Lawless Violence and Impunity in the Age of Electoral Democracy, c. 1990 to the Present

The drive in favour of democratic inclusiveness, interrupted by nearly three decades of military rule, resumed spectacularly in the 1990s, the decade that marks the onset of the fourth phase of state formation.

By the middle of the new century's second decade, some twenty-five years after the transition to democracy had begun, Latin America's commitment to electoral democracy and civilian rule was still holding firm, with the excep­tions of Cuba (where the first had never existed) and Venezuela (where a left­wing government allied with Cuba's sought to abolish competitive elec­tions). Organised political violence, whether that of a repressive military force, a guerrilla army, a gang of urban terrorists or a party militia, had almost entirely faded from Latin America. However, institutions long inimical to liberal-democratic practice and social peace continued to flourish, and in some respects, as we shall see, the state's capacity in many countries to carry out basic policing functions and to administer justice appeared to have diminished significantly during the democratisation phase. In almost every country, the fourth phase of state formation coincided with a fundamental shift towards a consensus, one more widely held than any since late colonial times, in favour of liberal democratic principles as the core criteria of legitimacy. Curiously, however, the twenty-first-century consensus also hap­pened to share with its late-colonial analogue what Taylor authoritatively styled the latter's ‘nearly always conditional and incomplete' character.¹¹ Murderous violence, often wreathed by and intertwined with the very state institutions designed to prevent it; an unremitting record of spectacular and seldom-punished acts of malfeasance among public officials; and a pervasive, society-wide indifference to the rule of law all persisted well into the twenty- first century.

The Latin American state's tentative and improvisational character, while particularly obvious in the first phase, has therefore survived in the form of violence-inducing patterns of ‘competitive state-making', ‘state capture' or ‘the criminalisation of the state', in the varied terminology of a growing academic literature on the subject. In parts of Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Peru and elsewhere, criminal organisations competed - often successfully - with the state for the loyalty of a region's populace. They did so by erecting and sustaining transnational systems of production and exchange - illegal economies typically centred on narcotics, but often extending into complementary services such as extortion, kidnap­ping, murder for hire, and contraband in firearms, human labour or environ­mental resources. The criminals (who occasionally presented themselves as social revolutionaries) earned a kind of local legitimacy protected by their capacity to generate revenue in sufficient quantity to buy off agents of the state and to develop the military power necessary to ward off competitors and the state's own law enforcement agents. The latter sometimes played a double role as business competitors in the illegal economies. Cities were no less subject to competitive state building; in November 2010, it took Brazilian military and police forces a week to recover control of the Complexo de Alemao district of Rio de Janeiro from the drug gangs that had governed it for years, at the cost of thirty-seven lives.

The shift away from traditional authoritarian forms of rule to competitively elected civilian government had added a measure of accountability and transpar­ency - exposing flaws, but achieving little in overall effectiveness, and high­lighting as never before the linkage between public violence and state-sanctioned impunity for, and collaboration with, wrongdoers.

The failure to administer justice in much of Latin America was not a fourth-phase innovation; nor was there anything novel about its sources - a combination of the venality, impotence and incapacity that had largely characterised the region's state structures for two centuries. What defied expectations was its continuity even after the unparalleled, and apparently lasting, transition to representative institutions and electoral democracy. As Latin America commemorated two centuries of independent self­government, only distant echoes remained of the pronunciamiento, the populist caudillo, social revolution and the military junta. What endured almost everywhere was the violence-laced crisis of order that had followed immediately on independence. Its source was no less familiar: a fragile, shallow and easily disrupted level of social recognition for the legitimating principles (now, liberal-democratic) of the state, almost everywhere.