Since the 1990s, criminal violence and responses to it have been central concerns in Latin American politics. Some of this debate focuses on how violence reflects a failure of the region’s regimes and, in particular, the democracies that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. In “Violent Pluralism” (2010), an essay Daniel Goldstein and I published fifteen years ago, we made the argument that many Latin American countries experienced a particularly violent form of democratic governance. We argued that violence was not so much an aberration or failure of the region’s contemporary democracies but, unfortunately, a feature of them. All democracies exercise some forms of violence and engage in varied modes of exclusion supported by the exercise of this violence. In the Latin American context we examined violent pluralism, a practice where various non-state armed groups, including criminal organizations, exercised violence in the service of their own goals but also engaged with politicians and powerful social actors to advance political and economic projects, often as functions of perpetuating exclusion in the context of democratic governance.
In the fifteen years since Goldstein and I published this essay, much has taken place across the region. There is a wide recognition of the role of criminal organizations in politics not simply in disrupting the proceedings of democracy but also in shaping politics at the local and national levels (Barnes 2017). The dynamics of violent pluralism has been documented around the region by numerous scholars highlighting the roles that armed groups play in everyday politics and how they affect the political, social, and economic life of many in the region (Albarracín 2018; Wrathall et al. 2019; Trejo and Ley 2020; Blume 2021). This essay highlights three dynamics about violent pluralism and crime in the region. The first looks at the historic roots of these arrangements. The second examines the variations of violent pluralism in democratic contexts. The third surveys violent pluralism in the context of democratic retrocession in the region and around the globe.
History Antecedents and Contemporary Connections
Latin America, as Diane Davis (2010) argued in the volume Goldstein and I edited, has oscillated between efforts to build more centralized state apparatuses that consolidated control over violence and other phases where violence has shifted to private hands. Violent pluralism, in the sense of violence held across multiple actors, has long been an element of Latin American political life. During the colonial and post-independence eras, private landholders had immense power over the lives of the enslaved inhabitants. Over time, regional governments built policing powers to prevent uprisings of excluded populations and maintain an order amenable to the upper classes (Centeno 2002; Holloway 1993). Amid revolutions and rebellions, states undertook sometimes authoritarian state building projects that involved the further expansion of military and policing powers and, during those periods, a consolidation of control over violence.
Contemporary violent pluralism may have first manifested in Colombia in the early 1980s. Colombia was ahead its time. It was a democracy undertaking market reforms that was also experiencing multiple simultaneous insurgencies as well as paramilitary conflicts over minerals (Malagón et al. 2020). These factors laid the ground for powerful criminal organizations developing around Colombia’s emerging illicit narcotics sector in the early 1980s. Armed actors expanded rapidly. Insurgents and criminal groups involved themselves in politics (Salazar 2001) and governed territory. Colombia, of course, continued as a democracy even while assassination became a common political tool and armed groups played increasingly important roles in supporting electoral campaigns (Arjona et al. 2025; Albaraccín et al. 2023). Such actions provided a basis to exclude individuals seeking to protect the rights of peasants and rural communities (Ramírez 2011). These armed practices contributed to the Parapolitica scandal which produced an agreement between politicians and paramilitary leaders to “refound” Colombia along right-wing lines through the combination of political power and armed force (López Hernandez 2010)
Beginning in the 1980s, democracy returned to the rest of the region and these forms of politics became visible in other contexts. These new democracies were generally liberal, free market-oriented, with limited social benefits, and, often had little accountability for dictatorship-era crimes. This generated a sense of impunity among security forces for violating the rights of citizens (Pereira 2005). Growing global narcotics markets spurred by reduced trade barriers opened space for the expansion of the global cocaine trade, which provided funding for criminal groups (Andreas 2000). Illicit markets offered some citizens economic opportunity not accessible through legal markets that in the region favor large-scale domestic and international capital (Schneider 2009). Some politicians began to look at these groups as potential tools in their electoral efforts, a dynamic that was also not unfamiliar from earlier periods of Latin American politics (Fischer 2008; Roldan 2002).
Goldstein and I characterized one of the factors driving the emergence of these new dynamics as neo-liberalism, a particular market-oriented instantiation of historic underlying inequalities in the region. The shape of Latin America’s armed politics, however, emerges from more nuanced regional and national factors of which the neo-liberal turn of the late 20th Century is only a part. While the non-state armed groups emerging around the region from the 1980s onwards reflected an inflection point in the region’s experience with conflict because of their scale, capacity for violence, and economic resources, these groups also expressed a long history of non-state violence.
