Politics and Violence in Central America and the Caribbean

Hannes Warnecke-Berger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319897813
• eBook ISBN: 9783319897820
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Regierung

This book develops a comparative study on violence in Jamaica, El Salvador, and Belize based on a theoretical approach, extensive field research, and in-depth empirical research. It combines the Caribbean and Central America into a single comparative research that explores the historical (from the conquista onwards) as well as contemporary causes of violence in these societies. The volume focuses on forms of violence such as gang violence, police violence, every day forms of violence, vigilantism, and organized crime. The analysis provides a theoretical perspective that bridges political economy as well as cultural approaches in violence research. As such, it will be of interest to readers studying development, violence, political, Central American, and Caribbean studies.

© The Author(s) 2019

Hannes Warnecke-BergerPolitics and Violence in Central America and the Caribbeanhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89782-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Hannes Warnecke-Berger¹

(1)

University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Sachsen, Germany

End Abstract

Despite their many differences, El Salvador, Belize, and Jamaica have in common that they lead international statistics on crime and violence. These three societies even surpass countries that are plagued by wars and civil wars. Today’s violence in Central America and the Caribbean seems to be “diffuse” (Call, 2003, p. 843), “anomic” (Zinecker, 2001, p. 166), and emerging out of the struggle of ordinary people against each other (Pereira & Davis, 2000). In contrast to former times of civil war when violence was perceived as political in nature, peacetime violence is said to serve criminal and more economic ends. Today, it is violence in peace (Zinecker, 2014).

With regard to violence, El Salvador, Belize, and Jamaica have three similarities. Firstly, violence is predominantly an urban phenomenon. Secondly, public discussion and academic discourse both express a certain bias towards scapegoating youth gangs, highlighting the nexus between drugs, youth gangs, and politics. Finally, politics opt to combat violence with repression. Even though the social and geographic context of assaults and the most visible actors of violence are known, violence itself—the modus operandi of violence or as the study will call it here, the forms of violence actors are exerting—is still of minor interest.

Violence in Central America and the Caribbean reflects a deep frustration that easily morphs into blind rage. It is a diffuse, disruptive, and destructive violence; violence seems to follow individual passions rather than political aspirations. It seems as if violence has lost its purpose. For the majority of society, these events are reason for indignant headshaking. People disgustedly turn away from this “new” brutal and frightening violence. At the same time, the number of clicks of brutal videos on YouTube are higher than ever. People seem to have a “perverse fascination” with violence (Avruch, 2001, p. 624). Newspapers are filled with bloody stories; TV programs claim to be on the ground when it happens. Violence is on the return—a resurgent social evil in our meanwhile “civilized” world.

Violence appears unevenly in the world, however. The great bulk of current deadly violence takes place in the Global South, and more than 70 percent of all violent deaths in the world occur in non-conflict settings, settings that are not categorized as interstate or civil wars (Geneva Declaration Secretariat [GDS], 2015, p. 57). Seen from this perspective, the study of violence requires links to the analysis of development processes to be able to explain this emerging social cleavage.

For some time now, the contemporary world system has become increasingly fragmented (Elsenhans, 2015). Today’s violence is one expression of this fragmentation. Historically, violence followed at least three waves after the end of World War II. With every wave, the topography, the predominant actors, but most notably, the structure of violence changed (Warnecke-Berger & Huhn, 2017). First, the forming social movements for national liberation after the Great Depression of the 1930s had been successful in organizing violence. Even though World War II overshadowed the struggle for independence of many liberation movements, the success of the Cuban revolution provoked a proliferation of guerrillas, and with them, violence occurred as a predominantly rural phenomenon. Violence at this time was either the vehicle to form a revolutionary subject (Fanon, [1961] 2010) or a repressive means for colonial or state authorities to brutally repress the claim for autonomy and liberation. In this context, violence was an expression of power and domination. It arose out of societal tensions between social classes, that is, between the subaltern and the ruling class. Violence in this setting is vertical, exposing a disparity of power differentials. Either it challenges authority and domination in times of revolution or rebellion, or it ensures security and “peace” through overt repression or hidden, quiet, and symbolic violence. While assuming power and aiming at producing development, both the state-classes that were born out of the anticolonial movements and the landholding oligarchies failed politically and their promises did not materialize (Elsenhans, 1991). The result was rising national debt, and by the end of the Cold War, almost every society in the Global South had to accept structural adjustment policies.

As a second wave of violence with a vanishing role of ideology and dissolving larger political objectives after 1989, ethnic violence came to the fore. The wars on the Balkans and in West Africa as well as the genocide in Rwanda are examples for that: Segments of remaining state-classes made use of ethnic motives instead of ideology to organize followers, thereby producing an immense output of violence. Violence thus shifted from being class-led to being identity-led.

