Vigilantism in Latin America
Collective violence, appropriations of justice, and challenges to public safety
Coordinatoris Antonio Fuentes Díaz. Leandro Gamallo. Loreto Quiroz Rojas.
Authors: Evangelina Caravaca. Leandro González. Violet Dikenstein. Fabio Magalhães Candotti. Alejandra Ramírez Soruco. Eduardo Castillo Claudett. Israel Pinheiro. Ailén Cirulli. José Alberto González Zempoalteca. Daniele Fini. Daniel Vazquez. Francisca Gómez Baeza. Rocío Baquero. Mariana Fernandez. Iván Javier Mojica.
CLACSO Working Group on Vigilantism and Collective Violence
An emerging phenomenon in Latin America in recent decades has been the community appropriation of security and justice. In various contexts, citizens, spontaneously or through organized action, decide to take charge of their own security or carry out punishments with relative independence from state institutions. The texts compiled in this book contribute to the understanding of these phenomena through a conceptual revision of the notion of vigilantism. The reader will find new lines of interpretation regarding this topic, based on the description and problematization of diverse types of vigilantist actions. The case studies provide, from a situated perspective, data that allow us to question and blur classical notions of security and legitimate state control. We see that in Latin America these collective forms of violence are shaped by history, social mediation, and the institutional role of states, as well as by the cultures of confrontation and conflict resolution that characterize the region. It is also possible to observe that issues related to the co-production of security emerge as a transversal axis across the subcontinent, influencing—albeit in differentiated ways—this configuration. From this, one of the key findings that emerges from the text is that in Latin America, there is a range of variability in this type of collective violence, from hard vigilantism to soft vigilantism. This finding already allows us to establish a future research agenda for the study of these forms of violence in Latin America.
Working Groups Collection.
ISBN 978-987-813-308-9
CLACSO. BUAP. ICSyH.
Buenos Aires.
October 2022
