Parainstitutional Violence in Latin America

Bergquist, Charles W., Gonzalo Sánchez G., and Ricardo Peñaranda, eds. Violence in Colombia, 1999-2000: Waging War and Negotiating Peace. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2001. Illustrations, map, appendix, index, 325 pp.; hardcover $65, paperback $21.95.

Campbell, Bruce B., and Arthur D. Brenner, eds. Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Appendix, bibliography, index, 371 pp.; hardcover $59.95, paperback $26.95.

Fumerton, Mario. From Victims to Heroes: Peasant Counter-Rebellion and Civil War in Ayacucho, Peru, 1980-2000. Amsterdam: Rozenberg, 2002. Illustrations, maps, figures, tables, abbreviations, appendixes, summary in Dutch, notes, bibliography, index, 368 pp.; paperback.

Human Rights Watch. The "Sixth Division": Military-Paramilitary Ties and U.S. Policy in Colombia. New York: Human Rights Watch, 2001. Photographs, abbreviations, appendixes, notes, 138 pp.; paperback $10. Also available at <www.hrw.org/reports/2001/colombia>.

Kaldor, Mary. New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Bibliography, index, 214 pp.; paperback $19.95.

Koonings, Kees, and Dirk Kruijt, eds. Societies of Fear: The Legacy of Civil War, Violence and Terror in Latin America. London: Zed Books, 1999. Map, notes, bibliography, index, 352 pp.; hardcover $65, paperback $27.50.

Rich, Paul B., ed. Warlords in International Relations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Bibliography, index, 192 pp.; hardcover $79.95.

Sluka, Jeffrey A., ed. Death Squad: The Anthropology of State Terror. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Illustrations, bibliography, index, 270 pp.; hardcover $39.95, paperback $18.50.

This essay examines parainstitutional violence in Latin America, notably the institutions of paramilitaries, death squads, and warlords, placing them in a global and comparative perspective. It engages in a critical debate of some recent literature, attempting to clarify key concepts and relationships and to synthesize aspects of the discussion. It focuses on case studies of parainstitutional violence in Colombia and Peru.

Parainstitutionality has been defined by Germán Alfonso Palacio Castañeda, in the specific context of Colombian politics, as "a series of mechanisms of social regulation and conflict resolution that do not rely on formal constitutional or legal means, but are governed by informal arrangements and ad hoc mechanisms." These mechanisms are "manifestations of, and alternatives to, an institutional inability to respond to both social conflict and the State's need to accumulate capital." Palacio Castañeda's analysis cites "paramilitary repression [as] one type of parainstitutional expression" (Palacio Castañeda 1991, 106-7).

Recent social-scientific study of parainstitutional violence is the outgrowth of work in two main spheres and by two distinct sets of actors. The first, and probably more important, labor was carried out by nongovernmental human rights organizations, notably Human Rights Watch (with its associated bodies, such as Americas Watch and Middle East Watch) and Amnesty International. They were supplemented by, and often dependent on, a host of less visible and much more vulnerable human rights groups in key states, especially Latin American ones. Since the 1970s, these organizations have devoted extensive attention to the role of death squads and paramilitary forces linked to the state security apparatus. In recent years they have been joined by the truth commissions characteristic of transition and democratization processes. The result is an extensive, grim body of documentation of these parainstitutional actors and activities—a foundation essential to comparative research, though nearly all these materials focus on individual countries and cases.

The work of NGOs has been gradually buttressed by an impressive body of scholarship that has strongly influenced evolving perspectives on parainstitutional violence. With rare exceptions, this literature has hailed from the left of the political spectrum, has been heavily concentrated in the United States, and has been spurred by the intimate involvement of successive U.S. governments in countries where death squad and paramilitary activity was rife, especially in Central and South America. The main figures in the English-language literature include Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, writing both together and separately (see, for example, Chomsky and Herman...