sure that people lack for nothing. So the people
take care of them. For those people, there is no other
option. The Mexican police are corrupt, they can't count
on them for help.‖ (Gabriel Berrelleza, singer).
http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=wQXKSK3Jc_8&feature=re
lated
Brazil:
http://www.youtube.com/watch
?v=521Cg_HvwNg&feature=fe
edwll&list=WL

12. Final thoughts
 Who benefits from crime in Latin America?
 What would be an effective way (if any) to
prevent youth choosing a criminal path?
 Mano-dura; War on Drugs; :effective
responses?
 Should the United States (or NATO or UN)
interfere in situations like
Mexico/Colombia/Brazil?

13. References
Garzón, G. V. (2008). Mafia & co: The criminal
networks in mexico, brazil, and colombia
Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars.
Prillaman, W. C. (2003). Crime, democracy, and
development in latin america. Policy Papers
on the Americas, 14(6), 1-30.
Ribeiro, L., Wood, C. (In review) Crime, Fear,
and Violence in Latin America: Issues, Data,
and Definitions

14. More:
 Santa Muerte:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1676932,00.h
tml
 Narcocorridos: Music to Mexican Drug Lords’ Ears By Noah
Shachtman Wired February 2011:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/01/pl_narcoscorridos/
 UN Office on Drugs and Crime - Global Study on Homicide
2011: http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-
analysis/statistics/Homicide/Globa_study_on_homicide_2011
_web.pdf