In the Shadow of the Giant: Gun Violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

Abstract

The United States dominates most policy debates and academic studies of gun violence, but this dominance overshadows the often much higher rate of firearm-related injury and death inflicted in its southern neighbors. This chapter explores guns and gun violence in Latin America and the Caribbean, where some countries experience war-level death rates from firearms despite considerably lower rates of gun ownership in those countries. The chapter presents data—which is unfortunately often scarce, incomplete, or dated—on the region as a whole and on specific countries, identifying trends but also distinct and important variation, both geographically and historically. This variation challenges simplistic explanations in terms of the region’s violent past or an enduring “culture of violence.” The discussion thus then turns to the elucidation of factors that influence the incidence of gun violence, from poverty, urbanization, gangs, and drug trafficking to concerns about weak states and personal security. Finally, the chapter shares some of the gun policies and regulations in the region, surveying the steps that countries have taken—and others like its great northern neighbor can take—to curtail the damage and loss of life attributed to guns.

1. Introduction

The nature, scale, and political controversy of gun violence in the United States disproportionately consume the attention of politicians, the public, and scholars alike. This is particularly curious and serious in regard to the country’s southern neighbors, where rates of gun violence (and violence in general) are commonly higher than in the United States. Americans have a vague notion that crime and violence are rampant in Mexico, and news of violence in Caribbean countries like Haiti often diffuses to the United States, but Diego Sanjurjo—one of the few to focus on Latin America—stresses that research on firearms in Latin America commenced only recently and has been conducted by “a limited number of scholars with highly empirical research agendas,” frequently concentrating on state and anti-state violence (for instance, revolutionary or terrorist groups and government responses). Despite the fact that crime, gangs, and drug trafficking are so prevalent in Latin America, leading to the widespread sense of danger in their societies and hence an impulse toward self-defense, “the role of armed citizens in the regional provision of security has not been examined” ([1], p. 3). Further evidence of this neglect appears in Springwood’s volume on “global gun cultures,” which features just one chapter on a Latin country, Brazil, plus a chapter on gun talk in Jamaican popular music, and four chapters on the United States [2].

Not only has Latin American gun violence been comparatively overlooked, but when noticed it has inevitably been perceived through the lens of US behavior and debates. The obvious inappropriateness of this approach is underscored by the Mexican reference to “gringo-style” gun violence, like school shootings, that rarely occur in their country; admittedly, “dozens of homicides and shootings are reported daily and attributed to organized crime, but…lone shooters opening fire for no apparent reason at a school, a church, or a supermarket are almost unheard of” in Mexico [3]. Predictably too, gun control is a different and often lesser issue in Latin America, and equally predictably, as Sanjurjo writes in another essay, gun control in that region has only recently become a subject for scholarly investigation ([4], p. 271).

The present chapter, then, fills a conspicuous gap in the literature on gun violence. It organizes and summarizes current knowledge about firearms injuries and fatalities in Latin America and the Caribbean, acknowledging that the information on the region is quite uneven and often not up-to-date. The chapter proceeds in three sections. First, it presents the best data on gun violence in the context of general violence, highlighting both regional trends and the rather remarkable diversity between countries and even areas within countries, as well as over time. The second section explores factors that contribute to the extraordinary and, in several parts of the region, increasing levels of gun violence, which is regularly but not exclusively attributed to gangs and drugs. While we cannot avoid confronting the histories and values of the various populations, we will resist the temptation to blame all of the gun play on a “culture of violence.” The third section will discuss what has been attempted in terms of gun policies and regulations.

2. Measuring gun violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

The neglect of Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) gun violence is all the more stunning in view of its extreme prevalence, and the overall high rates of homicide, in those countries. Robert Muggah, a primary investigator of gun violence and research director of the Igarapé Institute in Brazil, notes that Latin America, home to 8% of the world’s population, accounts for roughly one-third of the world’s murders—400 per day in 2016 [5]. Indeed, according to Sanjurjo, “Most Latin American countries have homicide rates that are considered to be at epidemic levels by the World Health Organization” ([6], p. 3). In fact, he adds that seven countries—Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela—are responsible for one-fourth of all homicides on the planet.