Contemporary violent pluralism sits in a particular history of exclusion experienced in each country. Countries throughout the region underwent varied experiences with labor-focused inclusion that gave rise to dictatorial reactions in the mid-to-late 20th century (Collier and Collier 1991). The new democracies that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s sought to avoid upsetting social relations while offering broad formal political inclusion. The nature of the gap between political inclusion and social and economic exclusion was a critical dyanmic that shaped the nature of violent pluralism in particular countries. In Colombia, it was characterized by the history of conflict over rural land reforms and pressures put on cities by the civil conflict. In Brazil, this was illustrated by the economic marginalization of large portions of the country’s non-white majority that had migrated to cities to—often unsuccessfully—seeking inclusion in the formal economy. In cities, this contributed to illicit economies that empowered criminal groups and furthered police violence (Arias 2006; Alves 2018). In Mexico, this dynamic involved adjustments to the post-revolutionary settlement that were undertaken in the late 20th century. These included new sources of opportunities due to licit and illicit trade (Andreas 2000; Lomintz 2024), how marginalized and excluded populations sought inclusion in a system where earlier corporatist inclusion mechanisms had failed, and the ongoing role of the formal and informal violent structures that supported those systems operating amid pluralist political competition (Astorga 2000; Dell 2015). Armed groups and economic and political leaders stepped into the space between economic exclusion and pluralist political opportunities, exploiting this gap to their own ends. The type of armed groups, their projects with politicians, and the uses of informal markets as an ersatz form of inclusion shaped the violent pluralism of each country.
Varied Violent Pluralisms
Inequality, violence, and exclusion are part of democracy. Understanding the dimensions of these factors not only tells us something about the shape of a particular democracy, but it can reveal pathways to a fuller and more robust pluralist system of government. Failing to address these exclusions heightens tension and augments the risk of these retrocessions that we see around the globe today. This section discusses the dimensions of this variation within violent pluralism and its significance for the region.
Countries across the region are at risk of increasing violent crime. Where Colombia has experienced plural violence over the past sixty years, if not longer, Ecuador was long seen as a country with relatively low crime where criminal violence erupted, and criminal organizations only became broadly visible in 2021. Similarly, Brazil has long faced high rates of violent crime in many cities while Chile long has, until recently, very low crime rates.
Various factors drive this underlying tendency towards violent pluralism. Significant portions of the population suffer limited access to democratic rights (Caldeira and Holston 1999). Lacking economic opportunities to address this exclusion through private channels, large portions of the population are subject to the predation of corruption, violence, and underpaid police and criminal organizations who many begin to look to as a positive alternative to a feckless state (Mainwaring and Perez-Liñan 2023).
In this context, crime becomes an important alternative pathway through which individuals can seek some modest level of economic inclusion and protection in the region’s somewhat exclusionary democratic political systems. Different places have different criminal economies that contribute to the shape of illicit political and economic opportunity. In rural areas the nature of exclusion and the types of illicit pathways to economic opportunity are different from those found in urban areas. Places with large illicit economies embedded in the global narcotics trade differ from locales where the global narcotics trade is limited. In some places, for example, extortion markets dominate illicit markets, changing the nature of powerholders and their relationship to the state and to society (Arias and Barnes 2017; Moncada 2022).
An example of this dynamic is the contrast between drug growing areas and drug export areas. At drug growing sites, armed organizations need to attract and maintain workforces that can grow and process drugs. Alternately, at zones of export the population is a secondary concern of criminal groups and even an object of exclusion. In an agricultural setting this can lead to different politics as is the case in southern Colombia where peasants, their union leaders, drug traffickers, and organized armed groups such as insurgents and paramilitaries all work with politicians to advance policies that protect growing areas, attract workers, and maintain control over the population and drug products (Ramírez 2011). In exports areas criminals can contribute to a politics that is much more exclusionary, building tighter ties to like-minded politicians, actively suppressing or removing inhabitants to create different types of localized politics (Ballvé 2021; Stelle 2017).
Urban areas offer a different experience of violent pluralism. Here robust consumer markets coexist with poverty and a great deal of urban informality. In these complex spaces the nature of violent pluralism bifurcates. Wealthy areas have private security guards (Caldeira 2000), more formal policing to supplement private security, and an upper class that increasingly removes itself from everyday life (Villareal 2023). In impoverished areas, gangs or other armed actors may exercise power over the population (Barnes 2025) and work with local leaders and politicians to secure and deliver votes (Arias 2017).
Space here does not allow for discussing the manifold forms of how violent pluralism operates in all social settings. That said, there are multiple dynamics of exclusion and informal modes of self-protection and inclusion. This relationship can contribute to varied types of violent pluralism.
