Abstract
Since the turn of this century, an intractable and inescapable violence has enveloped millions of people across Latin America. The region has 17 of the 20 deadliest nations on earth and 47 of the world’s most violent cities; and while just under 10 percent of the global population lives in Latin America, almost 40 percent of the world’s homicides happen in the region. Murder rates in some areas resemble those of active war zones. To wit, current Governor of Rio de Janeiro Wilson Witzel campaigned with the idea to target criminals in the city’s favelas with sharpshooters aboard helicopters—as it is, police in Rio already kill on average five people every day. The violence is all the more remarkable as the military dictatorships and civil wars that once cursed Latin America have almost all ended, in many cases decades ago. The region is also now characterized by stabilized standards of living and consolidated democracy.
This is the mystery Marcelo Bergman seeks to unpack in More Money, More Crime: Prosperity and Rising Crime in Latin America. Bergman is the director of an insecurity and violence center (CELIV is the Spanish acronym) at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, a public university in Argentina. In a self-described 15-year undertaking, Bergman has produced what must be the most comprehensive study of crime, law enforcement, and the judicial and incarceration systems in Latin America. It is an ambitious project of massive data and literature accumulation packaged around a comparative theoretical perspective that situates crime within the social, economic, and political context, or “crime environment,” in which the phenomenon occurs.
First, to address the book’s title and the claim that the region is undergoing “decades of economic prosperity.” While some data are presented in support, any number of recent economic and political crises in the region call into question the title’s set-up. Growth rates may be a little higher in some places, and inequality a little lower in others, but prosperous? Rather than a full-on argument of the region’s rising affluence, the point I think Bergman wants to make is that rising crime and violence cannot be explained by lower incomes, increased poverty, or rising inequality (as some would causally believe)—that the poorest places are not the most violent, crime rates in general do not track with economic trends, and thus we need alternative explanations. Someone along the line simply proposed an overstretched title.
But economic growth is not really integral to the analysis, and Bergman is not fundamentally interested in the economic conditions in the region. He is a well-known criminologist, and here he develops a compelling theoretical approach that revolves around the concept of crime equilibria. In particular, he theorizes the shift in crime environments from what he calls stable “Low Crime Equilibrium” (LCE) into the consolidation of “High Crime Equilibrium” (HCE), when the demand for illegal market goods becomes greater than the ability of law enforcement and criminal justice institutions to neutralize the conditions, and organized crime, extreme violence, and astonishing rates of impunity become entrenched. In Bergman’s telling, the driving force behind rising crime in Latin America is the surging consumer demand for illegal markets, which has led to a subsequent intensification in profit-driven crime characterized by the strategic use and prevalence of highly predatory and extremely violent crimes—homicides, abductions, extortions, kidnappings, and large-scale robberies (such as in mining or oil).
The emergence of illegal markets (drugs, yes, but also stolen goods and commodities, and unlicensed, unregulated, and refurbished products) is being met by inadequate or malfunctioning law enforcement and the decreasing marginal effects of courts and prisons (which he argues are effective institutions of deterrence only under LCE). Both conditions—growth in illegal markets and weakened ability to counter them—are necessary and mutually reinforcing for HCE to become established. Bergman depicts the conditions as equilibria because, he argues, no single variable determines the other: they evolve together. HCE, the consolidation of organized crime, high levels of corruption, and extraordinary rates of violence and impunity are the result.
As Bergman notes, illegal markets are hardly new around the world. What distinguishes Latin America is that the region’s authorities react too late and too erratically, usually when illegal markets are already firmly entrenched. By then, the cost of intervention is seen as too high and what he terms “forbearance” sets in. Forbearance means that “mayors, political bosses, and even ministers and presidents purposefully bypass enforcement for the sake of other public benefits, or even more precisely to avoid the perceived high cost of enforcing the law” (p. 29).
Furthermore, criminal law institutions such as the police and courts are built to react to deviant events. But in HCE crimes are not all that deviant, and a large number of cases simply go uninvestigated. Bergman develops a parallel argument in the later chapters linking the failure (and often complicity) of law enforcement and judicial systems in the region with vestiges of the authoritarian period and the failure of these institutions to adjust to new models after transitions to democracy. For the majority of Latin Americans, police are adversaries, and judges and prosecutors have a tendency to mistrust intelligence and surveillance. This historical baggage has also played a role in the establishment of HCE in the region.
In addition to providing the general comparative framework, the project Bergman presents here also has an explicit descriptive goal. The book contains information from nearly every empirical study of crime in Latin America, and Bergman conducted several surveys himself in different parts of the region—some with incarcerated inmates, others with victims of crime. In addition to the magnitude and trends in all manner of criminal activity (Chapters 2 and 3), there are cross-national datasets and typological scales on illegal markets, the drug industry, and organized crime (Chapters 4, 5, and 6), the police (Chapter 7), the courts and criminal justice (Chapter 8), and prison and incarceration (Chapter 9). If this study is not exhaustive of the data and literature on criminology in Latin America, then it is as close as a scholar can possibly get (there is a Statistical Appendix where the data collection and various databases are detailed).
One has to reach for omission to find points of criticism. A fuller analysis of the connections of today’s HCE to Latin America’s authoritarian past would be interesting. The role organizational innovation has played in expanding criminal networks in the region, and the direct contributions by police, paramilitary, and other state-sanctioned criminal activity to HCE are underexplored. The region’s parallel crisis of violence against women is also not linked to the analysis of HCE. But no book can do it all, not even one of this ambition.
Bergman’s is mostly a depressing outlook for the short-term future of Latin America and the millions of people entrapped or ousted by mind-numbing levels of violence. After all, that’s what equilibrium means—opposing social forces counteract and are balanced, and things tend to stay as they are. A recent example of this equilibrium comes from Mexico, where authorities have used a new aerial initiative to uncover 222 clandestine graves since 2018. But drug and kidnapping gangs are now reusing the graves, dumping new bodies into the pits that have already been excavated and investigated. Of all the terms used to describe HCE in Latin America, you can also include terribly heartbreaking.