Social and Political Transitions During the Left Turn in Latin America

Karen Silva-Torres, Carolina Rozo-Higuera, Daniel S. Leon, Karen Silva-Torres, Carolina Rozo-Higuera, Daniel Leon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000440225
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Amérique latine et des Caraïbes

Social and Political Transitions During the Left Turn in Latin America provides fourteen contributions to understand, from a multidisciplinary perspective, processes of socio-political reconfigurations in the region from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s.

The Left Turn was the regional shift to left-of-center governments and social movements that sought to replace the neoliberal policies of the 1990s. This volume aims to answer the overarching research question: how do state and societal (national and transnational) actors trigger and shape processes of political and socio-economic transitions in Latin America from the rise to the decline of the Left Turn. The book presents case studies in which transitions are moments of change and uncertainty, which one cannot predict their definitive outcomes. The various case studies presented in the book place actors and processes in specific historical and socio-political contexts, which are influenced directly or indirectly by the historical trajectory of Latin America's Left Turn.

This book is essential reading for students and scholars of Social and Political History, Latin American History, and those interested in the social and political developments in Latin America more broadly.

Part I

Transitions by State Actors

3 The Return of Mano Dura in Venezuela

The Political Economy of Transitions in Urban Security Policies since 1950

Daniel S. Leon

DOI: 10.4324/9781003161332-5

Introduction

There is too much democracy, [the police] needs to repress more, [and] they don’t repress more because of human rights; only criminals have human rights? No!…If a criminal has killed before, why is he still alive?

(May 25, 2016, original in Spanish, quoted in Leon 2020).

The quote above by an informant residing in Petare barrio in eastern Caracas, Venezuela, expressed a widely held view in the barrios—or slums—of Venezuela; that state security forces have been mostly absent from the barrios, which are the spaces where most urban violence occurs. Barrio inhabitants view the lack of mano dura or zero-tolerance urban security policies as a prime cause of high violence rates—measured through the annual rate of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. An informant from the barrio of Minas de Baruta in southern Caracas stated that “we need a Perez Jimenez” (May 11, 2016, original in Spanish, quoted in Leon 2020). The informant refers to the Venezuelan military junta’s leader in the 1950s, which notoriously used security forces to crack down on criminals and political opponents. Mano dura security policies make a return since 2015, which has resulted in more urban violence instead of pacification. This chapter argues that mano dura’s return results from militarized security policies, which the Venezuelan government gave free rein to violently repress actual or imagined criminals in working-class urban communities because of the collapse of oil incomes after 2014 and Venezuela’s political transition to an authoritarian regime.

Olga Meza, a 38-year-old Villa Zoita resident [in Margarita island]…said that at 2:30 a.m. on August 17 [2016], approximately five men dressed in black with their faces covered but wearing badges of the CICPC [investigative police] raided her home…The agents pulled Meza and her husband out of bed and forced him to lie down on the living room floor, where they beat him and threatened to kill him, Meza said. The agent holding Meza grabbed her face and forced her to look towards the room where her two sons, a 16-year-old and a 6-year-old, were in bed with the lights off. Meza said that she witnessed a CICPC agent enter the room and shoot her 16-year-old, Ángel Joel Torrealba. She recalled hearing four shots before the agent turned on the lights. Then he turned over Torrealba’s dead body, saw his face, looked at the agent who was holding Meza, rolled his eyes, and shook his head, she said, implying that Torrealba was not the person for whom they were searching.

(Human Rights Watch 2016)

The second quote, a testimony provided by an informant to Human Rights Watch, shows the violent and poorly planned modus operandi behind the implementation of mano dura urban security policies, such as the Operación de Liberación del Pueblo (OLP) or People’s Liberation Operation since 2015. Briefly, these operations consisted of large numbers of military and police special operations units to raid allegedly high crime areas, most of them working-class barrios (Ávila 2017; Zubillaga and Hanson 2018). These security operations aimed to quickly and forcefully eliminate supposedly organized criminal organizations, which according to the government presided by Nicolas Maduro (2013–present) included organized basic staple hoarders, large criminal gangs Colombian paramilitaries (Human Rights Watch 2016). As depicted in Figure 3.1, the implementation of the OLPs corresponded with the dramatic rise of people killed by security forces. This figure shows that the percentage out of total homicides in Venezuela reach an all-time high in 2015. Nevertheless, not all violent deaths caused by security forces were the results of OLPs, but these special operations by Venezuelan security forces exemplify the institutionalization of mano dura security policies during the Maduro government. This chapter contributes to understanding political transitions during Latin America’s “Left Turn” by analyzing the changes and continuities of Venezuela’s security policies, their historical roots, and the politico-economic rationales conditioning these policies.

Mano dura urban security policies such as the OLPs are not new to Venezuela or Latin America. These special operations that see many heavily armed police and military agents raiding barrios, or socioeconomically marginalized urban neighborhoods, became standard procedures by security forces in Venezuela since the second half of the 20th century (Hernandez 1991, 157). The names for such special police operations from the 1970s to the 1990s were redadas or raids. OLPs, just like redadas before them, seem to be erratic and poorly planned security interventions. Jose Vega, a resident of a barrio in western Caracas, told Human Rights Watch (2016) that:

security agents stormed into his house when he was getting ready to go to work, beat him, and threatened to kill him. Vega said that the agents pressed the muzzle of a gun to his forehead and forced his fingers to grip another gun, telling him they could kill him in a “confrontation” if he didn’t provide information on who the “criminals” were.

