Armed Actors: Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America
224
Armed Actors: Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America
224eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
These armed actors are reproducing organized social and political violence beyond the confines of democratic politics and civil society. The results, as the authors warn, include both 'governance voids' - domains where the legitimate state is effectively absent in the face of armed actors prevailing by force - and an erosion of the capacity and willingness of state officials themselves to abide by the rule of law. These tendencies, in turn, pave the way for a possible reinstallation of authoritarian regimes under the control of politicized armies or, at the very least, the spread of state violence in one form or another.
Why these tendencies need to be taken so seriously is, the authors argue, because of the deeper social roots underlying them - notably the failure of neoliberal economic policies and weakened state structures to deliver the jobs, standards of living and social services every democratic citizenry has a right to expect. The Argentinian collapse and persistent Colombian and Venezuelan crises receive special attention in this regard.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848136151 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 559 KB |
About the Author
Dirk Kruijt is Professor of Development Studies at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Utrecht University. He published about poverty and informality, military governments, and war and peace in Latin America.
Dirk Kruijt is Professor Emeritus of Development Studies at Utrecht University, and has previously served as an adviser at the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and at several embassies in Latin America and the Caribbean. His previous books include 'Guerrillas: War and Peace in Central America' (Zed Books 2008) and, with Kees Koonings, 'Violence and Resilience in Latin American Cities' (Zed Books 2015).
Read an Excerpt
Armed Actors
Organized Violence and State Failure in Latin America
By Kees Koonings, Dirk Kruijt
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2004 Kees Koonings and Dirk KruijtAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-615-1
CHAPTER 1
Armed actors, organized violence and state failure in Latin America: a survey of issues and arguments
KEES KOONINGS AND DIRK KRUIJT
Democracy and violence
Democracy is about citizenship rights and the structures and mechanisms to put these into practice. Citizenship means the incorporation of individual agents or groups in the modern nation-state in order to realize civil, political, social and cultural participation. A democratic social and political order therefore means the mutually reinforcing coexistence of civil society, political society and the state. A democratic state, citizenship rights and civil society presuppose the rule of law. The rule of law presupposes the effective monopoly of the collective means of coercion in the hands of the state. Democracy stands as a condition for the legitimacy of this violence monopoly. These notions have gained widespread attention and support in Latin America over the past two decades among political and social agents, scholars and the public at large (Domínguez and Lowenthal 1996; Linz and Stepan 1996; Diamond 1999). Still, the track record of democratic consolidation in the region has been far from spotless. A large body of scholarly literature on democratization has shed light on the various aspects of the Latin American democratic deficit. This debate has become increasingly urgent in recent years now that the initial optimism with respect to democratization has subsided. Among the contemporary obstacles to the deepening and quality improvement of democracy in the region, the following problems are highlighted (Agüero and Stark 1998).
First, there are the manifold flaws in the design and functioning of political democracy and governance. These range from issues related to institutional design (electoral systems, state apparatus, decentralization, among others) to problems in accountability and political culture (O'Donnell 1999). Second, there is the deep-seated problem of social inequality and exclusion. Popular mobilization before and during the democratic transition has consistently pressed for democratization of society and not just politics. Hence, political democracy is seen not only as an end in itself but also as a condition for enhancing citizenship rights and promoting social justice (Alvarez et al. 1998; Castañeda 1996; Foweraker 2001). Although throughout the twentieth century citizenship has been limited mostly to social rights and integration of selected social groups and classes (Roberts 1996), with the demise of the institutional dictatorships and the democratic transition, citizenship and civil society have taken centre stage in public and political discourse, mobilization strategies and academic research (Jelin and Hershberg 1996). During the 1980s and 1990s, social movements and civil society have been challenging the structures and practices of social exclusion. But in doing so, they have been facing the proliferation of neo-liberal adjustment policies, the withdrawal of the state, and the progressive impoverishment and informalization of Latin American societies (Kruijt, Sojo and Grynspan 2002). Finally, we witness the tenacious problem of social and political violence. Two decades of democratic consolidation have shown that contemporary violence is not just a leftover of the dictatorships and civil wars of the 1960s–1980s (Koonings and Kruijt 1999). Initially, it was supposed that the progress of democratization could be measured inter alia by the degree to which repression and extra-legal violence have been hemmed in by the forces of the law and by the degree to which social and political antagonism came to be channelled through consociational, non-violent arrangements. Up till the present, however, social and political violence in Latin America has appeared to be enduring, despite the consolidation of formal (political, electoral) democratic systems. Violence has acquired greater variation and new dimensions beyond the conventional state and insurgent violence of the past. As a result of this 'new violence' (a concept to which we will return below), one of the most noteworthy characteristics of contemporary Latin American societies is the de facto coexistence of formal constitutionalism, (electoral) democracy and an often vibrant civil society on the one hand, and the use of force to stake out power domains or pursue economic or political interests on the other. The violence that underlies this is not only extra-legal in the sense that it is pursued by state agents that overstep the boundaries of legality or by non-state agents that seek alternative ways of imposing 'justice' (Huggins 1991). It is also 'uncivil' in the sense that it undermines the constitution of citizenship as a principle based on non-violence and the rule of law. As such violence undermines the very foundations of democracy and bears witness to the failure of the state to uphold the rule of law and citizens' security. In the literature on Latin America, this problem has led to qualifications as the 'unrule of law' (Méndez et al. 1999), 'uncivil movements' (Payne 2000), and 'ugly' or 'illiberal' democracies (Pereira 2000; Diamond 1999). At the core of this syndrome lies the notion of 'new violence' to which we can now turn.
