Organized criminal violence and territorial control

Abstract

What accounts for geographic variation in organized criminal violence? In Honduras, a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world, the intensity of violence rivals many civil wars. Yet violent crime varies across cities and neighborhoods. Armed groups seeking to control territory use violence for different purposes, including competing against rivals, coercing residents and state officials, and exploiting the public for profit. Variations in community organization, defined as the density of interpersonal ties and the prevalence of shared expectations for collective action, affect the utility of violence for each of these purposes. Community organization can raise the cost of controlling territory, reduce the benefits of coercive violence, and generate pressure to protect residents from exploitation. These dynamics are examined through a comparison of nine neighborhoods in three of Honduras’s most violent cities, drawing from disaggregated homicide data and ethnographic research. The comparison shows that neighborhoods with denser community organization experienced lower levels of violence. Narrative evidence points to specific ways in which community organization mediates effects of competition among criminal groups and their interaction with state officials. Community characteristics thus affect the way non-state armed actors exercise authority in areas of limited state presence.

Adjustments to gang exposure in early adolescence

“…I focus on exposure to gangs at school in order to capture a regular and largely inevitable form of gang exposure. The difficulty in identifying the effect in question comes from the fact that the relationship between gang exposure and social outcomes can be reverse (Berg & Carranza, 2018). Moreover, youth gangs may be concentrated in schools that gather students with lower socio-economic status (Papachristos & Hughes, 2015: 152).…”

Youth Gang Violence in Honduras

“…By using a community approach, it becomes possible to analyze the impact gang presence has on everyday life in a community. This part of the entry is based on various ethnographic research that has been conducted in Honduras (Castro and Carranza 2001;Berg and Carranza 2018;Gutiérrez Rivera 2010Luitjens 2015;Pine 2008; Savenije and van der Borgh 2015; Wolseth 2011). Both Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula know extreme levels of gang violence, and as a result, most of the gang research has been conducted in these urban areas.…”

“Man a Kill a Man for Nutin”: Gang Transnationalism, Masculinities, and Violence in Belize City

“…Northern Triangle countries were contending with legacies of post-war violence, undergoing transitions to democracy from dictatorship, military oppression, and civil conflict, which shaped the societies that gangs inserted themselves into (Levenson-Estrada 2013; Savenije and van der Borgh 2015). A range of factors are attributed to the rise of maras including exclusion, connectedness to organized crime and drug trafficking, and the role of politics (Berg and Carranza 2018), including counter-productive mano dura crackdowns (e.g., Gutierrez Rivera, Strønen, and Ystanes 2018; Wolf 2017).…”