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The “New Wars”: security and cooperation in Mexico and Northern Central America

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Abstract

This article analyzes the current security crisis in Mexico and northern Central America from a comparative and subregional perspective. It does so by focusing on the “new wars” waged by the governments of these countries since the early 2000s against transnational criminal organizations and youth gangs. While acknowledging the weight and impact of these criminal actors in these countries’ levels of insecurity and violence, we suggest these challenges cannot be understood without looking at the series of political missteps that have repeatedly derailed efforts to build accountable institutions and comprehensive policies to fight crime and violence in the subregion. The article argues that, given the common challenges faced by these countries, subregional cooperation initiatives could offer an important mechanism to build integral and long-term security policies if the right conditions (at the domestic and transnational levels) were to be in place.

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Notes

  1. We use the term transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) instead of drug-trafficking organizations (DTOs) to make visible, as other authors before us have suggested, the fact that these groups’ criminal activities are not limited to the illicit drug business but instead include other transnational activities including arms trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering.

  2. Some of the works that have tried to study these countries’ common security challenges from a comparative and transnational perspective, include Dudley (2010) and Kloppe-Santamaría (2023).

  3. There is an ongoing debate as to how to best describe the aims and actions of members of organized crime, particularly when it comes to their strong and sustained linkages with state actors and institutions. See, for instance, the theoretical discussion elaborated by Valentín Pereda (2022) based on the Mexican case. Nonetheless, for the purposes of this article, we will follow the more traditional and narrower definition of political violence suggested by Bourgois (2001) as “targeted physical violence and terror administered by official authorities and those opposing it, such as military repression, police torture and armed resistance” (p. 8).

  4. In the year 2011, considered one of the most violent ones of President Calderon’s term, the number of deaths reached a total of 27,212. The year 2019 also reached historic heights, with murders reported during the first half of the year. See: INEGI 2020

  5. Interviews with law-enforcement officials, in Tegucigalpa and San Salvador in July and August 2011 and January 2012.

  6. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that around 550,000 people from northern Central America (Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador) have sought refuge in neighboring countries and over 315,00 have been internally displaced. https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/central-america/ [last accessed: July 25, 2023].

  7. Such categories of people range from so-called “social degenerates” during the 1910s and 1920s, to leftist guerrillas and subversive student activists during the 1970s.

  8. The latest example of the popularity of these measures abroad was Honduran President Xiomara Castro (2022-present), who had promised to implement a more holistic and civilian approach to security matters and yet declared in June of 2023 a state of emergency in some areas and deployed soldiers to regain control of the streets.

  9. Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores, Mexico, “Grupo de Amigos de la Estrategia de Seguridad de Centroamérica,” available in: https://www.gob.mx/sre/acciones-y-programas/estrategia-de-seguridad-de-centroamerica-esca [last accessed August 2023].

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  1. George Washington University, Washington, DC, 20052, USA

    Gema Kloppe-Santamaría

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    José Miguel Cruz

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Kloppe-Santamaría, G., Cruz, J.M. The “New Wars”: security and cooperation in Mexico and Northern Central America. Crime Law Soc Change (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-023-10130-w

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