Gangs, Urban Violence, and Security Interventions in Central America

Abstract

Urban violence is a major preoccupation of policy-makers, planners, and development practitioners in cities around the world. States routinely seek to contain such violence through repression and its exportation to and containment at the periphery of metropolitan centres. Yet urban violence is a highly heterogeneous phenomenon and not amenable to reified diagnosis and coercive intervention. Muscular state-led responses tend to overlook and conceal the underlying factors shaping the emergence of urban violence, as well as the motivations and means of so-called "violence entrepreneurs". This is very obviously the case of urban gangs in Central America, which are regularly labelled a "new urban insurgency" threatening the integrity of governments and public order. This article considers both the shape and character of Central American gang violence and attempts at reducing it, highlighting the complex relationship between these two phenomena. We advance a threefold approach to measuring the effectiveness of interventions, focusing alternately on discursive, practical and outcomebased criteria. In this way the article demonstrates how, contrary to their reported success in diminishing gang violence, repressive first generation approaches have tended instead to radicalise gangs, potentially pushing them towards more organised forms of criminality. Moreover, although credited with some modest successes, more preventive second generation interventions seem to have yielded more rhetorical advances than meaningful reductions in gang violence.

Coming of Age in the Penal System: Neoliberalism, ‘Mano Dura’ and the Reproduction of ‘Racialised’ Inequality in Honduras

“…theft), these did not account for the rise of violence, insecurity and crime in the country. Rather, organised crime did (Rodgers 2009;Jüttersonke et al 2009;UNODC 2012). Today, the maras are involved in the organised crime economy, but-to the extent that it is possible to establish comprehensive knowledge of this-hitherto mainly thought to be as associates further down in the food chain rather than as spiders in the web (Bosworth 2010:10).…”

“…However, even if the maras were framed as the main culprits for escalating violence and crime in the country, they were not the centre of the storm. Rather, organised crime was (Rodgers 2009;Jüttersonke et al 2009;UNODC 2012). However, these networks are much more difficult to target, whilst also being tied to more powerful sectors in the country (Bosworth 2010;Shipley 2016).…”

Gangs, Guns and the City: Urban Policy in Dangerous Places

“…Thought of as a spectrum of practices, security governance in cities involves discreet projects of urban design for crime prevention that may complement measures to privatise access to public space and use of surveillance, through to community policing, zerotolerance and the deployment of forces trained in counter-insurgency (see Graham, 2010). While cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Paris perhaps led the way with such urban 'security' innovations in the past, it is now cities of the Global South that are considered the laboratories for such measures, including for example the infamous Mano Dura anti-gang measures in Central America, or the "security partnerships" in South Africa (Bénit-Gbaffou, et al, 2008;FelbabBrown, 2011;Jütersonke et al, 2009).…”

Transnational Organised Crime and Fragile States

“…When the US began to tighten its immigration regime in 1996, many gang members were deported after being convicted of a crime, spreading the gang culture of southern California to Central America. While assessing the scale of gang presence is challenging, there are an estimated 70 000 gang members in the seven countries of Central America today, with Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala being the worst affected (UNODC, 2007;Jütersonke et al, 2009).…”

“…These policies not only further entrenched gangs within Salvadorean society (ICPC, forthcoming; Jütersonke et al, 2009), they also increased human rights abuses -including extra-judicial killings -and overall tensions in the region.…”