Not all murders are accomplished with guns, of course, nor are all gun-inflicted deaths homicides (globally, around 20% are suicides) nor all gun-inflicted injuries fatal. Nevertheless, turning to gun-related deaths specifically, the World Population Review estimates that nearly two-thirds [65.9%] of the more than 250,000 such deaths were located in six countries, four of them Latin American (Brazil 49,436, Venezuela 28,515, Mexico 22,116, and Colombia 13,169), plus the United States (37,038) and India (14,710). If we consider instead firearm-related death rates per 100,000 of population, LAC countries fill almost all of the top slots in the world, as depicted in Table 1.

Global rank	Country	Gun-related death rate
1	Venezuela	36.75
2	El Salvador	36.34
3	Guatemala	33.06
4	Colombia	25.29
5	US Virgin Islands	23.29
6	Brazil	22..84
7	Puerto Rico	20.95
8	Belize	19.96
9	Bahamas	19.87
10	Honduras	19.74

Table 1.

Global rank of countries by gun-related death rate (source: World Population Review).

In fact, the next 13 places are occupied by Western hemisphere countries (except for Greenland at number 11), including the United States (10.89) and Panama (10.30) in the 22nd and 23rd places, followed by Iraq (9.72) and Eritrea (9.44) before returning to LAC with Paraguay and Costa Rica [7]. (At the low end of the scale are Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, and China, tied at 0.08.) Incidentally, only three Western hemisphere countries make their way onto the top 10 of gun-related suicides: the United States (7.12) at number two, Uruguay (4.74) at number three, and Venezuela (2.50) at number 10. (Greenland again has the dubious distinction of leading the world in firearm-related suicide per capita.)

As is conveyed by the table, and by the presence of Mexico, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Lucia, and Panama in the top 23, Central America and the Caribbean islands are overrepresented among the countries most plagued by gun violence. To be sure, their small populations potentially skew the rates (the US Virgin Islands, fifth on the list, saw only 23 gun deaths), but these are countries where gun violence has remained high or actually increased in recent years. We will have more to say about this shortly.

What is still more startling about gun violence in LAC is the proportion of homicides that are committed by firearms relative to the number of such weapons in those countries. Globally, approximately 42% of murders result from gun violence. Yet, according to the decade-old Small Arms Survey 2012, 21 of 23 LAC countries for which figures are available suffered higher death rates by guns than the global average. Central America led the way with 70% of homicides being gun-related, followed closely by the Caribbean at 61% and South America at 60%. Among the worst sites for firearm-related homicide were Honduras, Guatemala, Venezuela, Panama, and Puerto Rico, while Cuba defied the trend with only 4.8% of homicides perpetrated by firearm, consistent with its comparatively low homicide rate of 4.5 per 100,000 ([8], p. 9).

Another exception for LAC is its high incidence of female death caused by guns. Globally, 90% of gun-related deaths are men, particularly young men. In LAC, on the other hand, both overall female mortality and female morality due to guns are higher than the global average. Sanjurjo reminds us that most of the top 25 countries for femicide sit in LAC and that, while around the world one-third of female deaths are caused by guns, in Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras that figure exceeds 60% ([1], p. 10).

What is especially confusing about this excessive rate of gun violence in LAC is that it occurs in a part of the world where gun ownership is not very common. For instance, it is often commented with a mixture of bemusement and alarm that the number of guns in the United States exceeds the human population (at 120.5 per 100 people). The rate of gun ownership in LAC is dramatically lower: Uruguay leads with a mere 34.7 guns per 100 people, and the rate falls to less than half that number in Honduras. In total, the gun ownership rate in the United States is 12 times higher than in LAC (which possesses on average less than 10 guns per 100 people), but the gun-related homicide rate in the US is seven times lower ([4], p. 274). It is easy to see, thus, why Sanjurjo concludes that, for reasons that we will consider soon, “the lethality of civilian firearms in many parts of Latin America is extraordinary” but also contradictory: “in countries like Guatemala, Honduras, or Jamaica, even low rates of firearm ownership (<12 per 100 residents) produce some of the highest firearm homicide rates in the world (>40 per 100,000)” ([1], p. 10). Clearly, it is not simply the number of guns but how and when they are used that makes the difference.

