Democracies in Dispute: Violence, Authoritarianism, and Security in Latin America and the Caribbean. A Critical Diagnosis from the Latin American Social Sciences
Democracies in Dispute: Violence, Authoritarianism, and Security in Latin America and the Caribbean. A Critical Diagnosis from the Latin American Social Sciences
Authors: Luciana Noelia Ginga, Rochele Fellini Fachinetto and Julio Solís Moreira 1
I. Introduction
Latin America and the Caribbean constitute, according to much of the specialized literature on criminology and security, the most violent region in the world (Dammert, 2025). This statement, which could be read as a merely quantitative fact—a comparison of homicide rates with other regions of the planet—actually conceals a problem of greater theoretical and political weight: the historically unstable and never-resolved relationship between violence and democracy in our countries.
This notebook is framed within and recovers a research tradition that, in the field of Latin American social sciences, has been developing for more than two decades. In 2001, the Working Group “Violence and Society” was established within CLACSO, whose members—many of whom are still active today—laid the conceptual foundations for thinking about violence as a structural phenomenon of Latin American societies, present “since the violence of the conquest, slavery, independence, and the processes of land appropriation” (Briceño-León, 2001).
This intellectual tradition constitutes the starting point of the present work, which seeks to update the diagnosis in light of the transformations recorded in the last two decades: the consolidation of diversified illegal economies, the cultures of violence, the emergence of new forms of security governance and the rise of “iron fist” models that enjoy social and electoral legitimacy despite their limited impact on the effective reduction of violence.
The central argument developed throughout this paper is the following: the expectation, widespread during the years of democratic transitions, that the establishment of democratic regimes would bring about a decrease in violence, did not materialize in practice (Peralva, 1997; Neto, 2011). On the contrary, there was an increase and diversification of the forms of violence that now permeate and erode democracies themselves, to the point that security has become a privileged arena from which authoritarian political-electoral agendas, processes of legal exceptionalism, and the expansion of social control through repressive policies that enjoy broad social legitimacy are orchestrated.
To develop this argument, the work is organized into seven sections. First, a genealogy of Latin American violence is reconstructed to understand its historical mutations. Second, the process of expansion and diversification of illegal markets and transnational criminal organizations is analyzed. Third, the relationship between democracy and violence is specifically examined, showing how even center-left governments deepened punitive policies. Fourth, the authoritarian drift of contemporary security policies is discussed. Fifth, the concept of socially implanted authoritarianism is revisited to explain the continuities between 20th-century dictatorial regimes and current repressive practices. Sixth, the rise of models of enemy extermination is analyzed, paradigmatically the so-called "Bukele model." Finally, the guidelines for a democratic citizen security agenda are proposed.
II. Genealogy of Latin American violence: from conquest to urban crime
Understanding contemporary violence in Latin America and the Caribbean requires a long-term historical perspective. Briceño-León (2001) argues that violence has been part of the region's daily life since the conquest, slavery, and independence movements, through the violent appropriation of land and the expropriation of economic surplus, to state violence exercised through the military repression of the dictatorial governments of the Southern Cone and Central America. This long-term perspective allows us to situate current violence not as an anomaly or a deficit of modernization, but as a structuring and cultural feature of Latin American society.
On top of this historical foundation, a second process unfolds, distinct from but overlapping with the first, framed by the 1970s and 1980s: the exponential increase in homicide rates, particularly among the young population (Imbusch, Misse, and Carrión, 2011). No other region in the world exhibits such high homicide rates or such a wide variety of types and forms of violence: youth gangs, gender-based violence, urban violence, violence linked to drug trafficking and money laundering, persistent civil wars, guerrilla movements, death squads, state terrorism, dictatorships, social uprisings, and violent revolutions coexist and overlap in the region's recent historical experience (Imbusch, Misse, and Carrión, 2011).
This dual movement—historical continuity and contemporary mutation—is key to understanding why speaking of Latin America and the Caribbean today means placing at the center of academic and public concerns the multiple forms that violence and conflict take, in dynamics and trajectories that are constantly renewed. Criminal and urban violence, youth violence, gender violence expressed in the sustained increase in femicide and transfemicide rates (Fachinetto, 2025), violence associated with drug trafficking and money laundering (Tenenbaum, 2022), and violence perpetrated by and against criminal organizations operating in illegal markets (Rodrigues, Feltran, and Zambon, 2023) configure a map of conflicts that demands analytical frameworks capable of accounting for their complexity and territorial specificities.
