The Central American region is the scene of multiple forms of violence. For this reason, sociologists such as Montserrat Sagot, Leticia Salomón, and Elvira Cuadra, as well as other social scientists like Ricardo Falla, Ignacio Martín-Baró, Edelberto Torres, and Carlos Figueroa Ibarra, among others, dedicate extensive reflections to violence from multiple perspectives. The work of some of the members of this Working Group reflects the development of several of these concerns, as seen in the work of the Guatemalan feminist sociologist Ana Silvia Monzón Monterroso (2013; 2015); the Guatemalan-Mexican sociologist Carlos Figueroa Ibarra (1999; 2023, in addition to dozens of compilations, chapters, and published articles); Argentine sociologist Julieta Rostica (2023) (Argentina) with her recently published book and the compilation, along with Leonardo Herrera, of the volume "Violence in Central America: Perspectives in Debate" (2025); as well as the works of Laura Sala (2024) and Kristina Pirker (2017). This diverse, critical, and collective thinking can also be seen in the dossier "Violence in Central America during the Last 50 Years," published by the Yearbook of Central American Studies and coordinated by this Working Group, with 13 articles dedicated to the study of the problem in the region.

In the working group we propose, we want to address the problem of violence in two ways. First, the procedural democracies that operated in the region since the Peace Accords of the early 1990s have begun to crumble, giving way to authoritarian models of government and increased state repression, culminating in the consolidation of two dictatorships in the region: Nicaragua and El Salvador. Second, this context deepens the enormous gaps in inequality between the wealthy and the poor, making redistributive justice for the benefit of the majority impossible.

During the final phase of the Cold War, conflict in the region escalated to such a degree that in most countries it took on an armed dimension, leading to civil wars, massacres, genocide, and highly repressive states that maintained a facade of procedural democracy but functioned de facto as dictatorships. In this context, political violence, especially illegitimate and illegal violence, was the most visible. In Guatemala, the death toll and number of disappeared exceeds 200, in addition to 1,5 million internally displaced persons and 500 refugees as a result of political violence. Military governments and institutional dictatorships of the Armed Forces carried out a policy of genocide, racial violence, sexual violence, violence against children, thousands of cases of torture, and scorched-earth campaigns. Revolutionary violence spanned two decades. In 1987, Sandinista Nicaragua allocated more than 50 percent of its budget to defense spending. There were 32 Sandinista deaths and more than 29 Contra deaths, in addition to 250 displaced persons and a phenomenal economic crisis. During the specific period of the civil war, the Truth Commission of El Salvador estimated the death toll at at least 75. In Honduras, although political violence was much less intense, it was no less worrisome. The country experienced the establishment of US military bases that served as platforms for attacks on neighboring countries. Towards the end of the 1980s, when the governments and elites of the region, especially in El Salvador and Guatemala, began to resort to political measures to end the armed conflicts, there was a period of relative calm. However, violence in the region never ceased. During the transitional period, other forms of violence took root and proliferated, such as extractive industries, social violence, organized crime, and drug trafficking.

Central America plays a key geopolitical role due to its mineral, energy, and water resources, as well as its strategic location as a bridge between South America, North America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Following the end of armed conflicts, the United States and transnational capital promoted large infrastructure projects and non-traditional exports, leading to territorial dispossession and the redefinition of economically attractive areas. This process of "accumulation by dispossession" generated increasing tensions between communities defending their territories and state and corporate interests, resulting in increased state violence and a resurgence of racist dynamics against dissident groups.

Job insecurity, unemployment, and the informal economy, products of the neoliberal economy, have created conditions conducive to the growth of organized crime. Disputes over control of drug trafficking and territory have resulted in a high number of executions and forced disappearances. At the same time, patriarchal violence has intensified: the trafficking of women for sexual exploitation is increasing daily, linked to the disappearance of women and girls, a phenomenon whose true extent is unknown due to a lack of reliable statistics.

Gray areas have emerged where criminal governance and hybrid governance intertwine state institutions with organized crime and the illicit economy, as is the case in Guatemala and occurred in Honduras under the presidency of Juan Orlando Hernández. In this context, transitional justice processes and their proponents face intense attacks; in Guatemala, the Public Prosecutor's Office is pursuing a policy of persecution against social activists and progressive political actors.

Transitions to democracy, peace processes, and neoliberalism diminished traditional expressions of political violence, but generated others. This new scenario is reflected in state violence, which is currently manifested in the concentration of dictatorial power, an increase in repressive solutions to social problems, and the spread of the idea that incarceration and imprisonment are the solution to all problems.

Despite the gravity of these processes, the region continues to receive little attention from Latin American social sciences. This lack of interest is not new: Central America gained global intellectual prominence in the 1970s with the revolutionary upsurge, but after the Sandinista revolution and the peace processes in Guatemala and El Salvador, it reverted to a subordinate position.

Therefore, researchers from the working groups “Anti-imperialism: Transnational Perspectives in the Global South” (2019-2022) and “Post-Counterinsurgency and Security” (2016-2019) proposed to CLACSO the creation of a space that would give Central America the relevance it deserves. In 2023, “Violence in Central America” was formed, yielding quite fruitful results in terms of research, discussion, and dissemination of the work carried out. With this in mind, we consider it pertinent to continue this effort in the current 2025-2028 call for proposals.