Another point that bears emphasis and analysis is the extensive variation of gun violence across the LAC region. Regional or continental averages mask a great deal of diversity and confound explanation of this violence. To start, as we previously documented, although both are higher than the international average, the difference between Venezuela’s firearm-related death rate of almost 37 and Panama’s of just over 10 is substantial. At the regional level, Central America’s aggregate 67% of homicides involving guns stands far above South America’s 53% and the Caribbean’s 51%. At the national level, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Jamaica, and Venezuela occupy one end of the spectrum of homicide rate (more than 30) and proportion of homicides by firearm (more than 70%), whereas Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Peru, Suriname, and Uruguay occupy the other end (homicide rates of just over 10 and percentage of homicides by firearm at under 60) [8]. Uruguay is a particularly interesting case, because it is “by far the most heavily armed country in the region, but its homicide rates are closer to Canada’s than to those of most neighboring countries,” due to its “relatively trusted security institutions” and its “rigorous and well-respected registration system” ([1], p. 10).

Because of their unusually high incidence of violent crime and gun violence, the Caribbean islands have been the subject of focused attention. A very recent study by the Caribbean Community Implementation Agency for Crime and Security (CARICOM-IMPACS) reveals that violent death rates in the surveyed states of the Caribbean approach three times the global average, with guns implicated in up to 90% of those homicides—all while civilian gun ownership is strictly controlled, leading to low rates of legal ownership (1.63 registered guns per 100 people). On the other hand, illegal guns circulate widely in the area, mostly from the United States (see below). Within the region, some countries like Antigua and Barduda and Dominica have notably lower murder rates, while others such as Jamaica, Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Bahamas are among the highest, with guns used in the overwhelming majority of those killings. Guyana stands at the opposite pole, with a much lower proportion of firearm-caused death (see Table 2) ([9], p. 38).

Country	Percentage of homicides by firearms
Jamaica	90
Haiti	84
Trinidad and Tobago	78
Bahamas	75
Guyana	17

Table 2.

Percentage of homicides by firearms, selected Caribbean countries (source: Weapons compass: The Caribbean firearms study).

Across all of the LAC countries, internal diversity of gun violence is also immanent. There is little disagreement among observers that cities tend to be more deadly than nonurban areas. Indeed, the Igarapé Institute reports that more than half of all Latin American cities with a population over 250,000 are victimized by higher-than-regional-average homicide rates and that 43 of the 50 most deadly cities in the world are housed on the continent [10]. The most dangerous cities in the region, however, lie in five countries—Honduras, Mexico, Belize, Brazil, and Colombia—and are not the largest cities in those countries (for instance, Veracruz and Acapulco in Mexico or Ananindeua and Maceió in Brazil) [11]. Among large cities, Koonings and Kruijt provide such disparate numbers as 122 homicides per 100,000 in Caracas and 116 in Guatemala City but only eight in Mexico City and four in Buenos Aires (these statistics do not all cover the same year) [12]. Within Guatemala, it is not urban areas as such that are more violent but particularly southern and border areas, associated with the production and smuggling of drugs; along the southern border, murders increased significantly in recent years, more than 80% committed with guns [13].

Within LAC cities, gun violence is often concentrated in particular neighborhoods. Muggah teaches that four districts alone in Mexico City “account for more than 25% of all violent crime there. In Bogota, 1.2% of street addresses account for more than 98% of homicides, and in Rio, roughly 5% of street addresses account for 95% of all homicides” [5]. Violence is similarly overrepresented in the Altavista section of Medellín, Colombia, with a staggering homicide rate of 140 per 100,000 compared to the city rate of 24.5 ([14], p. 34). But the most interesting and consequential dimension of diversity is the temporal one. Rates of violence generally and gun violence specifically have changed over time and not in the same direction in every location. Nationally, for example, murders decreased in Paraguay and Colombia in recent years as they increased by a factor of two or three in El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela [6]. Returning to Caracas, Briceño-León stresses that the city was reasonably calm before 1990; within a short span “Caracas had become one of the most dangerous cities in the world. In the lists of homicides in the megacities of the world, Caracas appears, with 122 deaths per 100,000, as the most violent” ([15], p. 53). Much of this negative trend he ties to a coup d’etat in 1992 and then the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999, after which gun violence in the capital city soared by two-thirds.

