Latin America is considered the most violent region in the world due to its high homicide rates and the greater incidence of phenomena such as urban violence, kidnapping, vigilante justice, and environmental conflicts. In recent years, the growth of right-wing, far-right, and neo-fascist forces is generating a progressive radicalization of the political sphere and a resurgence of political violence. The latter was the defining phenomenon of 20th-century Latin America: dictatorships, genocides, revolutions, armed conflicts, and civil war. Within the region, Central America significantly raises the average for all forms of violence. The armed conflicts of the 1980s registered levels of violence previously unimaginable. The social order that was structured from the peace processes, the transition to liberal democracy, and the transition to neoliberalism, far from what was expected, failed to reduce violence.

Central America has a geopolitical character of great importance due to its mineral, energy, and water resources, and its role as a bridge between South and North America and the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean. With the end of armed conflicts in sight, the United States and transnational capital focused on stimulating large infrastructure projects and non-traditional exports in the region, resulting in territorial dispossession and the redefinition of territories economically attractive for these purposes. These processes of "accumulation by dispossession" unleashed increasing conflict involving communities defending their territories against the state and local and transnational capital, and have entailed alarming cases of state violence in line with a resurgence of racism in the classificatory dynamics of dissident subjects.

Along with Mexico and the Caribbean, the region is the main gateway to the U.S. drug market. This has led to the emergence of local drug cartels and their association with Mexican cartels, which are among the most powerful in the world. Several of these structures were established on counterinsurgency networks that originated in the context of armed conflicts. Furthermore, since the mid-1990s, with the mass deportation of gang members from the United States to Central America, the phenomenon of gangs began to expand throughout the region, becoming a transnational phenomenon. The effects of the market economy—unemployment, precarious work and wages, the informal economy, and, in short, neoliberal decay—have created the conditions for this phenomenon to grow unchecked and become intertwined with organized crime. Disputes over the drug market and territorial control result in a bloody toll of executions and forced disappearances.

Patriarchal violence has increased significantly. Its most extreme manifestation, femicide, had the highest rate in Latin America in Honduras in 2020. The trafficking of women for sexual exploitation is growing daily. This is linked to the disappearance of women and girls, the true extent of which is unknown due to insufficient statistics. On another level, an increasingly violent discourse against the rights of women and gender minorities has been established by institutional policy and the State, as expressed in legislative initiatives such as the "Law for the Protection of Life and Family" or the "Law for the Protection against Gender Disorders" in Guatemala.

The implementation of neoliberal political reforms (privatization, decentralization and reduction of functions, spending cuts, etc.) coupled with the geopolitics of drug trafficking has resulted in weak states with minimal "state capacities." This has led to the emergence of gray areas within these states, particularly in Guatemala and Honduras, characterized by criminal governance and hybrid governance, whereby state institutions are intertwined with organized crime and organized economic crime, as is currently observed in Guatemala and was evident in Honduras during the presidency of Juan Orlando Hernández. Within this context, transitional justice processes, especially the actors promoting them, are under intense attack. In Guatemala, where a genocide trial was held, judicial officials and activists are going into exile. The data is alarming and makes their analysis from a social science perspective essential.

Neoliberalism and violence have triggered a significant increase in migration to the United States, which that country now considers a national security issue, effectively turning Mexico into a fifth border for the U.S. This has created a conflictive situation in Mexico, particularly along its southern and northern borders, as the country serves as a transit point for migrants, who are exposed to all forms of violence, extortion, and exploitation by various state agents and organized crime.

Despite everything, these processes lack visibility in Latin American social sciences. This is not a new phenomenon. Central America gained global intellectual relevance when the region experienced a revolutionary upheaval in the late 70s, a time when it also became a transnational political space where revolutionary and counter-revolutionary transnational networks converged. However, with the end of the Sandinista revolution and the peace processes in Guatemala and El Salvador, the region reverted to its usual subordinate status.

Currently, despite the regional and global importance of the ongoing Central American processes, the region continues to be overlooked by Latin American social sciences because, once again, greater emphasis is placed on events in Mexico and South America. This is the fundamental reason why researchers from the Working Group "Anti-imperialism: Transnational Perspectives in the Global South" (2019-2022) and others from the Working Group "Post-Counterinsurgency and Security" (2016-2019) decided to address this issue and propose to CLACSO a Working Group that would help give the region the importance it deserves.

How can we characterize the web of violence that structures Central American societies? How is violence understood by local actors, including Central American social scientists? How have the various forms of violence evolved throughout the period beginning in the mid-1980s? What lines of rupture and continuity can be drawn with the violence characteristic of the recent past? What factors explain the persistence and even the intensification of certain forms of violence? What characteristics do they share with the violence of the rest of Latin America? What factors (actors, relationships, processes, structures) explain the diverse manifestations of violence? What factors explain the differences and similarities with the rest of the region? What are the effects of violence on social and individual life? To what extent does the study of violence in Central America contribute to theories about violence? These are the major questions that shape the proposal presented here.