As a third wave of violence, finally, the world system entered an “age of insecurity” (Davis, 2006) with the rise of neoliberalism. In many places the retreat of the state and resulting “governance voids” (Koonings & Kruijt, 2004) contributed to further fragmentations of violence. Furthermore, the topography of violence changed with violence occurring increasingly in urban encounters. Religious terrorism, warlords, gangs, and everyday ordinary “criminal” violence are expressions of this fragmentation. These different phenomena have in common that the scale of social organization of violence is not as high as during the first two waves. The objective of this violence is not to organize masses of people or to mobilize an entire social class. Quite the contrary, it is anomic and diffuse violence that does not occur at particular places, does not know clear enemies, and that is not politically motivated. This violence is not directed against the state or intended to challenge the social fabric. In short, it is “horizontal violence” (see for the concept Warnecke-Berger, 2017 and Chap. 2 in this study). Typically, horizontal violence involves equally powerful rivals. No rival is able to overpower the opponent and to establish structural domination. Violence then is inscribed in a horizontal relation between equally powerful actors.

The advent of horizontal violence illustrates that capitalist growth has been too weak to create a homogeneous world economy. Economic rent, defined as a form of economic surplus, which is appropriated by political means, eventually overpowers capitalist profit, which is ultimately based on rising mass incomes translated into net investment (Elsenhans, 2015; Kalecki, 1971). This has two implications: firstly, the contrast and polarity between the West and the Global South increases further. Secondly, this transformation leads to the reconfiguration of traditional class contradictions. One expression of this arising class constellation is the need of smaller social groups within the same social class to struggle for access to economic surplus. It is a struggle about social recognition and about bare survival. Increasingly, horizontal violence is nested within these conflicts.

The Empirical Puzzle: Violence in Central America and the Caribbean

In present discussions on violence in Central America and the Caribbean, authors focusing on the recent change of violence predominate. With only few exceptions, the argumentation provided by these authors draws on new causes of contemporary violence. This narrative highlights that globalization and/or neoliberalism produced new patterns of exclusion and marginalization, which finally led to frustration and violent outbreaks. The reformation of labor markets and the specialization on new comparative advantages left particularly young people without proper job opportunities. At the same time, the state retreated from society. As a result, the rise of youth gangs, growing underground economies, and the emergence of ungoverned spaces go hand in hand. Although this body of literature mentions different triggers of violence, it focuses on general schemes of violence rather than on the question of why certain actors exert particular forms of violence (see for a detailed discussion of the literature, e.g. Warnecke-Berger & Huhn, 2017).

A second argumentation follows a historical strand and focuses on continuities of violence. This narrative explains today’s high levels of violence through the recourse on the causes and developments of former violent eruptions throughout the 1970s and 1980s (e.g. Kurtenbach, 2007; Steenkamp, 2005). While this body of literature intends to explain the continuity of certain forms of violence, it runs the risk of logical fallacies (violence produces more violence). Alternative explanations are sparse and unfortunately exclusively concerned with historical events rather than the historical processes in the longue durée (but see for an analysis of historical processes e.g. Holden, 2004; Pearce, 2010; Sives, 2010).

While the first line of argumentation tends to exclude history from analysis, the second line focuses on violent clashes in the 1980s. It has to be acknowledged, however, that violence already was a social problem in times well before the 1970s and 1980s. The detailed analysis of these periods in Central America and the Caribbean, however, is still in its infancy.

Figure 1.1 shows the homicide rates in El Salvador, Jamaica, and Belize over a longer period beginning in the 1930s. In El Salvador, starting with the massacres of 1932 where almost 40,000 people were killed, the homicide rate has always remained relatively high. The graph shows a peak in 1980 when the civil war broke out. The rate peaks again in 1989 during the guerrilla’s final offensive and increases after the Peace Accords of 1992 until 1996 to then decrease and oscillate around 55 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Since the 1930s, the lowest level documented in El Salvador was around 24 homicides in 1965. In Jamaica, the homicide rate steadily increases as of the 1950s. It peaks in 1980, in 1997, and in the mid-2000s. Recently, deadly violence decreased considerably; however, it remains at a high level.

Fig. 1.1

Homicides per 100,000 inhabitants in El Salvador, Jamaica, and Belize, 1930–2015. (Sources on El Salvador for the 1930s are found in Boletín Oficial de la Policía Nacional, Órgano Mensual de la Dirección General del Cuerpo, AGN El Salvador; for the civil war period, see Naciones Unidas (1993), for the 1960s, see Pan American Health Organization [PAHO] (1978, 1982), Seligson and McElhinny (1996); for the post-war period, see United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime [UNODC] (2007a), Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo [PNUD] (2009), and own collection of police statistics emitted by Policía Nacional Civil and Instituto Medicina Legal. The sharp increase in homicides after 1992 may be a statistically produced fac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Political Economy and/or Culture? Theorizing Forms of Violence
• 3. The Roots of Current Violence: Historical Comparative Perspectives on El Salvador, Jamaica, and Belize, 1500–1980
• 4. El Salvador: Transnationalization by Polarization and the Re-emergence of Violence
• 5. Jamaica: Transnationalization by Force and the Transformation of Violence
• 6. Belize: Transnationalization by Coincidence and the Rise of Violence
• 7. Forms of Violence in Comparative Perspective
• 8. The Cultural Political Economy of Violence: A Conclusion
• Back Matter