We will work around five questions that encompass these problems and are expressed in our objectives: 1) What are the new dynamics of violence in the context of democratic erosion and the advance of authoritarianism currently experienced in the region?; 2) What conditions of possibility favor the configuration of authoritarian political subjectivities?; 3) What characterizes political subjectivities in resistance and new emerging collective subjects?; 4) What are the impacts of US geopolitics on the emergence of new forms of violence and on the transformation of pre-existing ones?; and finally, 5) How can we understand the historical continuity between past and present violence and the lessons learned regarding resistance processes?

There is a consensus that Central America is currently facing its worst political crisis since the end of the armed conflicts, now exacerbated by the United States' decision to regain its sphere of political influence in the region. The coup d'état in Honduras in June 2009 highlighted the fragility of democratization processes and sparked academic debate about the imperfect democracies established in the region and their shortcomings regarding the expansion of citizenship and the rule of law (Torres-Rivas, 2010). The resurgence of forms of political violence, which show parallels with those that prevailed in the recent past, along with the intensification of extreme violence and criminal governance, is contributing to the demobilization of organizational spaces and greater democratic disaffection.

With few exceptions, academic production on the historical continuity between past and present violence, the role of violence in democratic erosion, the resurgence of political violence, the continuum of patriarchal and racist violence, or analyses of the political subjectivities that emerged under the neoliberal project, has generally been marginal. The emphasis on the manifestations of criminal violence and its security-focused approaches relegated to the background analyses of the sociohistorical character of violence, structural violence, and its effects on new political subjectivities. These political subjectivities emerged from the social discontents that took root in broad segments of the population, along with new forms of political violence. “By relating violence to each historical social context, the possibility of accepting a superficial, formalistic approach that does not consider the concrete meaning of each act of violence in relation to the social whole is ruled out” (Martín Baró, 1983, p. 371).

The working group's central purpose will be to analyze the new forms of violence and the political subjectivities—both authoritarian and those of resistance and emancipation—that are emerging in the current context of authoritarian regression in the region, from an interdisciplinary dialogue and diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks.

This leads us to return to structural violence as the central focus of our analysis, a violence exacerbated by the model of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2006) imposed by neoliberalism, whose impacts were devastating in a region simultaneously undergoing a process of reconstruction and transition to democracy. This situation of structural violence, in which the social or institutional structure prevents individuals from achieving their full potential (Galtung, 2016), also implies "an ordering of this oppressive inequality through norms that uphold the unequal social distribution of wealth and a coercive force to enforce them" (Martín Baró, 1983, p. 406). This inexorably leads us to the need to address cultural and symbolic violence as the foundational bases of structural violence, as they establish mechanisms that justify and legitimize various forms of domination. Thus, the dominant social order establishes which forms of violence are legitimate and which are not (Esponda Contreras, 2023), and which are incorporated into the social order. This is linked to Bourdieu's reflection on the power of symbolic violence (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977), which manages to naturalize and justify the various matrices of domination.

These structural forms of violence manifest themselves in the increased precarity of large segments of the population due to surplus labor (unemployment); internal displacement resulting from the dispossession of land, resources, and territory imposed under the guise of “development projects”; the murders and disappearances of land defenders; and forced displacement due to both criminal violence and, more recently, political violence. All of this places these new migrants in conditions of greater risk and vulnerability. Forced return and reverse migration resulting from the mass expulsions of migrants from the United States to the region will exacerbate poverty and vulnerability in communities. Criminalized and stripped of their rights, without options for reintegration, returnees are exposed to being recruited and revictimized by organized crime networks that appear to be reconfigured in the isthmus, based on the geopolitics of drug trafficking—now termed narcoterrorism. These surplus populations, discarded by neoliberal states, are at high risk of becoming cheap labor for transnational criminal networks that control migration corridors. This is the paradox of security policies that end up creating conditions for displacement and the greater proliferation and concentration of violence in other regions (Calveiro, 2025). This poses the challenge of reinstating, among our analytical categories, the role of regimes of fear as mechanisms of social control, political demobilization, and self-censorship and self-regulation in shaping political subjectivities of domination. Are these societies marked by the subjective traces of terror? Military terror had managed to weaken social bonds, had fostered narcissism and internal isolation? (Rozitchner, 2015, p. 191).

The resurgence of political violence and its new forms, shaped by the role of social media in a context of democratic decline, requires new analytical frameworks for understanding the subjective and intersubjective processes that emerge in contexts of corrosive polarization and political intolerance. For Arendt (2006, p. 16), “no one dedicated to thinking about politics can remain ignorant of the enormous role that violence has always played in human affairs.”

New exiles or self-imposed exiles, transnational repression, the proliferation of hate speech, the political use of security forces and lawfare to neutralize political adversaries, as well as the disturbing return of ominous figures such as political prisoners and the disappeared, underscore the need to revisit the vast body of knowledge on political violence in Latin America. Likewise, it highlights the importance of continuing lines of research adopted by members of the Working Group (Torres Rivas, 2011; Figueroa Ibarra, 2011; Pirker, 2017; Rostica, 2023; and Sala, 2024, among others).

Continuing with the approach proposed by the Working Group in the previous plan, the importance of analyzing these diverse forms of violence from historically situated and multidisciplinary perspectives is emphasized, as well as from analytical frameworks that incorporate the historical and psychosocial perspective of violence. This approach allows us to trace a line of continuity between the past and the present, not only in terms of the forms of violence, but also in terms of the subjectivities of resistance that drove social transformations from below. At the same time, it is proposed to continue deepening the intersectional perspective that integrates class, gender, ethnicity, and age, in order to account for the differentiated impact of violence, systems of domination, and processes of resistance.