Conceptualising criminal wars in Latin America

Figures & data

Figure 1. Homicide rates in Latin America from 1981 to 2015.

Source: World Health Organization Causes of Death Database.

Figure 2. Share of deaths from homicide by regions, 1990 to 2017.

Source: Global Burden of Disease Collaborative Network. Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. Results. Seattle, United States: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), 2018. Map: https://ourworldindata.org/homicides.

Table 1. Concepts relating to Latin American violence and criticisms.

Concept	Organisation	Main authors	Criticism under Gerring’s (1999) terms
Economic civil war/new war/criminal insurgency	Criminal rebels or insurgencies	Schedler (2018); De la Calle and Schedler (2021); Sullivan and Elkus (2008); Bunker and Sullivan (2010)	No differentiation from other concepts of conflict.
War on drugs/drug violence	Organised criminal groups	Durán-Martínez (2015, 2017); Trejo and Ley (2020); Osorio (2015)	It was not parsimonious enough because it created a narrow field focusing on drugs.
Militarisation/security crisis/security gap	Cartels	Kenny and Serrano (2013); Flores-Macías and Zarkin (2021); Pion-Berlin and Trinkunas (2011)	Insufficient depth to account for the wider dynamics, just a partial explanation.
Criminal violence/urban violence	Organised crime	Moncada (2013); Cruz (2010); Kronick (2020); Auyero, Bourgois, and Scheper-Hughes (2015)	These concepts do not account for the difference between regular criminal violence and massive organised criminal violence.
Violence democracies	Gangs	Arias (2006); Whitehead, Fair, and Payne (2010);	Any democracy can be named by any national feature but excludes hybrid regimes like Venezuela, so not parsimonious.
High violence equilibrium	Organised crime	Bergman (2018)	This concept does not differentiate other high levels of conflict violence and does not recognise the conflict dynamics.
Homicidal ecologies	Gangs	Yashar (2018)	Not familiar enough with other research fields, lack of utility to understand conflict dynamics by assuming a steady violence status.
Criminal war (cartel–state conflict)	Cartels	Lessing (2015, 2017)	Criminal war has more resonance than this specific feature of the concept. Rather than opposing turf wars, those are phases of criminal wars.

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