Two critical points are worth mentioning here. The first is that there has been a substantial focus on narcotrafficking as a primary driver of violence in the region. Drugs, including the Andean cocaine trade and the trade in natural and synthetic opioids, have played a large role in driving violent pluralism, but they are hardly the only cause. Colombia experienced violent pluralism even before the emergence of the modern cocaine trade in the early 1980s, driven largely by various insurgent groups that supported themselves through extortion rackets—most notably, kidnapping. Cocaine income expanded, dynamized, and diversified Colombia’s violent pluralism (Mejia and Restrepo 2013). Other places have more limited participation in the drug trade but may still suffer from extortion or other serious crimes that can create a basis for violent pluralism. In Jamaica, for example, the decline in the Caribbean drug trade as Mexico expanded its transshipment role in the 1990s, dynamized the local extortion market and the politics around that. So, while drugs have been a key source of this dynamic in the region, they are hardly the only one. The second often overlooked factor is the availability of firearms (for an exception see Ungar 2020). Contemporary violent pluralism is deeply connected to ready access among civilians to high powered weapons. Easy and cheap access to such arms—whether exported from the United States, produced locally, or as a result of other conflicts—contributes to violence and enables the production of an organizational framework for violent pluralism. Understanding these conditions is important to perceive variation within these systems.
Pressure Toward Repression and Plural Authoritarianisms
We find ourselves now in a period where many Western Hemisphere countries have faced meaningful democratic retrocession. Violent pluralism provides important insights into these changes and the nature of the regimes that have emerged.
Violent pluralism can generate circumstances that promote democratic retrocession and the abuse of human rights. The belief that crime results from state failure gives state officials the opportunity to argue that if human rights norms and the law did not restrain them, the state could use greater repressive policing power more directly to combat crime (Arias 2017). The more criminal violence, the greater the justification for repressive and even authoritarian state power even as state officials are implicated in working with armed actors to support their political projects. At the same time, these armed political projects within the context of democratic governance make violence more persistent, contributing to a vicious cycle that can lead to increased repression and eventually democratic retrocession as the population becomes inured to repression and state fecklessness.
Many authoritarian regimes in the region also experience violent pluralism in the sense that armed force is held by numerous different state and social actors and not just the state. This framework could be reframed as plural authoritarianism. Older models of authoritarianism from this region focused on centralized state power and repression (Cardoso 1979; Schamis 1991). Contemporary research, however, reveals the plural violence exercised in the region’s authoritarian regimes (Hirata and Grillo 2024; Joffily 2024; Kloppe-Santamaria 2021). Authoritarianism is not necessarily a system of centralized violence and there is ample evidence in the region’s history of non-state armed actors operating on behalf of authoritarian governments. Like democratic regimes, authoritarian regimes can also use plural violence as a feature of the regime to advance different projects pointing towards another relationship between violent pluralism and authoritarianism.
Venezuela is a good example of this dynamic. The state itself exercises a great deal of violence against society, going so far as to undertake the systematic killing of civilians with the Operaciones de Liberación del Pueblo, the repression of protest, and the arrest of dissidents (Antillano, Arias, and Zubillaga 2021). At the same time the government has debilitated and decentralized the power of police in the interests of protecting itself against future coup attempts by security forces but with the effect of the government losing centralized control of the police forces and the ability to repress criminality (Hanson 2024). Colectivos, a type of armed group that operates with police support to control criminal markets and sometimes repress dissent, play important roles in some areas. Some government agents tolerate the presence of Colombian guerillas on its territory as a way of accessing illicit markets and providing additional armed support for the government. There are numerous large scale criminal gangs.
Acknowledging violent pluralism in authoritarian contexts provides us with insights into the politics of the region and of the modalities of authoritarianism operating today. The dynamics of violent pluralism are not tied solely to democratic governments giving lie to the argument made in some circles that authoritarian regimes are more ordered than democratic ones, or that authoritarianism is a solution to plural violence, as is the case with much of the current discourse on Bukele’s state of emergence regime in El Salvador (Wolf 2023). Authoritarians can make as much—if not more—use of plural violence as democracies.
Amid large-scale illicit economies and markets in powerful firearms, governments face substantive challenges in maintaining a monopoly on legitimate violence within their societies. Rather, conditions exist in many contexts globally for the emergence of multiple armed groups. Many states will find it more effective and even affordable to manage these networks of violent actors rather than to seek to assert control over their crimes. What we have been observing in Latin America over the past forty years is an important dynamic that also operates in other regions of the world, though shaped by the specific political and social dynamics of these regions.
Conclusion
Latin America faces immense challenges with violence, reflecting a long history of non-state armed actors, that affect both democratic and authoritarian regimes throughout the region. This essay has examined the varied ways that violent pluralism has affected and continues to affect the region and shape its polities. The region’s contemporary regimes have roots in these dynamics. Licit and illicit economic factors associated with crime and violence mark how politics proceeds today and provide pathways into authoritarian rule. Addressing these risks, both in the context of violent democracies and plural authoritarianisms requires recognizing the forms of exclusion and economic dynamics to produce violence in societies and build coalitions to address those who, at the same time, seek to contain and diminish armed organizations and their connections into political systems.