The Politics of Resistance to Criminal Victimization in Latin America

• In Event: Collective Action in Settings of Crime and Conflict

Abstract

Criminal violence is a growing concern for citizens and policymakers across the developing world. Much of the growing research on crime in Latin America assumes that victims are resigned to their victimization at the hands of violent criminal actors amid absent or complicit states. Yet, I find that victims sometimes mobilize to launch and sustain collective action to resist their victimization. Moreover, the nature of resistance to criminal victimization actually varies in intriguing ways across both space and time. I compare variation in forms of resistance to victimization under criminal protection rackets in localities within Colombia, Mexico and El Salvador – three of Latin America’s most violent countries. I conceptualize rackets as institutions under which criminal actors forcibly extract rents from their victims in exchange for the promise of “protection” from external threats and the criminal actors themselves. Drawing on extended field research in each locality and using a combination of interviews, focus groups, participant observation and participatory drawing exercises, I present evidence that victims engage in diverse forms of resistance that range from everyday negotiations with criminal actors to violent armed rebellion against them. My overarching argument is that victims pursue distinct forms of resistance based on variation in the types of resources available to them. I find that two specific resources enable and shape the structure, strategies, and sustainability of resistance: organizational and coercive resources. The first refers to pre-existing associational institutions that facilitate collective action. And the second refers to the coercive arm of the state, specifically the police located in the spaces where victimization takes place. Different bundles of organizational and coercive resources shape the types of resistance that victims can pursue against their criminal victimizers. The paper thus unpacks the distinct and surprisingly diverse ways in which victims exercise agency in the face of their own victimization while linking the study of the politics of crime to broader realms of research, including the rich literatures on institutional change and civil wars.

Author

• Eduardo Moncada, Barnard College, Columbia University