In country after country, violent death rates grew between the 1970s and 1990s, marginally in some places (from 2.6 to 3.0 in Chile, from 3.9 to 4.8 in Argentina), drastically in others (2.1–10.9 in Panama, 11.5–19.7 in Brazil, and 20.5–89.5 in Colombia) ([16], p. 3). From the 1990s gun violence and violent death began to tick up in Central America and the Caribbean, although it actually dropped in South America [8]. Again in Guatemala specifically, rates rose steadily from 2001 to 2009, easing slightly in 2010 and 2011 [13]. The greatest increases between 1995 and 2010 occurred in Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago [8].

Adopting a deeper historical perspective, it is well known that LAC countries share a legacy of violent colonialism, independence struggles, and oppressive dictatorships. Indeed, “By the late 1970s, 17 out of 20 Latin American nations were ruled by dictators” [17], leaving permanent scars on the institutions and psyches of those countries (see below). Military or other autocrats ruled violently in states from Paraguay (1954–1989), Brazil (1964–1985), Chile (1973–1990), Ecuador (1976–1979), and Haiti (1957–1986) to Argentina (1976–1983, infamous for its “dirty war”). As Kooning and Kruijt summarize, during that era of strife, violence in LAC “was mostly political, instigated on behalf of the state by military forces, paramilitary units, and police forces and policing extensions” ([12], p. 3). The end of these regimes and the return of democracy (such as it is) did not inaugurate an era of peace and nonviolence, but neither, Koonings and Kruijt warn us, should we regard the continuation and even rise in violence as a mere extension of the previous period. Instead, they adamantly insist that we understand general violence and specific firearms violence in the region as a form of “new violence” different from its predecessor. The old violence, prosecuted with guns and other weapons, largely aimed to maintain the power of the state and socioeconomic elites or, alternatively, to contest that power (as in populist, revolutionary, or leftist movements). In contrast,

new violence does not aim at conquering state power or changing or defending a regime per se. New violence instead occupies the interstices of the fragile and fragmented formal legal, institutional and political order. As a tentative definition we therefore suggest that “new violence” is socially or politically organized to wield coercion by evading or undermining the legitimate violence monopoly of formally democratic states ([18], p. 8).

Not only is the new violence of the twenty-first century not less lethal, but it tends to be more so, partly because it is more “democratized,” that is, carried out by a wider number and range of participants for a greater variety of reasons. The result, in many countries, is the creation and perpetuation of an “uncivil society,” that is, one in which individuals or groups “force their interest upon the public domain on the basis of coercion and violence, in such a way that the legitimate aspirations of other groups or sectors in civil society are jeopardized and the rule of law is fragmented or shattered” ([18], p. 7), often provoking still more violence. Certainly much of this violence is perpetrated by criminals or by citizens attempting to protect themselves against crime (see below), but much is also still committed by the state, sometimes at a scale exceeding the height of political violence in the previous century. For instance, “in 2009 alone, there were over five times more deaths caused by routine police violence in Rio de Janeiro than the number of politically killed or disappeared in 21 years of military rule in Brazil”; concurrently, “Gang and police violence in El Salvador since 1992 has killed more people than the civil war between 1979 and 1992.” Koonings and Kruijt conclude that this lethal violence can be directly linked to “the high proportion of deaths by small firearms” ([12], p. 4).

3. Explaining gun violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

Just as the facts of gun violence are complicated and diverse across regions, countries, cities, and time periods in Latin America and the Caribbean, so are the reasons for this violence. Some variables naturally obtain throughout the entire area, but many other variables are unique to disparate parts of the area. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the conditions that describe many if not most LAC countries and that contribute to “significant levels of lethal and non-lethal violence” include:

• persistent high levels of income inequality

• high levels of unequal access to services, including education and health

• gender inequality

• lack of opportunities for youth

• perceptions of prevalent corruption and impunity

• expanding levels of social unrest

• increased vulnerability to environmental threats

• since 2020, the socio-economic impact of COVID [19].

