Policing, urban poverty and insecurity in Latin America

Abstract

This article explains how, in the late 20th century, Latin America went through a transition in social-control policy that followed and paralleled the area’s transition from a pervasively authoritarian polity to a democratic one bearing a strong neoliberal imprint. Social-control strategies initially designed to serve a national-security doctrine mainly directed against political opponents morphed into strategies for the repressive government of the advanced marginal groups that for the most part live within economically deprived urban areas. The focus here will be on Buenos Aires and Mexico City. These two cases will be used to exemplify the way in which crime and public security in the Latin American megalopolis have become an important part of the political agenda and how the fears and concerns so amplified have stimulated strong neo-authoritarian pressures that in certain ways have stifled police-democratization processes which had got under way in both Argentina and Mexico in the last decade of the 20th century.