Violence, Development, and Democracy in Latin America: The Outcomes of Transitions from Authoritarian Regimes

• Published date: 01 May 2020
• Date: 01 May 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19893945
• Author: María Dolores París Pombo
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19893945

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 232, Vol. 47 No. 3, May 2020, 235–241

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19893945

© 2020 Latin American Perspectives

235

Book Review

Violence, Development,

and Democracy in Latin America

The Outcomes of Transitions from Authoritarian Regimes

by

María Dolores París Pombo

Translated by

Mariana Ortega Breña

Cynthia J. Arnson (ed.) In the Wake of War: Democratization and Internal Armed Conflict

in Latin America. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press/Stanford University

Press, 2012.

Javier Auyero, Philippe Bourgois, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes (eds.) Violence at the

Urban Margins. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Leigh Binford The El Mozote Massacre: Human Rights and Global Implications. Revised

and expanded edition. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016.

John Gledhill The New War on the Poor: The Production of Insecurity in Latin America.

London: Zed Books, 2015.

Martin Mowforth The Violence of Development: Resource Depletion, Environmental Crises

and Human Rights Abuses in Central America. London: Pluto Press, 2014.

In the 1980s and 1990s, sociological and anthropological studies on Latin American

states and violence mainly addressed armed political conflicts, guerrilla movements,

dictatorships, and state terrorism. Political science privileged debates over the so-called

transitions from dictatorship or authoritarianism toward democratic governments.

Since the 2000s, two issues have been central to discussions regarding post–Cold War

violence—the reasons for the high levels of insecurity that have made some Latin

American countries among the most dangerous in the world and what Martin Mowforth

(2014) terms “the violence of development” associated with the implementation of neo-

liberal policies and what the U.S. geographer David Harvey has called “the capitalism

of dispossession.” There is some consensus in the social sciences regarding a fundamen-

tal change in the type of violence currently threatening human security: while the polit-

ical violence resulting from armed conflicts prompted by state power has decreased,

contemporary Latin America is nevertheless affected by bloody struggles involving the

control of natural resources and legal and illegal markets. State agents, multinationals,

national and international economic and political elites, criminal organizations, and

territorial gangs seem to participate equally in these struggles.

The book published by the Woodrow Wilson Center and edited by Cynthia J. Arnson,

In the Wake of War, addresses the links between pacification, democracy, and governance

María Dolores París Pombo is a full-time researcher at the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Tijuana,

Mexico, and the author of Violencias y migraciones centroamericanas en México (2017). Mariana

Ortega Breña is a freelance translator based in Mexico City.

893945LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19893945Latin American PerspectivesParís / Book Review

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