Since the signing of the peace accords, diagnoses and statistics on violence in Central America with a proactive focus—with important exceptions—have predominated. This has limited the concept of violence to its most evident manifestations and concentrated public attention on spaces, territories, and individuals most directly affected by violence. However, as Žižek (2013) argues, “subjective violence”—that which is directly visible and practiced by an agent we can identify—is understood by considering “objective violence,” which is shaped by “symbolic violence” that emerges from language and “systemic violence” that is a product of economic and political systems. The debate on the etiology of violent manifestations is one of the structuring debates within the diverse field of violence studies that we seek to cultivate. The group's general objective is to analyze the network of violence that structures life in the region through a dialogue among disciplines and researchers, allowing us to approach the phenomenon from diverse theoretical and methodological perspectives. We seek to study the diverse manifestations of violence based on: 1. its characterization and existing forms of problematization; 2. the study of its conditions of possibility and realization; and 3. its effects on subjectivities and on the social, cultural, political, and economic processes of the region. From this perspective, we intend to make empirical and theoretical contributions to the phenomenon that structures Central American social and political life.

The discussion of the concept of violence necessarily involves power and conflict. In Walter Benjamin's classic essay (2001), power and violence appear indivisible. Violence founds the legal order, and violence sustains it. The violence that establishes law is a "mythical violence" that delimits destiny. Benjamin contrasts this violence with "divine violence," which does not seek to replace one unjust system of legal coercion with another, but rather is redemptive, destroying both the law and the boundaries it imposes. The question of violence, its close link to power, and its instrumental nature had been raised early on by Marx, who demonstrated that "the most brutal violence" was the method employed by capitalism to forge its path through history. "Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one" (Marx, 1998: 939-940). From this perspective, state power expresses the organized and concentrated violence of the social relations of production. From this perspective, Engels championed the moral function of violence in history: its revolutionary role. Violence, he argued, "is the instrument by which the social movement imposes itself and breaks down rigid and lifeless political forms" (Engels, 1878: 178). In later years, Frantz Fanon reinforced the legitimate role of violence as a means of liberation by advocating and justifying its use by the oppressed to confront the violence of the oppressors. In Latin America, the writings of Ernesto Guevara and Régis Debray, among others, contributed to this understanding. Latin America boasts a significant body of research on "political violence," including the work of members of this Working Group (Ansaldi and Giordano, 2014; Torres Rivas, 2011; Figueroa Ibarra, 2011; Pirker, 2017; Rostica, 2015, to name just a few). This topic involves moving away from morality and placing oneself in a particular spatial, temporal and even ideological context for its study (Ansaldi, 2014: 54).

Arendt (2006) remained within the instrumental perspective of violence but contrasted it with politics and power. When violence begins, politics ends. Violence is a means oriented toward an end and requires the use of instruments of violence; it is destructive, while power—linked to words and group actions—belongs to the realm of politics, is positive, and creates reality. Within Marxism, Gramsci (2011) recovered the productive dimension of power by arguing that domination (coercion) always requires a certain degree of consensus from the governed (hegemony); therefore, the study of violence cannot disregard its link to non-violence. Bourdieu and Passeron (1981) use the term "symbolic violence" to refer to the imposition, by dominant subjects, of schemes of perception, appreciation, and action on the dominated. Therein lies the key to "masculine domination." (Bourdieu, 2010), in what Segato (2003) calls "moral violence" that is part of the elementary structures of "gender violence" so evident in Central America.

Foucault (1995, 2006) highlighted the productive nature of power but denied the instrumental dimension of violence. Violence is part of the modern biopolitical regime, which not only produces death but also creates life, relationships, bodies, and subjectivities. The questioning of violence as an instrument found a proponent in anthropology, which argues that the instrumental perspective ignores the role of culture and assumes that subjects are always rational (Smith, 1999: 94). The renewed focus on the concept of culture for understanding violence is based on the idea that violence is not only repression, disruption, and chaos, but also a way of resolving conflicts and building social bonds (Taussig, 1984; Garriga and Noel, 2010). Studies on cultures of violence (patterns, uses, customs, institutions, organizations, networks, etc.) and those linked to these, such as those focused on "urban violence," "micro-violence," among others, have enriched the understanding of the phenomenon in our region (AVANCSO, 2000; Briceño-León, 2002; Reguillo Cruz, 2002; Caldeira, 2001; Reséndiz Rivera, 2018, among many others).

The categorization of violence (gender-based, revolutionary, urban, symbolic, structural, etc.) highlights the difficulty of arriving at a common definition of the phenomenon and the need for multidisciplinary approaches. Furthermore, it underscores that there is no single essence of violence. There is no violence outside of history. The study of violent manifestations or "subjective violence" should teach us about the ways in which societies and their subjects are produced and reproduced in a given time and place. This is the general perspective on which this group is based. We propose a rigorous analysis of the processes, actors, and spaces involved in violence. We encourage a multidisciplinary and intersectional approach that integrates class, ethnicity, and gender to account for the intersection and imbrication of power relations underlying past and present violence, as well as the comparison of individual cases and across time. We tend to study this topic using a variety of empirical frameworks, such as geopolitics, the study of local and regional socio-political and economic transformations, the cultural dimension, lines of continuity and rupture with the past, and comparisons with other cases in the region. We will do so from a historically situated perspective, focusing on the Central American region and the period from the late 1980s to the present. However, we believe that understanding this period cannot ignore the region's recent past, especially the dictatorships, state terrorism, repressive military governments, revolutionary processes, the ways in which peace processes and transitions to liberal democracy and neoliberalism were carried out, and the effects these processes had on shaping the post-war social order. Along these lines, we seek to explore the combined effects of the lingering effects of old forms of violence with those generated by the new forms observed in recent decades.