The Legacies of Criminal Conflict for State-Sponsored Violence: Evidence from the Northern Triangle

• In Event: Studies of Organized Crime and Conflict Mini-Conference: Criminal and Civil Conflict, Criminal and Rebel Governance

Abstract

How do the legacies of criminal conflict influence government violations of civilians’ rights? While recent scholarship points to the existence of post-civil-conflict legacies of state repression, including difficulties reintegrating ex-combatants into society and retraining security forces after civil conflict, few studies examine how potential legacies of criminal conflict affect a state’s willingness to repress civilians, post-conflict. In this paper, I examine how criminal-group “embeddedness” over time (criminal-group presence, violence, territorial control, and time horizon) influences the occurrence and severity of one-sided government violence cross-nationally, toward four groups of civilians: 1) traditional protesters; 2) detained suspected criminals; 3) unarmed citizens; and 4) migrants. I develop a two-pronged theoretical framework, in which I posit that higher criminal-group embeddedness over time should be associated with more state-ordered repression of traditional protesters and detainees, and less state-ordered repression of unarmed citizens and migrants. At the same time, I expect that law enforcement becomes more violent in its dealings with all four groups of civilians in the long term, through a bureaucratic learning (tactical hardening) mechanism. I empirically test these notions in the context of the Northern Triangle in Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras—using data on the four aspects of criminal-group embeddedness from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) and the Varieties of Democracy Project (V-Dem); an original database of NexisUni newspaper articles; and instances of one-sided government violence from the CIRIGHTS Project (formerly CIRI). Various linear mixed modeling techniques provide preliminary support for the theoretical expectations. This project highlights the importance of examining how law enforcement institutions “learn” during conflict, and points to the potential existence of repressive legacies in the context of criminal conflict.

Author

• Margaret Frost, University of Rhode Island