Thoughts on Violence and Modernity in Latin America

2019

The University of Calgary Press acknowledges the support of the Government of Alberta through the Alberta Media Fund for our publications. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

2011

Review of Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M. Goldstein's Violent Democracies in Latin America .

Revista de Economia Institucional

This article analyses the factors that cause violence in Latin America. It argues that high levels of violence can not be reduced in the medium and long term just by repressive policies, and without fulfilling prerequisites that lead to a more cohesive society, among them: to reduce socioeconomic inequalities, to make a more equitable income distribution, to improve primary and university education quality, the quality of the institutions, especially justice and police, and to create new urban policies framed within "cultural solutions". And especially, to recognize the rights and values of those populations that have been ignored for a long time.

Latin American Research Review, 2020

From the humanities and history to all the social sciences, academics of nearly every discipline have used the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological tools at their disposal to try to understand the origins, causes, and consequences of criminal violence. The books in this review make significant contributions to these ends while demonstrating how criminal groups throughout the region are fundamentally restructuring state-society relations and transforming the daily lives of tens of millions.

SOCIOLOGIES IN DIALOGUE, 2020

The purpose of this essay is to analyse what could be seen as a transformation of a genre of fiction, the novel of violence. In sociological tradition, various authors have chosen the detective novel as a research object to explain modernity. This sociological tradition in studies of detective fiction allows us to suggest the emergence of another form of romance, the novel of violence, in the last thirty years. In México, the latest works of Carlos Fuentes (México, 1928-2012) belong to this genre of novels. Also, Elmer Mendoza (México, 1949-) who write about the detective and the organised crime. In the novels of violence, crime and solution are secondary, because violence is seen as a structuring element of social reality. New forms of murders arise: violent crimes, international drug trafficking, sexual abuse and violence, rape, corruption, and torture. These forms appear as an aesthetic of "brutalism" and "cruelty". The world of the novel of violence is a world without law, defined by the ineffectiveness or simply the absence of the police or the judiciary. There is a lack of a legitimate authority, formal or informal, signifying the crisis of the judicial system. But, also, this literature appears to have worldwide lectors in late modernity.

review of Will Fowler and Peter Lambert, eds., Political Violence and the Construction of National Identity in Latin America (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

Democracy and Security, 2012

Iberoamericana, 2001

This essay will compare the patterns of collective physical violence in the United States and in Latin America during the 19 th century. Its main purpose is to identify the differences in the practice of collective violence despite similar developments on the two continents and to uncover the underlying reasons for these distinctions. The comparison is not based on definitive theoretical assumptions or hypotheses, and therefore it will neither be systematic nor present "certified" results. Rather we select specific issues while neglecting others. Nowadays adolescents from Central America, for example, after living in the United States for several years as illegal immigrants take their "notions of street gangs" back to their countries of origin 2. We do not discuss this transfer of behavior or structures, which certainly could be included in a comparison, but instead we focus on distinguishing aspects and primarily on collective-not on individual-acts of violence, analyzing them in their specific historical contexts rather than in a normative framework of accepted and deviant behavior. In accordance with the sociologist Heinrich Popitz (1992: 48) we understand violence as an exercise of power which leads to physically injuring other persons, recognizing that this general definition includes various and quite distinct forms of violence. The following considerations provide some guidelines for this comparison. In contrast to the traditional constitutional law approach to state formation we find societies in the United States as well as in parts of Latin America which in comparison to the state were clearly excessively armed in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. In both cases-with perhaps the exception of Chile-in the 19 th century, the state's monopoly of violence was not, or only partly, enforced or the state was unable, or able only in exceptional cases, to keep effectively social actors from using physical violence high-handedly and arbitrarily. However, there were also significant differences.