Crime, Violence, and the Crisis in Guatemala :.

Crime, Violence, and the Crisis in Guatemala :. PDF Author: Hal Brands
Publisher: Strategic Studies Institute
ISBN: 1584874422
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description

Crime, Violence, and the Crisis in Guatemala :.

Crime, Violence, and the Crisis in Guatemala :. PDF Author: Hal Brands
Publisher: Strategic Studies Institute
ISBN: 1584874422
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 44

Get Book Here

Book Description


CRIME, VIOLENCE, AND THE CRISIS IN GUATEMALA: A CASE STUDY IN THE EROSION OF THE STATE.

CRIME, VIOLENCE, AND THE CRISIS IN GUATEMALA: A CASE STUDY IN THE EROSION OF THE STATE. PDF Author: Hal Brands
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Homicidal Ecologies

Homicidal Ecologies PDF Author: Deborah J. Yashar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107178479
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443

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Book Description
Latin America has among the world's highest homicide rates. The author analyzes the illicit organizations, complicit and weak states, and territorial competition that generate today's violent homicidal ecologies.

Enduring Violence

Enduring Violence PDF Author: Cecilia Menjívar
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520948416
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
Drawing on revealing, in-depth interviews, Cecilia Menjívar investigates the role that violence plays in the lives of Ladina women in eastern Guatemala, a little-visited and little-studied region. While much has been written on the subject of political violence in Guatemala, Menjívar turns to a different form of suffering—the violence embedded in institutions and in everyday life so familiar and routine that it is often not recognized as such. Rather than painting Guatemala (or even Latin America) as having a cultural propensity for normalizing and accepting violence, Menjívar aims to develop an approach to examining structures of violence—profound inequality, exploitation and poverty, and gender ideologies that position women in vulnerable situations— grounded in women’s experiences. In this way, her study provides a glimpse into the root causes of the increasing wave of feminicide in Guatemala, as well as in other Latin American countries, and offers observations relevant for understanding violence against women around the world today.

Adiós Niño

Adiós Niño PDF Author: Deborah T. Levenson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822353156
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In Adiós Niño: The Gangs of Guatemala City and the Politics of Death, Deborah T. Levenson examines transformations in the Guatemalan gangs called Maras from their emergence in the 1980s to the early 2000s. A historical study, Adiós Niño describes how fragile spaces of friendship and exploration turned into rigid and violent ones in which youth, and especially young men, came to employ death as a natural way of living for the short period that they expected to survive. Levenson relates the stark changes in the Maras to global, national, and urban deterioration; transregional gangs that intersect with the drug trade; and the Guatemalan military's obliteration of radical popular movements and of social imaginaries of solidarity. Part of Guatemala City's reconfigured social, political, and cultural milieu, with their members often trapped in Guatemala's growing prison system, the gangs are used to justify remilitarization in Guatemala's contemporary postwar, post-peace era. Portraying the Maras as microcosms of broader tragedies, and pointing out the difficulties faced by those youth who seek to escape the gangs, Levenson poses important questions about the relationship between trauma, memory, and historical agency.

Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala

Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala PDF Author: John P. Hawkins
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806188936
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The possibility of violence beneath a thin veneer of civil society is a fact of daily life for twenty-first-century Guatemalans, from field laborers to the president of the country. Crisis of Governance in Maya Guatemala explores the causes and consequences of governmental failure by focusing on life in two K’iche’ Maya communities in the country’s western highlands. The contributors to this volume, who lived among the villagers for some time, include both undergraduate students and distinguished scholars. They describe the ways Mayas struggle to survive and make sense of their lives, both within their communities and in relation to the politico-economic institutions of the nation and the world. Since Guatemala’s thirty-six-year civil war ended in 1996, the state has been dysfunctional, the country’s economy precarious, and physical safety uncertain. The intrusion of Mexican cartels led the U.S. State Department to declare Guatemala “the epicenter of the drug threat” in Central America. Rapid cultural change, weak state governance, organized crime, pervasive corruption, and ethnic exclusion provide the backdrop for the studies in this volume. Seven nuanced ethnographies collected here reveal the complexities of indigenous life and describe physical and cultural conflicts within and between villages, between insiders and outsiders, and between local and federal governments. Many of these essays point to a tragic irony:the communities seem largely forgotten by the government until the state seeks to capture their resources—timber, minerals, votes. Other chapters portray villages responding to criminal activity through lynch mobs and by labeling nonconformist youth as gang members. In focusing on the internal dynamics of poor, marginal communities in Guatemala, this book explores the realities of life for indigenous people on all continents who are faced with the social changes brought about by war and globalization.

Violence and Crime in Latin America

Violence and Crime in Latin America PDF Author: Gema Santamaría
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806158816
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
According to media reports, Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world—a distinction it held throughout the twentieth century. The authors of Violence and Crime in Latin America contend that perceptions and representations of violence and crime directly impact such behaviors, creating profound consequences for the political and social fabric of Latin American nations. Written by distinguished scholars of Latin American history, sociology, anthropology, and political science, the essays in this volume range from Mexico and Argentina to Colombia and Brazil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, addressing such issues as extralegal violence in Mexico, the myth of indigenous criminality in Guatemala, and governments’ selective blindness to violent crime in Brazil and Jamaica. The authors in this collection examine not only the social construction and political visibility of violence and crime in Latin America, but the justifications for them as well. Analytically and historically, these essays show how Latin American citizens have sanctioned criminal and violent practices and incorporated them into social relations, everyday practices, and institutional settings. At the same time, the authors explore the power struggles that inform distinctions between illegitimate versus legitimate violence. Violence and Crime in Latin America makes a substantive contribution to understanding a key problem facing Latin America today. In its historical depth and ethnographic reach, this original and thought-provoking volume enhances our understanding of crime and violence throughout the Western Hemisphere.

The Construction of the Maras

The Construction of the Maras PDF Author: Antonia Does
Publisher: Graduate Institute Publications
ISBN: 2940503354
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 60

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Book Description
High levels of crime and violence in Central America’s northern triangle are a major preoccupation of politicians, policy-makers and citizens. Public authorities in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala have sought repressive measures to increase public safety and to contain such violence, for which youth gangs (maras) are principally held responsible. Substantiated by interviews with key stakeholders in Geneva, Switzerland, this desk review offers a comprehensive understanding of the motivations and the intended effects behind the suppressive strategies of the respective governments. Viewing the gang phenomenon through the lens of securitization theory allows for a new understanding of how the maras are dealt with. This paper also traces how the concerned states have shaped a certain construction of these gangs and reveals a blurred line between the political and the security sectors. The analysis finds that interests other than combatting a security threat, as well as the particular historical and societal contexts of the three countries, decisively influence how the maras issue is addressed.

Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean

Transnational Organized Crime in Central America and the Caribbean PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Organized crime
Languages : en
Pages : 86

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Book Description
This report is one of several studies conducted by UNODC on organized crime threats around the world. These studies describe what is known about the mechanics of contraband trafficking - the what, who, how, and how much of illicit flows - and discuss their potential impact on governance and development. Their primary role is diagnostic, but they also explore the implications of these findings for policy. Publisher's note.

Votes, Drugs, and Violence

Votes, Drugs, and Violence PDF Author: Guillermo Trejo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108899900
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.