The Parallel State: Crime, Weak Institutions, and the New Urban Order

• In Event: The Political Economy of Crime and Violence in Latin America

Abstract

Crime has become a mayor concern across Latin America and most of the developing world. Although there have been concrete efforts to understand the economic and political impacts of criminal organisations, there is limited evidence on their organisational structure and societal embeddedness of said groups. In this paper, I provide​ new ​evidence on the geographic and the temporal formation and longevity of criminal networks under weak institutional settings. Using a novel registry of over 70,000 known gang members in El Salvador, I study how gang networks form, embed themselves​ in society​, and shape​ economic and political outcomes. Exploiting (1) the mass deportations of Salvadorans from the United States in the late 1990s which first brought MS-13 and 18th Street gangs to El Salvador, (2) the wave of mass incarceration in the mid-2000s under a tough-on-crime approach by the Salvadoran government, and (3) the truce between MS-13 and 18th Street in 2012-2013 as identification strategies, this paper traces the formation and the resilience of gangs to their social and geographic clusters within population networks. Gangs are not only a manifestation of deep socioeconomic inequality and weak state presence and lack of public goods provision, but also a "sticky" phenomenon within their respective societies.

Author

• Carlos Schmidt-Padilla, University of California at Berkeley