In recent decades, Latin America has witnessed a transformation in the modes, actors, and intensities of violence, leading the region to become one of the most violent in the world despite the absence of wars between countries. On the one hand, following the wave of military dictatorships, the development of constitutional regimes was expressed in processes of political democratization (at least in a formal and procedural sense) that were accompanied by a decrease in the political power of national security forces, a decline in armed struggle as the primary form of political dispute, and the condemnation of state-sponsored repression and extermination. However, while violence as a means of resolving political conflicts declined, new forms of violence (in the plural) emerged, linked to various illegal activities, the expansion of informal and illegal economies (primarily the trade in drugs, weapons, and people), and the weakness or complicity of state institutions in addressing these problems, leading to a consequent distrust of these institutions by citizens (Alba Vega and Kruijt, 2007). In short, violence in Latin America became heterogeneous and complex. In this sense, the region today reveals violence with different guises, different actors, different aims, and different mechanisms: a violent pluralism (Desmond and Goldstein, 2010), which includes active segments of civil society that have become protagonists of violence.

As a result of neoliberal economic transformations at the regional level and within the global context of (in)security, strategic risk mitigation responses have emerged from segments of rural and urban communities, both marginalized and from middle and upper-middle-class sectors. These responses involve vigilant actions against collective violence, including lynchings, self-defense groups, neighborhood organizations, and paralegal security and justice institutions within their communities. All of this occurs in contexts impacted by inequality, the rise of racism and urban segregation, and regressive transnational political agendas; processes that, following Sassen (2015), could be termed expulsions.  

The appropriation of security by communities or groups to which vigilantism appeals has become visible worldwide since the 1990s and 2000s, in documented experiences in African countries such as Nigeria, Mozambique, and South Africa (Saunders, 2011; Pratten, 2006), European countries such as Russia and Northern Ireland (Frank, 2017; Monaghan, 2011), and Asian countries such as Thailand and Chechnya (Schuberth, 2013), among other countries and continents. In the United States, the nation where the concept originated, vigilante practices have been present since the postcolonial era of the late 18th century, when the first civilian vigilante patrols emerged in response to community dissatisfaction with or perceptions of ineffectiveness regarding the nascent police and justice institutions. Currently, the presence of vigilante groups patrolling the borders, the widespread use of firearms, and a strong tradition of civil society participation in secondary groups make the United States a country permeated by this problem (Phillips, 1987; Rosenbaum and Sederberg, 1976). In all these contexts, lynchings and other forms of vigilante justice occur where the conditions of legality and justice are perceived unsatisfactorily by citizens and within a framework of abrupt structural transformations, profound inequality, racial conflicts, insecurity, and high levels of impunity. 

In Latin America, collective violence has become integrated into a repertoire of legitimate actions, where groups and communities react defensively to protect property or people from acts considered harmful to their integrity, while simultaneously imposing precautionary measures against insecurity independently of state security institutions. This phenomenon began to gain significant visibility in the early 1990s. In Brazil, the State Secretariat for Human Rights recorded 993 lynchings between 1980 and 1999 (Adorno, 2002). In Mexico, various studies detected an exponential increase in lynching cases throughout the country, especially in some rural and urban areas of the central and southern regions. Fuentes Díaz (2006) recorded 294 cases between 1984 and 2001, marking a sharp increase. In Bolivia, the Andean Network reported 70 cases between 1995 and 1999 in Cochabamba. In Peru, the phenomenon was a cause for concern and study, especially following lynchings of state officials; Castillo (2000) reported at least 350 lynchings between 1995 and 1999 in the metropolitan areas of Lima and Arequipa alone. In Guatemala, the issue was classified as a matter of national security after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996. Documentation on the phenomenon exists in Argentina (Gamallo, 2017) and Chile (Quiroz, 2015). Santillán (2008) and Guerrero (2000) have conducted qualitative analyses of some cases in Ecuador. while Rodgers (2008) has done the same with cases from Nicaragua, as have Romero Salazar and Raima Rujano (2007) with the lynchings that occurred in Venezuela.

The comparative study of vigilantism in various Latin American countries proposed by this project, which has brought together researchers from across the region, will allow for an investigation into the common elements that have led to the regional spread of this phenomenon and its integration as a legitimate action. It will also allow for a comparison of the local ways in which these actions impact and reshape their surrounding environments, enabling an understanding of the formation of political participation outside the formal state apparatus, where regulating insecurity through violence proves to be an effective strategy. The systematic comparison of cases will focus on the relationship between insecurity and regional democratic consolidation, as well as citizen participation in shaping safe civil spaces. 

Furthermore, this group aims to consolidate vigilantism as a topic of primary interest in the social sciences of the continent, understanding that lynchings and collective violence cannot be considered a peripheral or circumstantial phenomenon. On the contrary, these events reflect historical processes of nation-state formation and political subjectivities, as well as their contemporary transformations. In this sense, the group envisions training human resources in research on these topics by incorporating master's and doctoral students, in addition to establishing links with organized civil society and government sectors focused on security and peace processes.

The objective of this Working Group is to consolidate studies on vigilantism and to collaborate in the development of this academic field in our region. We understand vigilantism to be those collective responses to crime and violence that are extra-institutional in nature, whether they constitute preventive actions or express a punitive reaction (Huggins, 1991). 