III. Illegal markets, organized crime and transnationalization
What forty or fifty years ago was primarily focused on the trafficking of illegal drugs—particularly cocaine—has now expanded to encompass a wide range of illicit economies: the production and trafficking of various substances, human trafficking, commercial sexual exploitation, firearms trafficking, environmental crimes, various contraband markets, cybercrimes, and criminal services such as extortion and kidnapping, in addition to financial crimes linked to money laundering and the capture of public institutions (Dammert, 2025). This diversification process is accompanied by an equally relevant phenomenon: the growing interconnectedness of criminal organizations that previously operated in a more fragmented manner and that now operate on a regional and transnational scale (Trejo and Ley, 2021; Auyero and Sobering, 2021).
The issue of criminal organizations and their operations in illegal markets (Tenenbaum, 2022) currently constitutes one of the main challenges to Latin American democracies and public security policies. These groups have expanded their operations and are present in capital cities as well as rural areas, prisons, slums, border regions, and port cities (Rodrigues, Feltran, and Zambon, 2023), establishing themselves as key actors in criminal schemes that operate through transnational networks (Dias and Paiva, 2022). The expansion of these activities has impacted multiple dimensions of social life: from the functioning of illegal markets—with the factionalization of dynamics previously considered common crime or deviance (Rodrigues, Feltran, and Zambon, 2023)—to the daily lives of entire communities, constituting a concrete obstacle to the effective implementation of democracy.
The interconnection between these organizations and certain political and economic elites (Flores Pérez, 2009; Snyder and Durán-Martínez, 2009; Sain, 2023) allows illegal markets to become fluid and consistent over time. This membrane that connects seemingly heterogeneous social and economic phenomena is precisely what calls into question democracy itself as a system of government in our countries: when organized crime manages to infiltrate political financing circuits, security forces, or the judicial system, the boundary between legality and illegality becomes porous, and democratic institutions lose their capacity for autonomous regulation (Auyero and Sobering, 2021).
Added to this is the expansion of the contract killing industry (Barreira, 1998) and the increase in people with substance use disorders, a phenomenon exacerbated by the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has left profound consequences—especially in terms of mental health—in various sectors of society. In this context, the governance of crime has become a central issue in both academia and the public agendas of state governments. This necessitates a critical examination of the role states play in designing prevention mechanisms, while simultaneously reconstructing the network of actions and interventions deployed by social, community, and neighborhood organizations to avoid, prevent, and reduce homicidal violence linked to drug-related crime (Solís, 2018; Dammert, Croci, and Frey, 2024; Giavedoni and Ginga, 2017; Binder, 2009).
IV. Democracy and violence: a problematic and persistent relationship
It is possible to identify how the phenomena of violence, in its most varied manifestations, have become more complex over time. However, a dilemma persists that permeates academic debates, social practices, and public policies: the relationship between violence and democracy in the Latin American context remains, four decades after the transitions, an unresolved problem. The expectation that democratic contexts would bring about a decrease in violence did not materialize: in practice, there was an increase and a diversification of violence (Peralva, 1997; Neto, 2011).
This problematic relationship is also evident in the use of the democratic process itself—elections, the media, public opinion—to advance authoritarian policies through the dissemination of fear and the expansion of discursive tactics such as the use of the term “narco-terrorism,” which legitimizes violent and repressive interventions and even serves as justification for the interference of external agendas in the national policies of countries in the region. The debate has thus shifted from disputes over models of democracy to disputes over models for confronting the various forms of violence and crime.
through exceptional social control processes.
One fact that deserves special attention is that the center-left governments that ruled much of the region during the so-called “progressive turn” of the early 21st century, even while implementing inclusive social policies and multilateral-oriented international policy strategies, emphasized punitive policies—specifically in the area of social control and even while claiming to combat them: a repressive police force, an opaque and punitive judicial system, and a sustained increase in incarceration (Tavares dos Santos and Barreira, 2016). This fact challenges any interpretation that automatically associates a progressive political orientation with democratic security policies, and compels us to consider the issue of punishment as a field relatively autonomous from governing coalitions.
V. The authoritarian drift: security governance and the "risk subject"
In recent decades, a new repertoire of social control has emerged in the region, marked by political redefinitions and increasingly sophisticated security mechanisms (Solís, 2018). The specialized literature refers to security governance to describe how public and private actors jointly shape the management of order (Bergman, 2023). Mechanisms such as gated communities, mass surveillance—cameras, facial recognition—monitoring systems, and the use of big data by police and crime geography are proliferating. These mechanisms tend to privatize security and restrict public space, establishing what can be described as a grammar of social control centered on the “subject of risk,” which replaces the “citizen with rights” and identifies certain groups—migrants, poor youth, minorities—as “dangerous others” and potential threats (Wacquant, 2007, 2023).
