Class Struggle and Violence in Latin American Cities

• Published date: 01 January 2021
• Author: Andrew R. Smolski
• Date: 01 January 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19860470
• Subject Matter: Book Review

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19860470

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 236, Vol. 48 No. 1, January 2021, 280–284

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19860470

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

280

Book Review

Class Struggle and Violence in Latin American Cities

by

Andrew R. Smolski

Eduardo Moncada Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016.

Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt (eds.) Violence and Resilience in Latin American Cities.

London: Zed Books, 2015.

Violence is a chronic problem in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean,

especially in urban settings, which have expanded over the twentieth and twenty-

first centuries. In 2017, 80.34 percent of the region’s population lived in urban areas.

At the same time, the region contains 8 out of 10 of the most violent cities in the

world (Koonings and Kruijt, 2015). This startling number is based on the homicide

rate, which in 2014 was 66.87 per 100,000 for Honduras, 62.42 in El Salvador, and

27.92 for Colombia (UNODC, 2019). (In the Southern Cone the number was much

lower [for Chile, 3.62].) Even more, Peter Imbusch, Michel Misse, and Fernando

Carrión (2011) state that for every homicide there are a further 20–40 nonfatal violent

attacks. This violence is a regional social problem that most negatively impacts the

most vulnerable populations.

In Violence and Resilience in Latin American Cities, edited by Kees Koonings and Dirk

Kruijt, and Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America, by Eduardo

Moncada, scholars explore the reasons for it. The contributors to the former focus on

the concepts of fragility and resilience, while the latter adopts an urban political econ-

omy framework in relation to armed territorial control. Seeking to problematize a pop-

ular homogenizing narrative of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean that

overrelies on macro-trends by focusing on institutions, these researchers find evidence

for specific causes—social inequality and its spatial distribution, social exclusion, insti-

tutional failure, the proliferation of criminal organizations, and symbolic stigmatiza-

tion—and a possible solution, participatory governance. They point to a set of

mechanisms that produce criminogenic environments: corrupt policing and politicians,

social exclusion, social inequality, and concentration of poverty (Bobea, 2015; Koonings

and Kruijt, 2015). These are processes that drive the systemic breakdown whereby a

low-violence stable state can be disrupted. As Moncada points out, the necessary and

contingent mix of characteristics makes a social order conducive to criminal organiza-

tions that can institutionalize their own rules, delegitimize the state, and break the

monopoly on the “legitimate” use of violence. This tends to be true where a criminal

organization maintains a monopoly of armed territorial control over a given area and

the government competes against a dominant business sector that is not cohesive with

other parts of the business community.

Andrew R. Smolski is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at

North Carolina State University.

860470LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19860470Latin American PerspectivesSmolski / Book Review

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