Violence and the Latin American Imaginary: Preliminary Reflections

El tema de la violencia es connatural a la historia misma de América Latina y, por lo mismo, resulta inagotable en cualquiera de sus múltiples manifestaciones materiales y simbólicas, desde los orígenes coloniales hasta la actualidad.

Espacio urbano, comunicación y violencia en América Latina (2002) Mabel Moraña

El debate en torno a la globalización y sus consecuencias, que resulta fundamental de cara al futuro, puede terminar por ocultar sin embargo la historicidad de ciertos procesos cuya explicación no se agota o no debiera agotarse en la emergencia del “nuevo” orden global y neoliberal. Con relación a las violencias esto parece particularmente relevante en tanto hoy muchos de los brotes violentos hunden sus raíces en la historia y se convierten en las “molestas” señales de un retorno a cuestiones no resueltas y hoy agudizadas por los vientos neoliberales.

“Violencias y después. Culturas en Reconfiguración” (2003) Rossana Reguillo

In her 1992 Children of Cain: Violence and the Violent in Latin America, award-winning journalist Tina Rosenberg claimed that to the average North American newspaper reader, Latin America appeared as an “overwhelmingly, numbingly violent [region], marked by political disappearances, repressive dictatorships, torture, death squads, and revolutions that invariably seem to bring more of the same” (7). Rosenberg’s much lauded study featured a cast of violent actors—among them, an Argentine naval officer acting on behalf of Argentina’s dictatorship and responsible for the torture and deaths of hundreds; a member of Peru’s feared Shining Path; a Nicaraguan guerrilla fighter turned military officer for his new government; a member of El Salvador’s brutally repressive ruling class.¹ Nearly two decades after the publication of Rosenberg’s highly publicized book, the Latin American countries featured in Children of Cain are no longer at the mercy of brutally repressive military dictatorships. In retrospect it is clear that the image of Latin America captured in her book was quickly becoming obsolete by the mid 1990s, although Rosenberg could not have realized this at the time her book was finished.¹

Since the publication of Children of Cain, much of Latin America has gradually turned to democratically elected governments, some of which have tried, however summarily or reluctantly, to bring to justice the most egregious perpetrators of previous state brutality. Along with the gradual end to these repressive military regimes, Latin American nations have witnessed significant disarmament and disbandment of the organized guerrilla groups that relied on armed struggle and their own brutal tactics to battle governments and control local populations since the 1960s. As one might expect, economists and politicians interpret soaring indices of foreign investment and a rapidly growing tourist industry as reliable indicators of increased political and social stability throughout the region. Yet even a cursory look at Latin American cities, and at many inter-American border zones, leads many scholars and observers to a more troublesome conclusion. Any number of statistics will show that, despite nearly two decades of arguably democratic governments, growing public confidence in the judicial system and the eventual restoration of civil liberties throughout the region, for millions of Latin Americans daily life remains, as Rosenberg’s reader would have concluded in the 1990s, “overwhelmingly, numbingly violent.”²

The realization that the emergence of new democratic regimes did nothing to end the reality of Latin America as a frighteningly violent place was the impetus behind the late Susana Rotker’s 2002 edited collection of essays, Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America. In his foreword to the collection, Jorge Balán mentions the dashed hopes of those who had expected that the transition to democracy might bring with it a reduction in violence and an increased sense of public security. Addressing the alarming statistics of urban crime at the beginning of the 21st Century, Balán reaches the disturbing conclusion that the spread of violence and its concomitant climate of fear might pose new threats to Latin America’s recent democracies:

[f ]ear is now as much...