The Politics of Violence in Latin America

Pablo Policzer

• Publisher: University of Calgary Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781552389096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Violence in Society
• Index: Social Sciences

Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world. It has suffered waves of repressive authoritarian rule, organized armed insurgency and civil war, violent protest, and ballooning rates of criminal violence. But is violence hard-wired into Latin America? This is a critical reassessment of the ways in which violence in Latin America is addressed and understood. Previous approaches have relied on structural perspectives, attributing the problem of violence to Latin America's colonial past or its conflictual contemporary politics. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume argues that violence is often rooted more in contingent outcomes than in deeply embedded structures. Addressing topics ranging from the root sources of violence in Haiti to kidnapping in Colombia, from the role of property rights in patterns of violence to the challenges of peacebuilding, The Politics of Violence in Latin America is an essential step towards understanding the causes and contexts of violence-and changing the mechanisms that produce it.

Part I

1

Making Sense of Haiti’s State Fragility and Violence: Combining Structure and Contingency?

Andreas E. Feldmann

On 12 January 2010 an earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale devastated Haiti, killing 158,000 people and displacing 1.3 million more.1 The Haitian state was dealt a terrible blow as a significant number of state officers either died or were seriously injured; additionally, most of its infrastructural power (telecommunications, buildings, roads, bridges) was destroyed. The earthquake’s devastating effects prompted fears, among Haitians and foreigners alike, that a massive wave of violence would descend over Haiti as criminals—urban gangs and escaped prisoners—took advantage of the anarchy. Yet the feared upsurge in violence did not materialize. Homicides, kidnappings, and crimes against property did not increase after the earthquake; only sexual violence saw a major rise, particularly in and around displaced persons camps.2 In a rather perplexing development, the public’s overall perception of security actually improved after the earthquake.3

As this phenomenon shows, the nature and characteristics of violence in Haiti remain puzzling. Despite rampant poverty, a history of acute political upheaval, ecological damage, and extensive organized crime activity, Haiti displays relatively moderate crime rates when compared to other Latin American and Caribbean countries.4

This chapter seeks to help decipher this puzzle by investigating the root causes of violence in Haiti, particularly since the end of the Cold War. In Haiti, different forms of violence coexist and reinforce each other. There is widespread state-orchestrated violence, notwithstanding the limited coercive capacity of the Haitian state. 5 Beyond that, a wide array of actors, including agents with loose ties to the state and various nonstate actors, also engage in acts of violence.6 Homicides, gender violence, harsh prison conditions, and violent turf battles between criminal organizations are common.7 In recent years, kidnapping has become a major problem.8 Violence reigns unabated in Haiti because perpetrators enjoy virtually total impunity.9

Most of the studies in this volume lean toward arguing that the violence plaguing many Latin American states can be attributed to contingent rather than structural factors. The corollary to this proposition is that the region is not necessarily doomed—that violence can recede, be tamed, or even surmounted, and that there is, therefore, reasonable hope for the establishment of a socioeconomic and political context in Latin America that is hospitable to representative democracies with medium and high human development.10

Yet if there is one case that confirms the proposition that structural causes inform violence in Latin America, that case is Haiti. In other words, Haiti constitutes what Gerring calls a “crucial case”—that is, a case that confers validity on a given theory.11 While acknowledging that structure plays a role in fueling violence in Haiti, this chapter argues that such a view is partial and incomplete. It posits, rather, that contemporary violence in Haiti results from a combination of structural and contingent factors. This argument is in line with authors who argue that unchangeable structures are very rare, and that the study of social phenomena—in this case violence—requires merging various interacting causal explanations that combine more rigid contextual conditions with contingent ones.12

Following Jack Levy, this chapter is presented as a hypothesis-generating case study.13 Through a careful examination of the Haitian case, I seek to improve our understanding of the conditions informing violence in the region by questioning the proposition that violence in Latin America and the Caribbean obeys invariant structural conditions.14 Drawing on Elster’s seminal work,15 the chapter seeks to disentangle the conditions informing violence by tracing how the combination of particular historical conditions—structural and contingent—have interacted through particular mechanisms (Elster’s “causal chains”) to create a distinct outcome: violence. More specifically, it is maintained that from within a historical interpretation, violence in Haiti follows what Elster conceptualizes as a “general causal pattern.”16

