TAKING NOTE: Fear and Loathing in Latin America
Beck, Marshall
EARLIER THIS YEAR, THOUSANDS FILLED THE STREETS OF Mexico City, Guatemala City and Buenos Aires demanding more effective governmental action to stem an epidemic of violent crime. In separate...
...Indeed, Business News Americas observes that "prison concessions have become the next big thing in Latin America's infrastructure business" and Mexican prisons have been inviting U.S...
...One can easily sympathize...
...Observers note a chilling degree of acquiescence among Colombians to the lethal "social cleansing" by paramilitaries of those considered "delinquents" or otherwise socially undesirable...
...The obvious bears stating: hard-line, authoritarian responses ignore, or exacerbate, some of the core causes of crime in the region: profound poverty and inequality, drastic levels of un- and underemployment (especially among youth), an absence of cultural and social infrastructure for the poor, and a political system that is unable or unwilling to respond to the needs of the increasingly excluded...
...In Argentina, the urban middle classes in particular are calling for tough action, and their mobilizations have largely displaced poverty and government corruption from the top of the political agenda...
...Against the general grain, some citizens' action groups have advocated for such a response...
...Various governments of the region have exploited public fear to implement a "mano dura" ("heavy hand") response to crime...
...The efficacy of this approach in reducing crime, however, is questionable...
...Thus, Hondurans react positively to their president's harsh anti-crime measures, although these subject youth to police abuse and apparently have encouraged the continuing murder of street children...
...export to the region may well be the growth industry that accompanied the domestic U.S...
...The social control benefits of this approach, which enhances state powers of coercion and weakens civil liberties, are doubtlessly attractive to ruling groups...
...tutelage has played some role in this policy choice, most overtly in former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's service as advisor on crime control to Mexico City and the adoption there-as elsewhere-of his "zero-tolerance" model...
...But even the best-meaning Latin American government would be hard-put to advance such a plan...
...this would entail redesigning policy in a way that would infringe upon the interests of global investors and abandon the dictates of Washington and associated international financial institutions, hardly an option for these debtbeholden nations...
...In separate polls last September, Salvadorans identified crime as the foremost national problem while Colombians chose "security/safety" as their core issue...
...The next U.S...
...Giving freer reign to the often corrupt law enforcement forces of the region will put many of society's rejected behind bars, but the main source of the region's insecurity will not be so easy to arrest...
...U.S...
...Many crime-weary Latin Americans have come to support similarly draconian schemes...
...maquila companies to operate within their walls since 2001...
...The political channeling of related public fear, however, is troubling...
...Certainly there is something criminal in all this...
...Tellingly, a recent Latinobar6metro poll shows that most Latin Americans believe economic problems underlie the region's crime wave...
...Crime has captured public concern throughout Latin America...
...Some 75% of the world's kidnappings occur in the region...
...This model effectively criminalizes poverty, homelessness and the informal economic activities that help many scrape by...
...Perhaps, despite the trends noted above, a socioeconomic-rather than ruthlessly punitive-anti-crime strategy could garner broad public support in the region, rechanneling fear into "zero-tolerance" for the economic model so centrally at play...
...Instead, hard-line anti-crime sentiment and action will likely predominate, the policies that generate social deterioration will be kept intact and the excluded will be increasingly penalized...
...war on crime": the private prison industry, its profits enhanced through the exploitation of prison labor...
...A recent World Bank report considers the region among the world's most violent: youth homicide rates have leapt by 50% since the 1980s and "delinquency and violence" are the principal causes of death in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador and Venezuela...
...Such policies persecute the marginalized and feed the region's notoriously hellish prisons...
...People are right to demand greater security in their lives...
Vol. 38 • November 2004 • No. 3
