Latin America, defined here as the nineteen American republics that once constituted almost all of the overseasterritories of the monarchies of Spain and Portugal, now accounts for 8 per cent of the world's population and 13 per cent of its land area.

This chapter analyses the violence associated with the social field of power surrounding the state, or what we will call ‘public violence'. The volume's focus on the period after about 1800 conveniently captures the first years of the great divide in the chronology of Latin American public violence: the rupture, extending from about 1808 to about 1824, that ended a three-century, post-conquest period of relative order and stability under the rule of the Iberian monarchies.

That break inaugurated two centuries of self-government distinguished by consistently high levels of public violence. In breadth and intensity, public violence associated with the making and remaking of state institutions may have peaked in the late twentieth century. Since the 1980s, organised violence of a more criminal and less overtly political kind has flourished in many places without losing its place within the field of state power, because so much of it has depended directly on the collaboration, indifference or incompetence of agents of the state.

No investigation of violence, in any society, can pass over the role of the permanent institutions of rule (i.e., the state), particularly those responsible for the administration of law and justice. As a result, it is the combined problem of violence and the state - whose principal function is to administer justice - that will dictate the course of this analysis, with the unavoidable addition of the concept of revolution in its distinctly Latin American expression as the ever-frustrated search for a just order. Public violence remains closely linked, as both condition and consequence, to long-standing traditions of Latin American politics that cannot be overlooked but which can only receive cursory notice here. First among them is a towering indifference to the rule of law, and its sequelae of impunity and official venality.

Another is patrimonialism and its offspring, personalism and presidentialism, for where public office is widely seen as a kind of endowment to be utilised by its occupant for the benefit of family and friends, the personal qualities of the caudillo or leader, including his capacity to attract and reward followers while punishing enemies, overshadow law and ideology, thwarting common notions of just order. These mutually reinforcing dispositions entail a continuous summons to violence as the means of enlargement or resistance, enforcement or abatement, validating and even invigorating the dispositions and thus the tendency to use violence.

The following analysis interprets public violence not as some amorphous, unchanging ‘structure' of Latin American life but as a collective activity subject at once to the circumstances of particular times and places and to the larger tendencies that cross the national boundaries of the Hispanic world. In its numerous guises, public violence may signal a crisis of order, but only rarely, if ever, a state of utter disorder or chaos. Public violence should thus be understood as a mode of action dictated by a particular strategy for keeping or seizing power, or for influencing those in power.¹ Its agents justify it in the same way that they justify the exercise of the power that the violence is intended to serve - i.e., according to the principles of some legitimacy-bestowing authority. For power always invokes, and at least formally remains accountable to, some powerless, supreme authority: a political ideology, a person gifted by an extraordinary grace (charisma) of leadership, or some higher-order world view appealing to deeply held beliefs.^{^[861]} ^{^[862]} Hence, violence in the service of state-making.

Any state-centred analysis of violence across two centuries must rest on a periodisation of what Oakeshott called the ‘interminable enterprise' of the state formation process itself.^{^[863]} As the processes and outcomes of statemaking shifted over time, so did the kinds of violence associated with them, yielding the four-phase chronology of state formation that frames the following analysis.

A formative period associated with intense violence among rival power-seekers loyal to a diversity of legitimacy-bestowing authorities ended in the 1870s. In the second phase, lasting to about 1940, violence diminished as state institutions were consolidated along more or less liberal but markedly non-democratic lines. The phase of state-making that coincided with World War II and the ensuing Cold War was probably the most destructive in the region's history, as the result of large-scale mobilisations of people seeking more inclusive levels of both economic and political development, and the repressive response by states and their allies outside of Latin America. In an era of Marxist-tinged social revolution, expanding state responsibility for economic development and social welfare accompanied an often disproportionate enlargement of the capacity and internal reach of the armed forces. Finally, an era of democratisa- tion and demilitarisation, from about the 1980s until the present, has been unmatched in two, paradoxical, ways. The level of elections-driven political stability has never been higher or appeared more durable. But so has lawless violence, official corruption and state failure.

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Source: Edwards Louise, Penn Nigel, Winter Jay (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 4: 1800 to the Present. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 676 p.. 2020

Latin America, defined here as the nineteen American republics that once constituted almost all of the overseasterritories of the monarchies of Spain and Portugal, now accounts for 8 per cent of the world's population and 13 per cent of its land area.

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