Homicidal Ecologies
Illicit Economies and Complicit States in Latin America

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.

Deborah J. Yashar (Author)

9781316629659, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 December 2018

438 pages, 40 b/w illus. 23 tables
22.7 x 15.3 x 2.4 cm, 0.61 kg

'In this eagerly anticipated book, Deborah J. Yashar takes up one of the most critical challenges facing Latin America today: how to understand the violence that has plagued the region after democratization. Showcasing Yashar's deep knowledge of Central America, Homicidal Ecologies explains this violence as the result of competition between organizations over the control of territory - an argument that is especially compelling because it draws on transnational, national, and subnational levels of analysis.' Kent Eaton, University of California, Santa Cruz

Why has violence spiked in Latin America's contemporary democracies? What explains its temporal and spatial variation? Analyzing the region's uneven homicide levels, this book maps out a theoretical agenda focusing on three intersecting factors: the changing geography of transnational illicit political economies; the varied capacity and complicity of state institutions tasked with providing law and order; and organizational competition to control illicit territorial enclaves. These three factors inform the emergence of 'homicidal ecologies' (subnational regions most susceptible to violence) in Latin America. After focusing on the contemporary causes of homicidal violence, the book analyzes the comparative historical origins of weak and complicit public security forces and the rare moments in which successful institutional reform takes place. Regional trends in Latin America are evaluated, followed by original case studies of Central America, which claims among the highest homicide rates in the world.

Part I. Introduction: 1. Violence in third wave democracies
2. Engaging the theoretical debate and alternative arguments
Part II. The Argument about Homicidal Ecologies: 3. Illicit economies and territorial enclaves: the transnational context and domestic footprint
4. State capacity and organizational competition: strategic calculations about territory and violence
Part III. Divergent Trajectories in Central America: Three Post-Civil War Cases: 5. High violence in post-Civil-War Guatemala
6. High violence in post-Civil War El Salvador
7. Circumscribing violence in post-Civil War Nicaragua
Part IV. Looking Backwards and Forwards: 8. Concluding with states.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Political structures: democracy [JPHV], Comparative politics [JPB]