State failure, uncivil society and 'new violence'
Not only have modern states been grounded upon violence (Giddens 1985), but also there is the permanent fragility of the state's monopoly of legitimate force. This means that the coercive capacity of the state runs the risk of being 'unharnessed'. This can come about if the state uses violence without consented legitimacy (as happens with dictatorships, state terrorism and dirty warfare). It can also result from decentralized or atomized state-related actors that use parts of the coercive resources of the state for other ends. Finally, the state as a structure and effective power arena may break down in part or in full. We can call this governance voids (Kruijt and Koonings 1999: 12), state failure or, in its most extreme manifestation, collapsed states (Zartman 1995). In Latin America we see the hand-overs and leftovers of political conflict and violence of the recent past: authoritarianism, repression, counter-insurgency, political militarism and security doctrines, police violence, etc. This violence has been changing in the new context of formal democracy, but continues to constrain the consolidation of the rule of law and citizenship rights.
Apart from the problem of state failure with respect to its legitimate violence monopoly and the rule of law, civil society also has its dark side. According to Keane (1997: 63–4) the space offered by the anonymous freedoms within civil society also facilitates the mobilization of agents against the legal order, using coercive rather than legal-institutional means. Herewith we can define 'uncivil society': agents or groups that force their interest upon the public domain on the basis of coercion and violence, in such a way that the legitimate aspirations of other groups or sectors in civil society are jeopardized and the rule of law is fragmented or shattered. In effect, this is a further aspect of state failure in the sense that the state is effectively incapable of countering coercion and violence by non-state agents. It should be added that, in fact, state violence very often recruits or provokes non-state violence (paramilitary, hidden, informal) to do the dirty work or to occupy the spaces created by the delegitimization of the legal order and the impunity that goes with it. In the combined instance of the failure of legitimate statehood and its control of violence and the rise of uncivil society we see what Méndez, O'Donnell and Pinheiro (1999) have labelled the 'unrule of law'. However, unrule of law is a mild manifestation, suggesting that contemporary violence by state and non-state actors is a governance problem, something that can be restored through concerted public action. More intense manifestations are 'societies of fear', and societies in which the so-called 'new violence' seems to have become endemic. Such appears to be the case in many parts of Latin America.
Earlier, we argued that post-authoritarian violence should be distinguished from the violence of the 'traditional order' and the violence of the authoritarian regimes of the 1960s–1980s (Kruijt and Koonings 1999). Pereira and Davis (2000: 4) observe that contemporary violence in Latin America should not be seen as the continuation in new forms of the historically established patterns of violence in the region, as 'new moves in an old game'. They point at the rise of 'citizens-on-citizens violence', as well as at the blurring of the boundaries between state and society owing to the confluence of such things as repressive crime fighting, social cleansing, criminal racketeering, and the elimination of political opponents by state, pseudo-state or non-state actors alike. One could try to pinpoint the new violence by noting its increasing variety both in form and in the nature of its perpetrators (Kurtenbach 2003). Newness may also lie in its purpose. Whereas the 'old violence' revolved around defending or challenging the power of the state and the position of certain regimes, new violence entails in a way its 'democratization' in the sense that a variety of social actors pursue a variety of objectives on the basis of coercive strategies and methods (Kruijt and Koonings 1999: 11).
Perhaps the principal dimension of newness is the manifest contrast between the persistence and proliferation of violence and the simultaneous adoption of democracy, citizenship and the rule of law as norm and goal in Latin America. Precisely for this reason, the new violence does not aim at conquering state power or changing or defending a regime per se. New violence instead occupies the interstices of the fragile and fragmented formal legal, institutional and political order. As a tentative definition we therefore suggest that 'new violence' is socially or politically organized to wield coercion by evading or undermining the legitimate violence monopoly of formally democratic states. This implies the permanent 'uneasy coexistence' of the legal democratic order and the new violence in a parallel logic that is at the same time antagonistic and complementary in present-day Latin America (see Box 1.1). This represents, in fact, a hidden form of state failure: on the surface the institutions and practices of democratic politics, civil society and the rule of law hold sway; at the core, these very notions are undermined by violence.
The proliferation of armed actors
With the rise of this new violence, post-dictatorial Latin America had to cope with the presence of a variety of armed actors, most of them non-legitimate. We can at least distinguish the following typology of armed actors (Koonings 2001: 403–5).
