Narco Robin Hoods: Community support for illicit economies and violence in rural Central America

Blume, Laura Ross

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2021.105464

Cited by 26 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…All mistakes are my own. America (Blume, 2021) to share territory, though not always peacefully, because they lack the capacity or desire for exclusive control. 5.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Such a shift, however, depends on the willingness of public security actors, political coalitions, and the general public to seek a way out of the cycles of militarization that have thoroughly overwhelmed Rio de Janeiro and much of the rest of the Americas. America (Blume, 2021) to share territory, though not always peacefully, because they lack the capacity or desire for exclusive control. 5.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Idler, for one, finds that criminal and other non-state armed groups can sometimes peacefully share territory in Colombia’s borderlands (2012, p. 77). Recent research has also found less well-structured gangs in some Brazilian cities (Wolff, 2015) and rural transportistas in Central America (Blume, 2021) to share territory, though not always peacefully, because they lack the capacity or desire for exclusive control.…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Logic of Criminal Territorial Control: Military Intervention in Rio de Janeiro

Barnes

2021

Comparative Political Studies

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How do organized criminal groups (OCGs) respond to military interventions intended to weaken and subdue them? In many cases, such crackdowns have proven counterproductive as OCGs militarize, engage in violence, and confront state forces directly. Existing studies have pointed to several explanations: inter-criminal competition, unconditional militarized approaches, and existing criminal governance arrangements. Much of this work, however, has focused on national, regional, or even municipal level variation and explanations. This article takes a micro-comparative approach based on 18 months of ethnographic research in a group of Rio de Janeiro favelas (impoverished and informal neighborhoods) divided between three drug trafficking gangs and occupied by the Brazilian military from 2014 to 2015. It argues that an active territorial threat from a rival is the primary mechanism leading OCGs to respond violently to military intervention. It also demonstrates that geographic patterns of recruitment play an important role in where OCG rivalries turn violent during intervention.

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“…All mistakes are my own. America (Blume, 2021) to share territory, though not always peacefully, because they lack the capacity or desire for exclusive control. 5.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Logic of Criminal Territorial Control: Military Intervention in Rio de Janeiro

Barnes

2021

Comparative Political Studies

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“…Violence is also evident in prominent examples: the war that Pablo Escobar declared against the government to stop the extradition of Colombian nationals to the United States in the late 1980s; the extreme violence that between 2007 and 2020 has caused more than 300,000 deaths in Mexico; or the role of cocaine trafficking in funding non-state armed actors (paramilitaries and guerrillas) in the Colombian civil war. However, within and across cocaine producing and transit countries violence varies due to factors that the scholarship is only starting to explore, such as the nature of the organizations involved and the level of competition among them, the relations among state power, electoral competition, and criminal groups (Durán-Martínez 2018a, Trejo and Ley 2020) the design of enforcement policies (Lessing 2017), and the less explored civilian interactions with traffickers (Blume 2021).…”

Section: Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling

Gallien¹,

Weigand²

2021

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“…Today, an estimated 90% of cocaine destined for North America passes through the region (United States Department of State Bureau for International Narcotics and Law and Affairs 2016). Cocaine rents are increasingly captured by regional (e.g., Guatemalan and Honduran) criminal groups and part-time narcotraffickers (known as transportistas) (not just Colombian and Mexican cartels, which dominated pre-2005) (Blume 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narcotrafficking and Land Control in Guatemala and Honduras

Tellman

McSweeney

Manak

et al. 2021

Journal of Illicit Economies and Development

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On frontiers dominated by illicit activities such as narcotrafficking, criminal organizations' usurpation of land and resources is profoundly changing rural livelihoods and prospects for biodiversity conservation. Prior work has demonstrated how drug trafficking catalyzes forest loss and smallholder dispossession but does not make clear the extent to which the long-term control of land is moved from state, Indigenous, or smallholders to criminal or other actors. This study attempts to describe those shifts. Specifically: we develop a typology of land control, and use it to track how drug trafficking initiates shifts from public lands and Indigenous territories to private large holdings. We examine an array of secondary sources indicating shifts in land control related to narcotrafficking, including illegal land seizure documents, news media, and surveys of land managers. In absence of formal land registries, frontier actors may signal their control over land through land use change. After establishing where changes in land control have taken place, we analyzed land use and resulting changes in spatial patterns of forest loss. We found that large scale sustained forest losses (over 713,244 ha and 417,329 ha), in Guatemala and Honduras, respectively, from 2000-2019) corresponds with areas undergoing shifts in control towards large landowners, often related to narcotrafficking. Incomplete empirical data on land control prevent comprehensive attribution of all sustained forest loss related to narcotrafficking. Yet the limited evidence gathered here indicates drug trafficking activities initiate widespread and sustained shifts and consolidation of who controls land and resources at the frontier. Our work suggests that in Central America and likely elsewhere, control over land-quite separate from property rights-is the key factor in understanding social and ecological change.

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Narco Robin Hoods: Community support for illicit economies and violence in rural Central America

Cited by 26 publications

References 44 publications

The Logic of Criminal Territorial Control: Military Intervention in Rio de Janeiro

The Logic of Criminal Territorial Control: Military Intervention in Rio de Janeiro

The Routledge Handbook of Smuggling

Narcotrafficking and Land Control in Guatemala and Honduras

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