Due to the violent, poorly planned, and erratic behavior by security forces, a political commentator described that “just like the redada, the OLP is macho bullshit masquerading as police strategy” (Toro 2016). Figure 3.1 shows that mano dura security policies increased sharply from 2015 to historically unprecedented rates. These rates of state violence are high, even for Latin American standards. In 2016, Brazilian security forces, which readily use lethal force, were responsible for 7% of all homicides in their country, while their Venezuelan counterparts’ violence rate was almost four times higher (Zubillaga and Hanson 2018).

Figure 3.1 Percentage of killings by security forces out of the total number of homicides in Venezuela, 1950–2017

Source: Figure created by the author with data from: Ávila (2018), Ministerio de Sanidad y Asistencia Social (various years, 1950–1998), Ministerio de Salud y Desarrollo Social (various years, 2000–2004), Ministerio de Salud (various years, 2005–2006), Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Salud (various years, 2007–2014).

Note: The figure presents percentages from 1950 to 2009 in decade averages for visualization purposes. Several years were omitted due to missing data. As shown in the sources, the primary source of overall homicides and killings by security forces was the Venezuelan Health Ministry, except for the years 2010–2017, which the source was the Venezuelan Interior Ministry (Ávila 2018).

The literature on security policies in Latin America documents the counterproductive effects of mano dura or zero tolerance security policies extensively (Labate, Cavnar, and Rodrigues 2016; Lessing 2018; Rodgers 2010; Wolf 2012). However, the academic literature on the Venezuelan case blames the country’s high violence rate—which nationally skyrocketed from about 20 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants per year in the 1990s to over 60 in the 2010s (Leon 2020)—on impunity and the absence of the state security apparatus from enforcing the law in barrios of the country’s cities (Briceño-León 2012; 2006; Tremaria 2016). The claim that the state is unwilling or unable to enforce its legitimate monopoly of force in the barrios mirrors the views of barrio inhabitants as exemplified by the first two informants cited in the introduction. Indeed, government intervention has historically been critical in controlling violence by non-state actors. The state can pull the necessary resources together to achieve such goal-oriented collective action (Fukuyama 2014). State penetration can also substitute violence as a conflict resolution mechanism by institutionalizing bureaucratic governance, commonly known as the rule of law (Collins 2011). However, the way urban security policies and practices evolve impacts whether they bring violence rates under control or allow it to propagate further (Arias 2006; Hoelscher and Nussio 2016; Kubrin and Weitzer 2003; Lessing 2018; Zinecker 2014). Understanding how state organizations shape urban security policies, constrained by politico-economic changes and continuities, helps move the debate beyond the presence or absence of the state to explain increases in homicide rates, as the state of the art about violence Venezuela has stated.

Police researcher Keymer Ávila’s (2017) aptly describes the Venezuelan criminal justice system as behaving “like a pendulum constantly swinging between absences and excesses” (59). This chapter argues from a historical-institutional perspective that swings of the criminal justice system pendulum to more mano dura or repressive urban security policies since 2015 in the Venezuelan case occurred during low oil revenue windfalls, which conditioned transitions to more authoritarian political orders. Therefore, politico-economic transitions in Venezuela conditioned changes to more repressive and deadly urban security policies. The implementation of heavy-handed security practices occurred mostly in socioeconomically marginalized or working-class urban neighborhoods such as barrios. The official governmental discourse was that heavy-handed operations by security forces were actions to crack down on crime and violence (Ávila 2017; Zubillaga and Hanson 2018). However, the fact that these urban security policies appear during times of depressed oil revenues—and thus low economic productivity—points toward the use of such policies as tools of the state to control urban areas viewed by elite political actors as politically volatile such as working-class barrios. Moreover, the persistence of such security policies, viewed from a political economy perspective, rested on rent-seeking organizational arrangements. Rent refers to economic revenues that surpass opportunity costs (Buchanan 1980), which elite actors accrue because of political power (Elsenhans 2011).

The following analysis examines the politico-economic institutional evolution of urban security policies in Venezuela through a structural politico-economic analysis following the new institutional economics school’s longitudinal methodology (North, Wallis, and Weingast 2009). This analysis’s sources are primary sources on homicides from different Venezuelan authorities and secondary sources such as journalistic and academic publications. The development of mano dura security policies is not a new event in Venezuela and has followed a reactive path dependency, which refers to a historical change of events where one event, such as the return of mano dura, is the result of previous events (Mahoney 2000).

The following section analyzes the institutional-historical development of mano dura of urban security policies in Venezuela to understand the reactive path dependencies leading to the use of mano dura ur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Contributing Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Conceptual Discussions
• Part I Transitions by State Actors
• Part II Transitions by Societal Actors
• Part III Continuities and Disruptions of Latin American Transitions
• Index