Before delving into these factors in this section of the chapter, a word is in order about the proliferation of what Kooning and Kruijt call “armed actors” in LAC countries. No longer is deadly force only or even mainly deployed by agents of the state (e.g. military or police) or enemies of that same state (insurrectionists, revolutionaries, Maoists, etc.). The panoply of armed actors undoubtedly embraces legitimate (but often heavy-handed if not militarized and unnecessarily deadly) law enforcement agents but also local, national, and international gangs and organized crime syndicates (in the drug trade and other branches of the illicit economy) as well as unofficial or extra-legal parties engaged in law enforcement and self-defense such as “urban vigilantes, lynching parties, and private security companies” and various paramilitary groups acting in the absence or failure of state authorities and in an atmosphere of “insecurity, fear and distrust” ([12], p. 1).

3.1 Poverty, unemployment, and inequality

The correlation between poverty and socioeconomic inequality on the one hand and violence (firearm-related or otherwise) is obvious and well understood. Unfortunately, as Muggah claims, Latin America contains 15 of the 20 most unequal countries in the world [5]. Sanjurjo, seconding this assessment, adds that in 2012 22% of young people (ages 15–29) were neither employed or in school, amounting to 30 million Latin American youths [6]. Global statistics support these claims. Latin America is far from the poorest area on earth; that depressing distinction belongs to Africa. However, Haiti consistently ranks among the poorest countries, 27th on the list compiled by the International Monetary Fund, and LAC countries like Honduras (59), Nicaragua (61), Venezuela (62), Bolivia (68), and Guatemala (70) hang in the middle of the pack. But the question is not simply the total national wealth of a country but how that wealth is distributed. Using the measure of Gini coefficient, which expresses the inequality of wealth distribution, Brazil occupies the ninth-most unequal spot, with Belize, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Paraguay, Jamaica, and Mexico not far behind [20].

Some gun-related and other violence stems directly from such inequality. In El Salvador, for example, the infamous “fourteen families” formed an oligarchy and were willing to use force to maintain their status. In that country and similar ones in the region, small elites continue to monopolize most of the wealth, to constrict the options of the vast majority, and to contribute to gun violence directly (by employing private security companies or organizing paramilitary units) and indirectly (by driving poor people into gun-related criminal activity). Predictably, poor people can be attracted to the lures of the drug trade (see below) when employment options are unavailable. “A lack of work, particularly for youths, often translates directly to crime. ‘In Brazil, every…2% increase in unemployment results in a 1% increase in homicide,’ Muggah said. ‘There’s a pretty linear relationship’” [5].

3.2 Urbanization and hyperurbanization, often without sufficient city services

Gun violence is hardly exclusive to urban settings, as we have seen, but it is often particularly prolific there, especially in the poorer neighborhoods. Sanjurjo instructs us that not only is Latin America among the most unequal parts of the world, but it “is also the most urbanized, with over 80% of its citizens living in cities, characterized by rapid and poorly planned urban growth” ([4], p. 276). Some of these city populations live in hyperurban settings, where a troubling percentage of the country’s people inhabit just one city. For years, 40% or more of Chileans have lived in its largest city, Santiago, while a whopping 75% of Paraguayans reside in its mega-city of Asunción.

This massing of humanity is compounded by inadequate services for these residents. According to Muggah,

Latin America urbanized before it industrialized, and within the space of two generations it went from being a profoundly rural society, with roughly 40% of the population in the 1950s living in cities, to being a predominantly urban society, where now you have got over 82% of the population living in cities….

No other part of the world has urbanized so quickly. Sao Paulo added 8 million people to its population in about 25 years. New York took about 150 years to become a million-person city.

