The politics of peacetime violence in Latin America: drug wars, gang wars and the United States

As various scholars have argued, the persistence of violence and insecurity in Latin America compels us to rethink peace beyond the mere absence of conventional armed conflict and instead to conceptualize it in relation to ongoing forms of violence, including those driven by organized crime (Kurtenbach 2019; Pearce & Perea 2019). In this brief article, I highlight some of the main characteristics of peacetime violence in Latin America by focusing on the new type of wars being waged in Mexico and Central America, particularly in El Salvador, against gangs and drug cartels. These “new wars” are non-conventional in nature, enacted in the name of security, and rely on the suspension of legal rights via executive decisions and the declaration of states of emergency that allow for the temporal but seemingly unrestricted participation of the military and militarized forms of policing in law enforcement activities (Kloppe-Santamaría & Cruz 2024).