The Ashgate Research Companion to Political Violence by Marie Breen Smyth

Author:Marie Breen Smyth [Smyth, Marie Breen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Peace
ISBN: 9781409471820
Google: 3ydbIW_h_gAC
Goodreads: 17197546
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
Published: 2012-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Violence in Post-authoritarian Latin America

The collapse of authoritarianism and the subsequent ‘wave’ of democratization that spread across the continent from the late 1970s led to the belief that there would be a parallel reduction in political violence and that conflict would henceforth tend to be channelled through new democratic institutions and procedures, especially following the end of the Cold War (Huntington 1991). Indeed, political conflict, in the form of state terrorism and civil wars between the state and ideologically inspired guerrilla movements, did largely disappear during the 1990s, with the notable exception of Colombia.

However, transitions to democracy in Latin America were not smooth, but rather were difficult and uneven processes, especially given the contextual problems of the debt crisis, the ‘lost decade of development’ in the 1980s and the imposition of structural adjustment programmes (Stallings and Kaufman 1989). In a region already characterized by endemic poverty and extreme inequalities, the prolonged crisis led to an increase in social inequality and poverty, social disintegration and the growth of the informal sector – all of which contributed to the exclusion of large sectors of the population from the benefits of democratization (Green 1996; Pinheiro 1996). Such ‘fault-lines of democracy’ (Aguero and Stark 1998) undermined citizenship, the legitimacy of the political order and the democratic process itself.

In part as a result of this, and despite progress in terms of the consolidation of democratic institutions and procedures, ‘since the mid-1980s democratic rule has been accompanied by increasing levels of social and organized violence in which armed actors of all kinds have frustrated the efforts to achieve a peaceful social and political order. Instead violent disorder has permeated many Latin American societies’ (Silva 2004: 186). What has emerged is a new form of violence that is fundamentally different from established patterns (Pereira and Davis 2000). This new violence – ranging from the drugs trade to small- and large-scale organized crime, to the maras of Central America, to social cleansing in the favelas of Brazil14 – is linked to the emergence of an ‘uncivil society’, which exists alongside civil society, but uses force or coercion to maintain or pursue its interests against the legitimate work of other societal groups (Keane 1997). It is different from previous forms of violence, not only in the diversity of its forms of expression but also in that in terms of intent, it does not seek to challenge, conquer or defend the power of the state or the regime and is therefore not easily classified as overtly political violence. True, in some cases, such as in El Salvador, gang violence including extortion, kidnapping, drug trafficking and revenge killings may be linked in some cases to ex-combatants involved in the overtly political violence of the 1980s, but this is not a common explanatory factor throughout the continent. However, the consequences of this new violence are clearly political in that it undermines the rule of law, active citizenship and democratic procedures and institutions.

In addition, the collapse of military rule might have led to

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