Such rapid urbanization strains social structures and a city’s ability to provide services. What you tend to get is a rapid informalization and peripheralization of the population as they are pushed to the margins, and your surplus labor, as it were, ends up living in slums, or what we call here favelas or shanty towns [5].

Inevitably in such locations, a significant chunk of the population ends up in slum neighborhoods—between 10 and 60% in most LAC countries, although perhaps as much as two-thirds in Haiti, over half in Jamaica, and nearly half in Bolivia. Brazil’s hilltop favelas are only the most famous example, where gun violence is perpetrated by gangs and militarized police alike.

3.3 Criminal gangs

Probably the first thing that most outsiders—and even many locals in LAC countries—think of when they ponder gun violence in those states is gang activity. One of the most notorious gangs is Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13, which arose in the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America, composed of countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras but has spread to plague the United States itself. Many of the region’s gangs are much smaller and more local, patrolling and exploiting specific cities, towns, or neighborhoods. Some if not many are involved in the drug trade (see below), but they also engage in other illicit (and often licit) activities that implicate them in gun violence.

That gang activity and violence is not identical to drug trafficking and its related violence is made apparent in a study of gangs in Guatemala. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) compared gang areas and drug trafficking areas and found that there were actually more homicides by firearm in the former than the latter. This situation was exacerbated by the abundance of guns, Guatemala recording the highest rate of gun ownership in Central America (15.8 per 100 people in 2007, more than twice the next-highest rate of 7.0 in El Salvador and Nicaragua). Frustratingly, almost half of all homicides in the mid-2010s had an undetermined motive, but rivalry between gangs accounted for almost 100 per year during that period. Gangs were hardly responsible for most homicides: in 2015 gang rivalries killed 91, but armed robbery killed 184, personal arguments 70, crimes of passion 37, and family violence 15 [21].

Gun deaths due to gang rivalries highlight the fact that the victims of gang violence are not always innocent civilians but often members of other gangs. This process is at work in the surge of murders in northern Ecuador. The province of Esmeralda witnessed a doubling of homicides from January to August 2022, yielding 325 deaths from gang wars over territory that is central to the drug network and a former home to Colombian guerrilla forces. Consequently, the vicinity “has been in the grips of a spiraling crisis for years, a mixture of an inconvenient geographical situation, its role as a drug transit hub, and the presence of increasingly violent gangs” [22].

As others have noted in similar areas of gang violence, gangs often function as de facto rule-enforcement and even service-providing institutions, although often if not always in their own interests. Violence, including but not limited to gun violence, constitutes what Savenije and Van der Borgh call “perverse social organizations” that maintain a kind of social order, to be sure, but in ways that benefit some individuals (gang members and those they protect, who often reciprocally protect them) but damage entire communities ([23], p. 155). In fact, one line of business for gangs is precisely the “protection racket,” a form of “violent entrepreneurship” in which gangs extract payment from citizens in exchange for the citizens’ “rights” to use their land, do business, even travel through their neighbors, or seek gang “justice” for local disputes ([14], p. 28). Of course, control is exercised through threats and acts of violence: in one year (1998), El Salvador experienced 22,000 firearm injuries but also 96,000 beatings, 29,000 knife or machete attacks, and 285,000 death threats [23].

Finally, such gang activity, which is disproportionately male here as elsewhere in the world, perpetuates what Zaluar, in the Brazilian context, dubs the “masculine warrior ethos.” For young members, “the main source of pride lies in the fact that they are part of the gang, use guns, join in robbing and looting, become famous for this, and, if they have the proper ‘disposition,’ may someday ascend in the hierarchy of crime.” As mentioned, guns are central to this value-system: “there is no respect except for the other man’s gun…. All the men carry guns; to carry a gun is to ‘walk mated’ or ‘to have iron in your belt,” and this macho performance is as much for the women they want to attract as for the men of other gangs—or even their own—they want to intimidate ([24], pp. 149–50).