This technocratic language disguises repressive measures as “quick, effective, and executive solutions,” thus promoting “wars against” crime or drugs, and using hardline slogans aimed at persuading a frightened citizenry through a discourse that seeks to instill the idea that “order will be restored” immediately (Durán-Martínez, 2022). Under this logic, the social or welfare state is in decline, while the penal state expands, promising order through punishment, surveillance, and the normalization of punitive exceptions.
This authoritarian drift, then, refers to the tendency to use security as the central theme of discourses and policies that undermine democratic guarantees and the rights of citizens. In numerous countries in the region, the political and electoral agenda has shifted toward promises of a hardline approach and extreme securitization. The most hardline and reactionary sectors of the political spectrum argue that an “excessive number of guarantees” fuels impunity, which is used to justify extraordinary measures outside the bounds of legality and the rule of law. In practice, this translates into prolonged states of emergency, the militarization of public security, an increase in the number of people detained, and punitive legal reforms.
From a conceptual-criminological perspective, this process corresponds to what Garland (2005, 2007) termed “criminologies of the other” through the expansion of social control: penal institutions gain ground while social policies recede. Feeley and Simon (1992) argue, in a similar vein, that this shift is based on an actuarial rationality that manages risks rather than guaranteeing rights. In everyday practice, this is evidenced by harsher sentences, the sustained increase in prison populations, and a growing state indifference toward social reintegration processes.
VI. Socially implanted authoritarianism: continuities beyond dictatorships
In analyzing the transition processes from authoritarian regimes to democracies in the late 1980s, Paulo Sérgio Pinheiro (1991) identified structural resistances within civil society that operate relatively independently of the prevailing political regime and constitute an authoritarian continuity, anchored in systems of social hierarchy that are regularly reproduced with the support of instruments of oppression and criminalization. The author termed this phenomenon “socially implanted authoritarianism,” a category that both precedes and transcends authoritarian political regimes proper.
This concept is central to understanding not only the persistence of arbitrary practices and torture by state agents, but also the ways in which civil society itself supports and legitimizes these actions today, more than four decades after the end of the dictatorial regimes in the Southern Cone. The notion of socially implanted authoritarianism thus contributes to understanding some of the challenges posed by the effective consolidation of a democratic culture in the current Latin American context (Alvarado Mendoza et al., 2024), and deserves to be expanded, revised, and deepened (Álvarez et al., 2021) in the face of new forms of authoritarianism expressed in the most varied modalities of social and state violence, which constitute a persistent obstacle for the region's democracies.
This perspective also allows us to qualify any evolutionary or teleological interpretation of Latin American democratization, according to which the passage of time alone would guarantee a progressive democratization of security and justice institutions. On the contrary, the diagnosis that emerges from this conceptual tradition suggests that authoritarian practices can coexist, in a relatively stable manner, with formally democratic institutions, insofar as they have social, cultural, and institutional anchors that extend beyond the strictly political-electoral moment.
For his part, O'Donnell, in his text "Democracy in Argentina: Micro and Macro" (1983), argues that the consolidation of democracy depends not only on what happens in institutions (macro level) but also on the patterns of authority that structure daily life in schools, families, workplaces, and on the street (micro level). He adds something that sounded provocative in 1983: Argentine society was already strongly authoritarian before the 76 coup. The regime simply unleashed those wolves that slumbered in the micro-contexts and operated on what he called the social authoritarian pathos—the diffuse demand for order, intolerance of those who are different, the "they must have done something" mentality as a moral framework for state violence. It is not just that the state is punitive, but—as O'Donnell argues in the case of 76-83—that the capillary penetration of the punitive order into the micro-contexts is what makes a particular model of authority durable.
VII. The rise of hardline models: the "Bukele model", Brazil and penal populism
The authoritarian drift described in the preceding sections has found its clearest expression in recent years in the intensification of security policies guided by a strategy of exterminating the enemy. The most frequently cited case in recent literature is that of the so-called “Bukele model” (Landeros, 2025; Martínez, 2026), implemented in El Salvador under a prolonged state of emergency that combines the suspension of due process with a massive deployment of incarceration, within the framework of the confrontation with gangs—among them, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13). An analogous pattern, albeit with its own particularities, can be observed in police operations deployed in various cities in Brazil.
