Book Review: Crime, Violence, and Justice in Latin America by Carlos Solar, and Carlos A Pérez Ricart (eds)
| Published date | 01 August 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00125806241252286 |
| Author | Hugo Goeury |
| Date | 01 August 2024 |
action. Arriaga offers other counties with 287(g) agreements a tangible blueprint to chal-
lenge and deconstruct immigration enforcement mechanisms, urging communities still
entangled by these agreements to work toward a truly inclusive future.
Carlos Solar, and Carlos A Pérez Ricart (eds), Crime, Violence, and Justice in Latin America,
Routledge: New York/Abingdon, 2023; 282 pp., 21 B/W illustrations: 9781032206844, £125.00/
$160.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Hugo Goeury, The Graduate Center (CUNY), New York, NY, USA
This edited volume brings together the contributions of a wide range of Global South and
Global North scholars, the majority of whom had taken part in the 2019 Security and
Criminality in the Americas: Governing the Unruly conference organized by Carlos
Solar and Carlos A Pérez Ricart, the two co-editors of the present book. It is part of
the ever-growing literature that, following the so-called “third wave of democratization,”
focuses on what Enrique Desmond Arias and Daniel M Goldstein (2010) famously
defined as “violent democracies in Latin America.”
Crime, Violence, and Justice in Latin America is divided into four parts: logics of
crime; geographies of violence; circulation of policy knowledge; and criminal justice
and homicide investigation. Wary of the “quantification fetish”(p. 8) that tends to
prevail in public discourse about crime and violence, the 11 empirical chapters offer a
great variety of methodological approaches. From ethnographic research to the evaluation
of experimental criminal justice reforms, this diversity of methodologies and approaches
is a great strength of the book.
As the two co-editors highlight in their introductory chapter, violence and crime
are not distributed evenly throughout the region, nor within each country’s national
territory. This is reflected in the selection of the case studies, which tends to prioritize
well-researched “hotspots of violence”in Latin America such as Colombia, Brazil,
Mexico, and the Northern Triangle of Central America. This is a legitimate and
understandable choice but, in my opinion, the book could have benefited from the
inclusion of somewhat less studied cases. For instance, readers could have been
interested to learn about Ecuador, where the initial success and eventual collapse
of the country’s innovative gang legalization policy led homicide rates to drop
from 21/100,000 to 5.6/100,000 between 2008 and 2016 before surging to 44.5/
100,000 in 2023. This is all the more the case that gangs, the well-known “usual sus-
pects”when it comes to criminal violence in the Americas, are a recurrent theme in
the book.
In Elena Butti’s fascinating ethnography(ch. 2), we learn that, far from being “unruly”,
Colombia’s“criminal underworld”is, in fact,highly regulated. She shows that, from “the
law of the mom”at home, to “the law of the street”and “the law of the State”in public
space, the youths from Medellín’s marginalized neighborhoods are subjected to various
and conflicting sets of rules and norms. Despite their differences, these distinctive norma-
tive orders all share the use of violence asa legitimate “rule enforcer,”which leads to the
normalization of violence as an unquestioned and regular mode of action.
412 Theoretical Criminology 28(3)
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