Criminal Governance in Latin America: An Assessment of its Prevalence and Correlates
65 Pages Posted: 23 Dec 2022 Last revised: 11 Apr 2024
Date Written: December 14, 2022
Abstract
In communities throughout Latin America, criminal organizations provide basic order, as much or more than the state. Although rich, multidisciplinary research on criminal governance has illuminated its dynamics in hundreds of specific settings, a systematic assessment of its prevalence and correlates is lacking. We leverage novel, nationally representative survey data, validated against a compendium of qualitative sources, to estimate country-level prevalence of criminal governance and explore its correlates. Across 18 countries, 14% of respondents reported that local criminal groups provide order and/or reduce crime. Based on this, we conservatively estimate that between 77 and 101 million Latin Americans experience criminal governance today. Counterintuitively, criminal governance is positively correlated with both perceptions of state governance quality and objective measures of local state presence. These descriptive results, demonstrating the pervasiveness of “duopolies of violence”, are consistent with case-specific findings that state presence — rather than absence — drives criminal governance.
Keywords: Criminal governance, state capacity, Latin American politics
JEL Classification: K42, O17, O54, P37
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation