A vigilante police? Official Citizens’ Involvement in Crime Prevention Tasks in Bolivia

• In Event: Ethnographies of State Bureaucracies in Latin America

Abstract

In front of raising insecurity, the Bolivian government elaborated and signed off the “Citizen Security National Plan for a Safe Bolivia. 2012-2016”. Aligned with global recommendations on citizen security (UNDP, 2013), and under a constitutional framework that recognizes indigenous and ordinary systems of conflict resolution, the plan emphasizes the role of citizens in surveillance and crime prevention tasks. In a country where individuals and collectivities many times take justice in their own hands due to distrust or absence of law-enforcement institutions, this may seem as an attempt to gear civil society responses to actions framed under the rule of law. With ethnographic focus on one marginal neighborhood of the city of El Alto, this paper seeks to analyze how these policies look on-the-ground as well as their effects, both for neighbors and law-enforcement institutions.

Author

• Jorge C Derpic, University of Texas at Austin