Uncivil actors and violence systems in the Latin American urban domain

Abstract

The character and quality of Latin America’s democracy is in dispute. Uncertainties about its nature and future prevail in the development debate. In the early 2000s the UNDP (2004) coined the terms “low-intensity citizenship” and “low-intensity democracy” to describe the post-dictatorship democracy in the region. When in the 1980s the military establishment withdrew from the political arena and democracy was restored, a severe economic crisis affected the region, producing long lasting effects in terms of mass poverty, informality and social exclusion. In the urban domain, and especially in territories where the representatives of law and order are relatively absent, “uncivil” nonstate actors surfaced, including local drug lords and their small territorial armies; youth gangs; organised crime and the so-called “dark forces”, joined by former belligerent actors of the Andean and Central American civil wars. In this article, I will analyse and typify this erosion of formal social order and the emergence of parallel and informal structures and hierarchies throughout Latin America.