3.4 Drug trafficking

The drug trade is not equivalent to gang activity, but the latter would not exist, at least not in its current form, without the former. Indeed, scholars and activists have observed an escalation of gun and other violence since the 1990s along with the escalation of drug trafficking, and outbursts of the “war on drugs” have commonly resulted in simultaneous outbursts of deadly violence. Since the drug business is both illegal and lucrative, it is an inevitable quarter for fighting between traffickers and police, between traffickers and the general population, and between one gang or cartel of traffickers and another. Very recently, InSight Crime, an institution that studies organized crime and security issues in LAC, reported that rival drug gangs “battling over control of Costa Rica’s cocaine trafficking infrastructure and the domestic market are fueling an increase in violence in the country,” resulting in a 36% rise in homicides from the previous year. In a stunning revelation, professional murderers or hitmen were responsible for almost one-third of all killing in the current year, and the dead, “for the most part, are drug dealers who did not want to give up their plaza, did not want to pay a quota for the right to sell drugs, or simply tried to fight another criminal group” [25].

Writing from the Andean context, Vellinga reiterates that coca production “became the ‘big business’ that we know today only two and a half decades ago”—that is, right about the critical moment of 1990. It is particularly appealing because growing coca requires little skill or investment, inclining many small players to enter the field. At the same time, the illegality of the substance “has turned violence into an indispensable element of market operations”—making violence a “market strategy” in this and other drug trades—in a number of ways: for “ensuring compliance in business transactions,” “to protect one’s market or market share” and a code of silence, “to conquer and defend sources of primary materials” as well as “smuggling routes,” “to protect property obtained through unlaundered, illegally begotten funds,” and “to pressure authorities or eliminate those in the law enforcement branch” who threaten their livelihoods ([26], pp. 78–9).

Speaking of law enforcement, certainly one stream of gun violence is the battle between police and drug traffickers. At the same time, we cannot overlook the complicity, even the participation, of legal authorities in this illicit business. Brazil emerged in 1985 from a military dictatorship known for abuses of power, illegal arrests, and torture. Consequently, “Some of the officers who had adhered to those unlawful practices became members of extermination and extortion groups, or became involved with bicheiros (racketeers controlling the illegal jogo do bicho, the ‘animal game’ lottery) and drug traffickers.” Not only did firearms deaths not decrease after the end of the junta, but they actually increased and dramatically so: in 1980, before the military government fell, the gun death rate among adolescents was 59 per 100,000, but by 1995 it had soared to 184 per 100,000 ([24], p. 141).

3.5 State failure, insecurity, and privatization of security

Many critics inside and outside LAC countries have complained about the inability of the state to enforce laws and manage economies, let alone provide decent services, housing, and job opportunities for their people. Drugs and gangs specifically and gun and other violence more generally serve as both a cause and an effect of this incapacity, allowing criminals—and corrupt police and officials—to act with impunity while exposing the citizenry to pervasive insecurity. As Sanjurjo put it bluntly, “Latin Americans frequently acquire guns in a context of state neglect, corruption, and illegitimacy. It is thus for many an attempt to counteract feelings of living in ‘no man’s land,’ at the mercy of violent criminals and illegitimate state authorities” ([4], p. 287).

It goes without saying that LAC countries have a long and deep history of violence, dating back to the first contacts with European conquerors and colonists (and in some places, predating colonialism in brutal local states and empires). Indubitably “Latin American history since independence has been marked by conflict and the violent struggle for political power,” conflict and struggle that it central to the construction of modern nations and their national identity ([27], p. vii). (Certainly the same could be said of virtually every country today.) The military dictatorships laid another layer of violence and injustice onto LAC history and culture, and scholars like Savloff have argued that the “afterlives of political violence” resonate today, inspiring a “pedagogy of cruelty” (a phrase borrowed from Rita Segato) throughout the region ([28], p. 44). The effect is not only a dispersion of violence into the fabric of society but a tolerance or acceptance of violence in which “people tend to resort to solving problems their own way, the sort of vigilante approach” [5].