In addition to the vast specialized literature on the subject by the American and Anglo-Saxon academy in general, research in Latin America has contributed to the understanding of this complex and current phenomenon in the regional context, fundamentally along two general lines: on the one hand, those studies that focused on the macrostructural social and economic transformations from the implementation of the neoliberal turn of the late seventies (De Souza, 2015; Goldstein, 2008; Snodgrass, 2006); on the other hand, those that directed their gaze towards the institutional dynamics, the local political cultures and the collective organizational capacities and resources in the places of appearance (Adorno, 2010; Sinhoretto, 2009; Gamallo, 2014; Castillo, 2000). Thus, in our region, these types of social appropriations of security and justice are part of a continuum in risk management that takes multiple forms: from vigilante justice to armed self-defense; passing through reactions with relative spontaneity such as lynchings to events with greater organization and permanence such as the networks of neighbors on alert developed in several regions of the continent (Moncada, 2017; Fuentes Díaz, 2017).

The emergence of these actions has been considered to be linked to the existence of spaces where the relationship between the State and society is tenuous, with a clear difficulty for the State in monopolizing the use of violence, and under a coexistence of other legal orders, such as the community-traditional order, which confront and compete with positive legality (Vilas, 2001). Thus, what in some research appears as a citizen's demand for justice against State ineffectiveness, embodied in violent reprisals and the exercise of extralegal justice, is conceptualized in others as the production of community micro-sovereignties and a challenge to the rationality of the central State (Goldstein, 2003; Guerrero, 2000; Paes-Machado, 2012). Similarly, some authors have emphasized the subjective character shown in collective punitive actions, arguing that their incorporation as a repertoire of action reveals cultures not marked by the grammars of official statehood, but rather alternative understandings of formal justice and the reparation of damage that are clustered in other horizons of political organization and social action.

A recurring theme in studies on this issue is justice in Latin America, identified as a substantial component of this phenomenon (Mendoza, 2004). Testimonies gathered from witnesses to these events confirm that their recurrence is directly linked to the widespread social perception of impunity. This impunity is perpetuated by legal justice systems, both due to a lack of judicial officers in local communities and the low ratio of judges per capita in the region's countries, which is below the world average. In this regard, one line of research has focused on the historical formation of states, exploring how the institutions of various Latin American countries have allowed for levels of violence and structural impunity within the political and social order, as well as ethnic and class bias in access to justice. As can be seen, exclusion and inequality are another cross-cutting theme in understanding this issue.

In addition to state ineffectiveness and the perception of insecurity and impunity, other authors have added the capacity of some communities to activate collective action and the relationship of these episodes to the culture of struggle and social movements in each particular territory (Burell, 2008). Given that many of the causes of the emergence of these events are structural in nature, but that the events occur more frequently in certain territories than in others, empirical studies have shown with data that vigilant collective actions occur more often in places with a longer tradition of struggle, where communities resort to collective action as a means of resolving problems.

In recent years, given the rise in insecurity and violence at the regional level, and especially in response to the implementation of security policies such as the War on Drugs in Mexico and Democratic Security in Colombia, new variables have been incorporated into the understanding of vigilantism. These include the use of vigilantism to produce order and contain risks in scenarios with blurred boundaries between state actors and criminal groups that perpetrate violence. In this way, the use of collective violence reshapes local political environments through conflict with non-state armed actors, producing new forms of statehood and citizenship (Fuentes Díaz, 2019). Historical research on the topic has suggested that, at certain times, lynchings were used by the state itself to maintain control over political adversaries in specific situations, creating areas of indistinction between legal and extralegal violence (Santamaría, 2017).

One discussion within the characterization and effects of neoliberalism has focused on its relationship with public security policies. This debate has posited that actions involving the appropriation of violence, such as lynchings, correspond to, or have their counterpart in, the transfer of certain functions previously held by the state to citizen participation or the involvement of private actors in security governance strategies. It follows that these policies encourage the participation of collectives and communities in vigilant forms under the model of citizen participation, relegating state functions. Thus, vigilant actions would demonstrate a redefinition of statehood in terms of the relationship between the public and private spheres, which seeks to be understood under the notion of the governmentality of risk. In this framework, the appropriation of security is complemented by the delegation of state power, which utilizes a plurality of actors who regulate their local environments through violence.

Taking into account all these backgrounds and theoretical and historical approaches, this project seeks to investigate, through comparative studies, the particularities of the phenomenon in each country and thus contribute to the regional understanding of vigilantism in Latin America within the international context, thereby contributing to the theoretical understanding of violence in contemporary societies. It also seeks to account for the destructive dynamics produced by these actions, as well as to envision, with the information gathered, alternatives that can be translated into public policies to mitigate the effects of various violent social conflicts. 

The proposal submitted to the Working Group aims to combine qualitative and quantitative methodologies for the study of vigilantism and acts of punitive violence. A critical review of the existing literature on the topic will be conducted, along with newspaper and magazine reviews, which will be used to construct databases and comparative models. Information obtained from print media will be supplemented by data gathered from interviews focusing on oral narratives, as well as by analyzing images from videos of collective acts of violence. Finally, various ethnographies will be deployed in fieldwork to understand these practices in the places where these events have occurred.