ABSTRACT
Although gangs are not a new feature of the violence panorama in Latin America, they have come to the fore in an unprecedented manner in the post-Cold War period, to the extent that they are now widely considered to epitomize the dynamics of contemporary regional brutality. This is largely because in addition to their exponential growth, as fundamentally urban, socially sovereign, and criminal phenomena (see Hazen and Rodgers, 2014), gangs can be said to paradigmatically reflect four critical transformations that have affected the dynamics of Latin American violence in the post-Cold War period, including: (1) the fact that regional levels of violence have (paradoxically) increased (Pearce, 1998); (2) that violence has shifted from being predominantly rural to becoming overwhelmingly urban (Rodgers, 2009); (3) that it has “democratized,” “ceas[ing] to be the resource of only the traditionally powerful or the grim uniformed guardians of the nation … [and] increasingly appear[ing] as an option for a multitude of actors in pursuit of all kinds of goals” (Koonings and Kruijt, 1999: 11); and finally (4) that the political economy of violence has changed, with the phenomenon associable both with the rise of “governance voids” consequent to widespread processes of state erosion (Kruijt and Koonings, 2007: 138), as well as the institutionalization of “violent democracies” in the region, based on collusion and the “out-sourcing” of authority to non-state actors (Arias and Goldstein, 2010; see also Rodgers, 2006b).