First, we have the expanded legitimate security sectors or the formal armed actors within the public domain: the military, the security and intelligence forces, and the police. In the Weberian ideal of the modern rational-bureaucratic state, these forces are the tools of legitimate coercion against extraterritorial military opponents or internal violent or terrorist infractors of the rule of law. These state-related actors, however, were instrumental in the 1960s to 1980s as the backbone of Latin America's 'national security' dictatorships (Kruijt 2001: 413–14). The crusades against communism, the internal wars and the campaigns against internal terrorism coincided for the most part with heavy-handed governments, whose instrument of power was the unique combination of the legitimate security sector and an array of connected services: military intelligence, the security bodies, the controlled police forces. As the brain and backbone of the confrontation with real or imagined insurgents and terrorists, the intelligence and security systems expanded to such a degree that their official and unofficial functions became difficult to distinguish.
The monopoly on violence implied another, even more enviable monopoly on intelligence and information. Even after the military regimes ended and the reduction of the armed forces set in, military intelligence controlled, for years after the regime transitions, the civilian cabinets as imposed advisers on matters of national security and development. The de facto military predominance over the police forces generally reinforced the power of the security and intelligence services delivered by the military. The police, in many Latin American countries, are still prone to arbitrariness while targeting social enemies, rather than upholding the rule of law (Chevigny 1995; Glebbeek 2003; van Reenen, this volume).
In the second place, there is the expansion of legal violence to extra-legal violence in the name of law and order. In many cases a murky symbiosis has developed between the official security forces and vigilante forces or private police forces. This was clearly the case during the decade of the Peruvian pax fujimoricana in the 1990s when even within the Sistema de Inteligencia Nacional (SIN), led by Vladimiro Montesinos, there existed a parallel service for blackmail and wet jobs. At the same time the armed forces, corrupted by drug money and equipment frauds, acted as the executive arm of the civilian regime. Other examples are the proliferation of special forces, extralegal task forces, paramilitary commandos, para-police forces, death squads, etc., especially in the case of the prolonged civil wars in Colombia and Guatemala. In the specific case of rural self-defence bodies (rondas and patrullas) and sometimes urban serenazgos, a peculiar combination of subordination to state terrorism, particularism of local power holders, and more or less justifiable instances of community defence have emerged in countries such as Guatemala and Peru (Fumerton 2002; Remijnse 2003; Fumerton and Remijnse, this volume).
Third, we have old and new forms of guerrilla movements that still employ violence as a coherent working and negotiating strategy. Conventional cold-war-era guerrilla groups have become scarce in post-cold-war Latin America (Wickham-Crowley 1992; Gaspar 1997). The two Peruvian guerrilla groups of the 1980s and the 1990s (Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru) have been more or less dissolved after being crashed by counter-insurgency operations involving peasant ronderos (self-defence patrol members). After the peace accords and the regime transitions in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, all former Central American guerrilla organizations have been transformed into political forces, acting as peaceful actors in electoral instead of insurgency campaigns. The first post-cold-war guerrilla movement is the Mexican EZLN. This movement has indulged in hardly any fighting, however, displaying a high political profile at the negotiating table. Pursuing a series of social and political reforms, it won the hearts and minds of the Mexican popular and middle classes. Only in Colombia do 'regular' left-wing guerrilla forces still wield considerable military power to resist the state and paramilitary strength. As shown in Box 1.2 below, however, the state-related security forces, the guerrilla and the paramilitary act as 'macro-forces' at the national level. At the regional and local levels the proliferation and fragmentation of second-generation armed actors is absolutely astonishing.
In the fourth place there is the phenomenon of 'uncivil society' already referred to above. Sometimes, social and political movements tend to radicalize. Their 'speaking rights' in the political arena are in some cases directly derived from their use of force to back up their economic and social claims. The tactics of Ecuador's indigenous movements in the 1980s and 1990s and of the Brazilian landless workers' movement are examples of the weapon of coercive pressure to reinforce a negotiating position (Hammond 1999). It is therefore notsurprising that these kinds of movements are targeted by the military and police forces as new and post-cold-war security threats. In countries such as Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua, however, it was typically right-wing violence which nurtured uncivil society. The smooth ties between local and rural elite sectors and the local police forces offer a ready instrument for reactionary violence, applied often in connivance with private
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Armed Actors by Kees Koonings, Dirk Kruijt. Copyright © 2004 Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction - Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt1. Armed actors, organised violence and state failure in Latin America: a survey of issues and arguments - Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt
2. The military and their shadowy brothers in arms - Dirk Kruijt and Kees Koonings
3. Policing extensions in Latin America - Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt
4. Civil defence forces: Peru's Comites de Autodefensa Civil and Guatemala's Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil in comparative perspective - Mario Fumerton and Simone Remijnse
5. Violence as market strategy in drug trafficking: the Andean experience - Menno Vellinga
6. Armed actors in the Colombian conflict - Francisco Leal Buitrago
7. Venezuela: the re-militarization of politics - Harold A. Trinkunas
8. A failed state facing new criminal problems: the case of Argentina - Marcelo Sain
9. Urban violence and drug warfare in Brazil - Alba Zaluar
10. Youth gangs, social exclusion and the transformation of violence in El Salvador - Wim Savenije and Chris van der Borgh
11. Violence and fear in Colombia: fragmentation of space, contraction of time and forms of evasion - Luis Alberto Restrepo
Epilogue : violence and the quest for order in contemporary Latin America - Patricio Silva