In the Haitian case, this refers to the exclusion of the majority of the population by a small native elite that captured the state after the island gained its independence from France in 1804. Post-independence leaders could have transformed the violent, exclusive social order created by French colonialism; instead, they perpetuated many of the features of the old colonial system. From this perspective, the post-independence moment represents a “critical juncture”17 in the country’s history.18 The new rulers engaged in predatory behavior, encouraging the creation of a parasitic state devised to serve their narrow political and economic interests rather than creating the basis for a modern state that would protect the wider population and address its urgent social and economic needs. Relying on a combination of coercion, co-optation, and clientelism, the rulers of independent Haiti inhibited the development of civil society, political parties, and, more broadly, opposing views of any kind. They thus deliberately curbed the development of formal institutions that could promote economic development and social well-being, regulate social relations, and arbitrate conflict through a fair, evenhanded process. Against this backdrop, structural conditions fostering violence flourished. These endogenous conditions, it is also maintained, were reinforced by the intervention of external powers that, in their keenness to retain influence in the country, collaborated with domestic ruling elites.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the principal agent of violence in Haiti was the state; with the demise of the Duvalier regime in the mid-1980s, patterns of violence became more complex and heterogeneous, much as the actors unleashing it. Structural conditions undoubtedly play a role in explaining changes in the patterns of violence, but the actual configuration derives from other, more contingent pressures associated with the process of globalization, including democratization and the development of a global organized crime industry.

In short, rather than an “either/or” explanation, it is argued that violence results from a combination of structural and contingent factors of an environmental, cognitive, and relational nature. Violence in Haiti can be explained against the backdrop of a state that has been ill-prepared to withstand the lethal combination of growing social pressure from a marginalized population and the weakening of state structures due to a complex pattern of globalization that propped up nonstate armed parties and led to the atomization and/or privatization of violence. The interplay between these conditions has set the stage for a qualitative change in the nature of violence, as witnessed in the mutation of traditional armed groups and the emergence of new, more lethal ones (paramilitaries, drug cartels, and transnational youth gangs) whose actions reinforce and recreate violence in ways not seen before in Haiti. A particularly salient factor is the emergence of powerful drug syndicates capable of openly challenging the state by combating and/or infiltrating its institutions (political parties, police, and judiciary) and fomenting a toxic culture of violence.

This chapter proceeds as follows. The first section briefly describes contemporary patterns of violence in Haiti. It then defines crucial terms before presenting evidence to support the proposition that structural and contingent factors have interacted through particular mechanisms to produce the patterns of violence that currently in Haiti. In the concluding section, the findings are discussed in the broader context of contemporary violence in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Patterns of Violence in Haiti

Haiti constitutes a fascinating case for the study of violence in Latin America, for several reasons. First, as indicated above, the nature, sources, and characteristics of violence are multidimensional, complex, and widespread.19 Second, violence has been long lasting and relentless, haunting the country since its independence. Haiti has oscillated between periods of relative calm (1818‒43, 1915‒34) and acute violence, such as the long reign of the Duvaliers (1957‒86), the regime of Generals Raoul Cedras and Michel François (1991‒4), and part of Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s second term (2003‒4).20 Third, levels of destitution, economic underdevelopment, and disenfranchisement make the country’s sociopolitical situation desperate, something that has been exacerbated by severe ecological damage.21 And fourth, the state’s capture by unfit, venal rulers has crippled the development of formally institutionalized ways of dealing with social tensions and grievances.22

Data on violence in Haiti is sketchy.23 In 2010, its homicide rate was 6.9 per 100,000 inhabitants, lower than that of other countries in the region, including Costa Rica (11.3), Ecuador (18), Brazil (22), Puerto Rico (26.2), and Trinidad and Tobago (35), and nowhere near Guatemala (42), Jamaica (52), El Salvador (66), or Honduras (82).24 Data on kidnappings and sexual violence, though also not entirely reliable, shows a rather acute pattern.25 While there are no statistics on mob violence, its brutal outcomes—at times orchestrated by political parties and strongpersons, at times spontaneous—is a common feature of the political landscape.26 Violent riots are also common: in 2008, they paralyzed the country as people furiously protested soaring food and fuel prices in several cities. And yet it is very inte...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Structural vs. Contingent Violence in Latin America
• Part I
• Part II
• Contributors
• Index