Drug Violence, War-Crime Distinction, and Hierarchies of Victimhood
| Author | Katja Franko,David Rodriguez Goyes |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/09646639221091226 |
| Published date | 01 February 2023 |
| Date | 01 February 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Drug Violence, War-Crime
Distinction, and Hierarchies
of Victimhood
Katja Franko and David Rodriguez Goyes
University of Oslo, Norway
Abstract
Issues related to victimhood are central to transitional justice and international criminal
justice. However, processes of transitional justice do not usually include victims of drug-
related violence, despite the fact that in several Latin American countries deaths caused
by cartel violence easily meet criteria of civil war. This article’s central argument is that
distinctions between victims of war and victims of what is often termed conventional
crime are of great importance to notions of legitimate victimhood in transitional con-
texts. Taking Colombia’s Victims’Law (2011) as a case study, we argue that the binary
distinction between war and crime fails to address the needs of victims of mass drug
violence and creates a hierarchy among victims. This has important symbolic, legal
and material implications for those who find themselves in the less favoured category.
Victims of drug related violence struggle to access justice and to make their voices
heard in public discourses about violence. We argue that the current understanding
of mass drug violence as ‘conventional crime’represents a Northern perspective on vio-
lence, which can be counter-productive when used uncritically in Southern contexts.
Keywords
drug violence, hierarchies of victimhood, transitional justice, victimology, war-crime
distinction
Introduction
On 27 November 1989, the Medellín Cartel bombed the HK-1803 domestic flight
from Bogotá to Cali in Colombia. 107 passengers died in the attack. The event was
Corresponding author:
Katja Franko, Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
Email: katja.franko@jus.uio.no
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2023, Vol. 32(1) 75–95
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09646639221091226
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
part of a terror campaign orchestrated by Pablo Escobar and his associates to resist U.S.
pressure on the Colombian government to make them stand trial in the United States on
trafficking charges (Smyth, 1998). The plane bombing was part of a larger,
long-standing conflict involving the Colombian state and the Medellín Cartel which,
at the height of its power, controlled 60 per cent of the world’s cocaine and made
the city where it was based among the most violent in the world. During the 1980s,
375 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants were recorded annually in the city, which is
more than 35 times the World Health Organisation’sdefinition of epidemic violence
(Maclean, 2015: 2).
It, therefore, came as a surprise to many that victims of the Medellín Cartel were
excluded from the recognition and benefits granted by the 2011 Colombian Victims’
Law
1
. The Colombian Congress declared that the law would only cover ‘direct
victims of the conflict, i.e. those affected by the guerrillas, paramilitaries or agents of
the state’(Unidad para la Atención y Reparación Integral a las Víctimas, 2018: 7).
The law specifies that ‘those whose rights have been harmed as a consequence of
common criminality will not be considered as victims’(art. 3, para. 3; italics added).
When interpreting the law, also the Constitutional Court’
2
defined as victims only
those affected by violence related to internal armed conflict. Although Federico
Arellano—son of the musician Gerardo Arellano, who died in the HK-1803 plane—
eventually received official recognition as a victim of the Colombian conflict
(Unidad para la Atención y Reparación Integral a las Víctimas, 2018), few other
victims of drug violence have achieved the same.
Processes of transitional justice do not generally include victims of drug-related vio-
lence, despite the fact that, in several Latin American countries, deaths caused by cartel
violence easily exceeds the common 1000-battle deaths-deaths-per-year criterion of civil
war (Lessing, 2018: 1487). In this article, we show that distinctions between victims of
war and victims of what is often termed conventional crime are of great importance for
notions of legitimate victimhood in transitional contexts. Drawing on previous scholar-
ship on hierarchies of victimhood (McEvoy & McConnachie, 2012, 2013), we argue
that the position of victims of drug violence reflects a globally established hierarchy,
which distinguishes between victims of war and those of ‘conventional crime’, and
gives the former greater priority. Our data collected in Colombia—the first Latin
American country to experience drug violence on a massive scale—show that hierarchies
of victimhood have serious legal, symbolic and material implications for those who find
themselves in the less favoured category. Victims of drug related violence struggle to
access justice and to make their voices heard in public discourses about violence. We
argue that current binary distinctions between war and crime do not offer sound concep-
tual tools for understanding the Colombian conflict or the empirical realities of mass vio-
lence and atrocities in many other societies in the global South. They have a distinct
Northern bias which can be counter-productive when used uncritically for understanding
Southern contexts.
The article begins with an overview of the existing scholarship on hierarchies of vic-
timhood. While research on the issue has brought significant advances in the past decade,
we point out that there has not yet been an examination of how global epistemological
power imbalances contribute to our understanding of victimhood. We then continue to
76 Social & Legal Studies 32(1)
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