The Killers' Kindness: Gang Humanitarianism in Latin America
Amalendu Misra
Mar 14 2023 •
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One of the endearing features of contemporary Latin America society is the prevalence of violent gangs. They have an obliquitous presence across Brazil, in many Caribbean islands such as Haiti and Trinidad and Tobago, throughout Central America and much of narco-infested Mexico. The gangs’ archetypal tattooed young men stand out among the region’s greatest sources of public anxiety. The society and citizenry in many of these places remain perpetually hostage to their violence and everyday mayhem. They go about their business of terrorising neighbourhoods with absolute impunity. In places like El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras their indiscriminate violence against the civilian population has forced hundreds of thousands to flee these countries. These gangs, “have left near-broken societies in their wake”, across much of Latin America. As violent non-state actors perpetuating insecurity they engage in kidnapping, extortion, forced recruitment of individuals to their ranks, undertake horrific sexual violence against women, peddle narcotics and murder their rivals and bystanders with impunity.
The regional criminal landscape displays certain common features. According to a 2021 study all the top ten most violent cities in the world happened to be in Latin America. According to the humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontier (MSF), although not in a state of war, many of these gang-infested societies are experiencing conditions similar to the ones felt by people living in a war zone. With 60 murders per 100,000 people in 2017, El Salvador was the deadliest place in the world that was not at war. The severity of their violence has earned some countries like Honduras as murder capital of the world, leading to the regime engaging in a country-wide purge to rid the gangs once and for all.
However, during times of extreme societal crises, some gangs in Latin America are found to have engaged in humanitarian activism. Add to this are the occasions when some notoriously violent drugs cartels have begged forgiveness for acts of public violence while handing over to police members of their fraternity responsible for questionable undertakings. This begs the question what lies at the heart of the enterprise of “criminal humanitarianism”? Is there something called “criminal integrity”? Does the idea of “honour among thieves” have some practical manifestation? Are these acts of pure altruism? Or, are these attempts at “whitewashing” their conventional images in order to gain some sort of legitimacy from the wider public?
While they paint an overwhelmingly negative picture, there are shades of grey when it comes to depicting some gangs in the continent’s violent landscape. Some gang members belonging to violent grassroots criminal organisations as well as those in the narco-fraternity from time-to-time have engaged in acts that defy their conventional stereotypical image. As one recent observer put it,
despite the widespread fear they sow through extortion, murder and kidnapping, groups like the Gulf Cartel and their rivals, the Sinaloa Cartel, profess a twisted code of ethics under which they believe they are looking out for the most vulnerable in Mexican society.
More:
https://www.e-ir.info/2023/03/14/the-killers-kindness-gang-humanitarianism-in-latin-america/