These models share a key characteristic for the diagnosis proposed here: their limited verifiable impact on reducing violence and effectively dismantling organized crime coexists with remarkable social and political legitimacy (Venegas Álvarez and Martínez Herrera, 2025). This paradox—instrumental ineffectiveness and symbolic legitimacy—is one of the most difficult challenges for Latin American social sciences to address, as it challenges both explanatory frameworks focused on the rationality of public policies and those that prioritize the analysis of political emotions and social fear as fuel for hardline agendas.
Penal populism, understood as the political use of punishment for electoral gain rather than for effective security, finds its most complete expression in these cases. The social legitimacy enjoyed by these policies cannot be explained solely by their effectiveness—which, as noted, is at the very least debatable—but rather points to broader processes of institutional distrust, the exhaustion of existing democratic security frameworks, and a social demand for protection against everyday violence that, in many cases, the State has been unable to address through other means.
VIII. Towards democratic citizen security: a possible agenda
Given the trends described, the imperative to build democratic citizen security policies arises. Achieving security with democracy requires shifting the focus from punishment to social protection, reducing the role of the penal system and strengthening the welfare state through education, health, and the creation of economic opportunities. Without addressing the structural causes of violence, such as inequality and social exclusion, hardline policies only manage to contain the problem temporarily and, in many cases, displace or exacerbate it in the medium term.
This diagnosis compels us to revisit the debate on the role of the State in public security policies, guided by the guarantee of due process and respect for human dignity and human rights. In this regard, it is crucial that academia, social movements, and state officials assume a leading role in proposing more qualified and effective responses to crime and violence, so that public security policies are guided by democratic values and principles, and not by the logic of permanent exception.
In this context, Central America constitutes a space of particular analytical relevance, both because of the spread of authoritarian security models and because of the intensity of ongoing research on violence, security policies, and authoritarianism in the subregion, including the Bukele-MS13 case. Convergingly, the debate on the link between the state and organized crime, repressive strategies, and policies aimed at preventing femicide, youth violence, and transphobic violence requires an approach that combines comparative perspectives with a rigorous grounding in national and local specificities.
A democratic citizen security agenda entails, in essence, three fundamental shifts: from punishment to social prevention; from exception to the full guarantee of due process; and from technocratic risk management to the recognition of the "citizen of rights" as a subject of security policies. These shifts are not merely normative, but are empirically supported by public policy experiences that have achieved sustained reductions in violence without resorting to the suspension of constitutional guarantees, suggesting that the false dichotomy between security and democracy is, above all, a political construct rather than an unavoidable technical necessity.
IX. Final reflections: elements for a regional diagnosis
The diagnosis that emerges from this analysis can be summarized in four key points. First, the violence plaguing Latin America and the Caribbean is neither a new phenomenon nor foreign to the region's historical trajectory; rather, it is part of a long-standing genealogy that extends from colonial violence to contemporary urban crime, including the dictatorships of the 20th century. Second, the expansion and diversification of illegal markets and transnational organized crime has substantially altered the conditions under which the region's democracies operate, to the point of challenging their capacity for autonomous regulation in the face of increasingly consolidated illegal powers.
Third, the relationship between democracy and violence remains an unresolved problem: the expectation of a decrease in violence associated with democratization—as mentioned—did not materialize, and the democratic process itself has, at times, been the vehicle for authoritarian security agendas, promoted even by governments of different political persuasions. Fourth, the persistence of what Pinheiro (1991) termed socially implanted authoritarianism explains why repressive practices and human rights violations were not eradicated with the end of dictatorships, and why they now find new forms of social legitimacy in the hardline models spreading throughout the region.
Given this diagnosis, building democratic citizen security is not merely a normative aspiration, but an urgent task for Latin American social sciences. It demands sustained dialogue between academic production, state institutions, and the social groups that daily confront and resist the multiple forms of violence in the region. Maintaining this dialogue and translating it into public policies capable of strengthening the inclusive dimensions of the state without sacrificing effectiveness in combating crime is one of the main challenges facing Latin American and Caribbean democracies today.
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- Noelia Ginga: Coordinator of the Working Group “Violence, Authoritarianism and Democratic Security Policies” of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). She works in the Research and Postgraduate Studies Secretariat, Faculty of Political Science and International Relations, National University of Rosario (Argentina).
Rochelle Fellini: Coordinator of the Working Group “Violence, Authoritarianism and Democratic Security Policies” of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). She works in the Postgraduate Program in Sociology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil).
Julio Solís: Coordinator of the Working Group “Violence, Authoritarianism and Democratic Security Policies” of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). He works at the Center for Research in Culture and Development (CICDE), State Distance University (Costa Rica). ↩︎
