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Drugs, Crime and Territory in Latin America

Fri, August 30, 4:00 to 5:30pm, Hilton, Georgetown East

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Latin America and the Caribbean remain as the most violent regions in the world due to crime (UNODC, 2013). Research indicates that at least part of this violence is due to drug related crimes. Organized crime groups, especially those operating in the drug business, have become powerful actors, which often contest state rules and oppose the police and local authorities. The association between drugs and crime can be examined under the framework developed by Goldstein (1985), where the link between drugs and violence can be explained either by a) ‘psychopharmacological violence,’ this is, when crime occurs as a consequence of drug consumption; b) ‘economic compulsive violence,’ when criminal violence is the result of certain individuals’ actions involved in illegal activities to fund their personal drug consumption; and c) to ‘systemic violence,’ when crime is the result of actions of criminal organizations conducive to enforce contracts in the absence of a legitimate framework that will resolve the disputes through the legal system (Goldstein, 1985). Latin American countries have been struggling with this problem, and for most of them, things have worsened during the last decades.
In order to solve this problem, governments in the region have followed different strategies that combine different types of policing and drugs policies. Some countries such as El Salvador, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, have implemented aggressive and repressive policing practices; others as Colombia and Mexico pursued strong anti-drugs operations, while Uruguay has decided to combine police raids with the legalization and regulation of the marijuana market. Those policies have different impact on the population and the territory and imply various responses from local populations and drugs gangs.
This panel present a group of articles that discuss those reactions. Bogliaccini, Monogan, Pereira and Pereira analyze, using a diff-in-diff design, the effects of police raids in the most conflictive neighborhoods of the capital city in Uruguay. Looking at changes in the levels of violence and delinquency after the implementation of these policing strategies, they observed competitiveness between gangs for the control of the drug market. Alcocer and Picatto, using a network analysis with data from Colombia and Mexico, show that drug enforcement efforts by the state do not change trafficking routes. Even more, cities along trafficking routes struggled more with drug-related consequences. Albarracin, Tiscornia, Pérez, Flom and MacColman analyze the role of deservingness on citizens’ support to tough policing taking advantage of a policing program implemented since 2016 in high-violence neighborhoods in the city of Montevideo. Observing the deservingness mechanism at work in Uruguay offers insights about how this argument operates in countries with low levels of violence. Finally, Bowers, Alvarez Queirolo and Repetto test the impact of drugs’ legalization on crime and public insecurity perceptions. They do that using an “as if random” design defined by the selling of legal marijuana at pharmacies in Uruguay.

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