Earlier this year, thousands filled the streets of Mexico City, Guatemala City and Buenos Aires demanding more effective governmental action to stem an epidemic of violent crime. In separate polls last September, Salvadorans identified crime as the foremost national problem while Colombians chose “security/safety” as their core issue. Crime has captured public concern throughout Latin America.
One can easily sympathize. A recent World Bank report considers the region among the world’s most violent: youth homicide rates have leapt by 50% since the 1980s and “delinquency and violence” are the principal causes of death in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela. Some 75% of the world’s kidnappings occur in the region.
The political channeling of related public fear, however, is troubling.
Various governments of the region have exploited public fear to implement a “mano dura” (“heavy hand”) response to crime. The social control benefits of this approach, which enhances state powers of coercion and weakens civil liberties, are doubtlessly attractive to ruling groups. The efficacy of this approach in reducing crime, however, is questionable. Such policies persecute the marginalized and feed the region’s notoriously hellish prisons.
U.S. tutelage has played some role in this policy choice, most overtly in former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s service as advisor on crime control to Mexico City and the adoption there—as elsewhere—of his “zero-tolerance” model. This model effectively criminalizes poverty, homelessness and the informal economic activities that help many scrape by.
Many crime-weary Latin Americans have come to support similarly draconian schemes. Thus, Hondurans react positively to their president’s harsh anti-crime measures, although these subject youth to police abuse and apparently have encouraged the continuing murder of street children. Observers note a chilling degree of acquiescence among Colombians to the lethal “social cleansing” by paramilitaries of those considered “delinquents” or otherwise socially undesirable. In Argentina, the urban middle classes in particular are calling for tough action, and their mobilizations have largely displaced poverty and government corruption from the top of the political agenda.
The obvious bears stating: hard-line, authoritarian responses ignore, or exacerbate, some of the core causes of crime in the region: profound poverty and inequality, drastic levels of un- and underemployment (especially among youth), an absence of cultural and social infrastructure for the poor, and a political system that is unable or unwilling to respond to the needs of the increasingly excluded.
Tellingly, a recent Latinobarómetro poll shows that most Latin Americans believe economic problems underlie the region’s crime wave. Perhaps, despite the trends noted above, a socioeconomic—rather than ruthlessly punitive—anti-crime strategy could garner broad public support in the region, rechanneling fear into “zero-tolerance” for the economic model so centrally at play. Against the general grain, some citizens’ action groups have advocated for such a response. But even the best-meaning Latin American government would be hard-put to advance such a plan; this would entail redesigning policy in a way that would infringe upon the interests of global investors and abandon the dictates of Washington and associated international financial institutions, hardly an option for these debt-beholden nations.
Instead, hard-line anti-crime sentiment and action will likely predominate, the policies that generate social deterioration will be kept intact and the excluded will be increasingly penalized. The next U.S. export to the region may well be the growth industry that accompanied the domestic U.S. “war on crime”: the private prison industry, its profits enhanced through the exploitation of prison labor. Indeed, Business News Americas observes that “prison concessions have become the next big thing in Latin America’s infrastructure business” and Mexican prisons have been inviting U.S. maquila companies to operate within their walls since 2001. Certainly there is something criminal in all this.
People are right to demand greater security in their lives. Giving freer reign to the often corrupt law enforcement forces of the region will put many of society’s rejected behind bars, but the main source of the region’s insecurity will not be so easy to arrest.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marshall Beck is NACLA’s editor.
