State hierarchies versus criminal hierarchies

Forms of presence and territorial control of drug trafficking organizations in three Latin American cities

Abstract

Medellín in Colombia, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil and Ciudad Juárez in Mexico show important similarities if the reference point is the chronically high levels of homicides, classified here as lethal violence. Robbery, extortion and kidnapping - characterized in this text as predatory violence - are also conceived as common practices that make coexistence difficult for the inhabitants of these three cities. But a finer reading of both types of violence and the multiple indicators that shape them requires a more precise identification of its relational components. Agents from various state institutions -mainly those nominally in charge of providing security- and members of criminal organizations (especially dedicated to drug trafficking) appear as first-level protagonists in the works that analyze the topic. But it cannot be ignored that neither the agents of government institutions for the enforcement of the law, nor the members of criminal organizations, act in a homogeneous manner. This text evaluates in a comparative way some of the ways in which the State hierarchies and criminal hierarchies have been configured and deployed on the ground in the three aforementioned cities. Approaching the topic from a hierarchical perspective contains the hypothesis that both types of hierarchy represent differentiated forms of social ordering. Understanding these alterities makes it necessary to observe the type of criminalized activities, the degree of organizational complexity that arises from them, the participating social agents -individuals or groups-, their interaction formats, as well as the different types of temporalities and territorialities. The approach of this article, comparative by definition, seeks to briefly explain overlapping spatialities, articulated evolutionary processes, interspersed forms of division of labor and different mechanisms of legitimation and insertion into local frameworks.