This book challenges the quasi-consensus that Latin American countries dominate global homicide rankings mainly due to the illegal nature of drug production and trafficking. Building on US scholarship that looks at the role of social exclusion and discriminatory policing in drug violence, the authors of this volume show that the association between illegality and violence cannot be divorced from the inequality that prevails in those countries. This book looks in detail at the functioning of drug markets in Recife, the largest metropolitan area in Brazil’s North-East and, over the last 25 years, the heart of the country’s most violent metropolitan area. Building on extensive interviews and field work, the authors map out the city’s drug markets and explore the reasons why some of those markets are violent, and others are not. The analysis focuses on the micromechanics of each market, looking at consumption patterns and at the workings of retail sales and distribution. Such a systematic micro-level comparative analysis of the workings of Latin American drug markets is simply not available elsewhere in current literature. These findings point to significant gaps in current understandings of the link between illegal markets and violence, and they illuminate the need to factor in the way in which those markets are nested in exclusionary social contexts.

It is widely believed that monopoly control, based on violence, corruption or risk-spreading, is characteristic of markets for illegal goods and services, such as marijuana and bookmaking. This essay examines the effects on the organization of a market arising from changing the status of a good or service from legal to illegal. In general, it can be shown that illegal enterprises are likely to be smaller than their legal counterparts. The most important reasons for this are the lack of external credit markets, itself a consequence of the non-existence of audited records, the lack of court enforceable contracts, and the need to restrict knowledge of participation in the enterprise. The inability to advertise or to create goodwill for the enterprise itself, as opposed to goodwill for its agents, is also significant. Corruption is likely to affect the organization of the market only under special circumstances, where there is a single agency which monopolizes enforcement. Though that condition held for most illegal markets thirty years ago enforcement now is fragmented and overlapping, which inhibits an agency from granting a monopoly franchise. The introduction of violence does not in general change this result. The use of violence to acquire market power can occur only where there is a ready focus for that violence. Most illegal markets lack either time or space consistency that would permit exclusion of competition. Some comments about the optimal use of violence are offered. The final section offers some analysis of the plausibility of using illegal market enforcement as an instrument of organized crime control. There have been systematic changes in the set of opportunities available to organized crime members; illegal markets no longer are so central to the power and income of organized crime. The shift from gambling to narcotics markets has also weakened the link between organized crime and illegal markets.

Some theories predict that profits facilitate peace in illegal markets, while others predict that profits fuel violence. I provide empirical evidence from drug trafficking in Venezuela. Using an original data set, I compare lethal violence trends in counties near a major trafficking route to trends elsewhere, both before and after counternarcotics policy in neighboring Colombia increased the use of Venezuelan transport routes. For thirty years prior to the policy change, lethal violence trends were similar in both groups of municipalities; afterward, outcomes diverged: violence increased more along the trafficking route than elsewhere. Together with qualitative accounts, these findings illuminate the conditions under which profits fuel violence in illegal markets.

Over the last few decades, drug trafficking organizations in Latin America became infamous for their shocking public crimes, from narcoterrorist assaults on the Colombian political system in the 1980s to the more recent wave of beheadings in Mexico. However, while these highly visible forms of public violence dominate headlines, they are neither the most common form of drug violence nor simply the result of brutality. Rather, they stem from structural conditions that vary from country to country and from era to era. In The Politics of Drug Violence, Angelica Durán-Martínez shows how variation in drug violence results from the complex relationship between state power and criminal competition. Drawing on remarkably extensive fieldwork, this book compares five cities that have been home to major trafficking organizations for the past four decades: Cali and Medellín in Colombia, and Ciudad Juárez, Culiacán, and Tijuana in Mexico. She shows that violence escalates when trafficking organizations compete and the state security apparatus is fragmented. However, when the criminal market is monopolized and the state security apparatus cohesive, violence tends to be more hidden and less frequent. The size of drug profits does not determine violence levels, and neither does the degree of state weakness. Rather, the forms and scale of violent crime derive primarily from the interplay between marketplace competition and state cohesiveness. An unprecedentedly rich empirical account of one of the worst problems of our era, the book will reshape our understanding of the forces driving organized criminal violence in Latin America and elsewhere.

Violence is widely associated with illegal drug markets, and is one of the features that can differentiate illegal capitalism from legitimate business. This book explores the perceived causes and functions of violence in an illegal drug market in Dublin City, Ireland. Understanding why violence occurs amongst participants in illegal drug markets is an ongoing part of the criminological endeavour. Scholars debate the various business and personal factors that contribute towards violent perpetration. Complex aspects of participants’ lives, such as addictive disorders, socioeconomic status, and socialisation, add further complexity. This book examines violence in an illegal drug market from the perspectives of those who had participated in it, that is, formerly addicted people as well as former profit-oriented drug dealers. The text is the result of the first ethnographic study of an illegal drug market in Dublin. This book will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as scholars interested in the criminology and psychology of violence. More specifically, the book will be relevant to those interested in the areas of illegal drug markets, gang studies, the intersection of drugs and crime, and desistance from crime.