While this may well be, a history and culture of violence alone, as we have contended, does not explain the intensification of firearms-related and other violence in the past 25 years. To any such history and culture we must amend the ongoing and growing environment of fear, mistrust, and insecurity. States have proven unable to guarantee peace and order; in fact, states have often been prime agents in conflict and disorder, especially against the poor, workers, and indigenous peoples. Those empowered to protect citizens often exploit and abuse citizens, delegitimizing governmental institutions and officials. Indeed, Sanjurjo holds that.

political illegitimacy prevails in all Latin American countries to a greater or lesser extent. Public opinion surveys show that in 2011, only 33 percent of Latin Americans trusted the police and just 36 percent considered that the police actually protected them from crime. Another 43 percent even thought that the police were involved in criminal activities. The perception of criminal injustice is not much different. In all but two countries, more than half of survey respondents said they had little or no trust in justice courts to be helpful in the case of suffering a robbery or assault ([1], pp. 7-8).

And this feeling is not unfounded; for instance, in 2003 more than a 1000 homicides were attributed to the Rio de Janeiro police department. One favela dweller expressed it thusly: “we live in a state within a state… the law that operates is the ‘law without law’” ([29], p. 65).

In such circumstances, it is little wonder that criminal gangs, drug trafficking cartels, and corrupt police are able to operate with relative immunity. It is little wonder too that individuals, families, communities, corporations, and elites take security into their own hands, spawning new armed actors on the LAC stage including vigilantes, lynching parties, self-defense militias, paramilitary units, and private security companies [4]. For the poor and vulnerable, guns (and other weapons) are a cheap and accessible form of self-protection, and of course for criminals guns are effective and culturally-attractive tools to achieve their interests and expand their influence. Godoy among others has examined lynching (which does not always involve guns) as a method of criminal justice or justice crime [30]. Scholars and journalists have also documented the persistence of paramilitary groups throughout the region; non-state or extra-state organizations which sometimes function with the tacit or explicit support of the state, paramilitaries may be spontaneous local militias or private armies mobilized “to eliminate those who are perceived as threatening the socioeconomic basis of the political hierarchy.” Tragically but not incomprehensibly, “The tactics and victims of paramilitary groups are reminiscent of the old counterinsurgency wars sponsored by some Latin American states during the late 1970s and 1980s” that once again evince “the usurpation or delegation of part of the state’s monopoly over the legitimate use of violence to an extra-state actor” ([31], p. 6).

For those who do not take the extreme step of mobilizing a militia, an alternative is to hire a private security firm. Ungar has studied this “privatization of citizen security,” noting that “the combination of democratization, neoliberalism, and record crime has converged to spur such a phenomenal growth in private security that private security guards not outnumber public police officers in nearly every country” ([32], p. 20). The number of such businesses and the guards they employ has skyrocketed since the 1980s, in concert with the explosion of gangs, drug traffickers, and gun violence across the region. Ungar estimated in 2008 that as many as 1.6 million private security officers worked in Latin America, with anywhere between 80,000 and 200,000 serving in Guatemala alone. Six thousand private security firms operated in the Mexico City area with between 140,000 and 450,000 employees, the majority of them former police officers.

Armed citizen security is not necessarily a bad thing in every incarnation (although vigilantism and lynching can hardly be justified), but scholars like Sanjurjo judge it to be both a sign of state weakness and a source of that weakness. Firearms in private hands are corrosive to social order, prompting “behavior which delegitimizes authorities and harms state security policies,” which are singularly fragile in LAC “due to the legitimacy deficits of authorities and the lack of information regarding firearms and users, which hinder state capacities to control armed citizens from a distance” ([1], p. 1).

3.6 Proximity to US gun market

The afterlife and culture of violence and the armed privatization of citizen security would not be so bad if not for the access to a steady supply of guns. While a few large LAC countries have domestic gun manufacturers, a great many if not the majority of firearms owned and used flow from the United States, both legally and illegally. Loads of guns—and not just small arms—were shipped to countries like El Salvador by the United States during the right-wing fight against leftist guerrilla movements. According to Muggah, little El Salvador received more than 32,000 M-16 rifles (not to mention hundreds of thousands of grenades and other lethal devices) over a dozen years; three decades after the cessation of armed struggle, “at least half of the weapons turning up in crime scenes in the country can be traced back to the United States” [33].

Many LAC countries have been beneficiaries of American guns. Muggah also reports that over 70% of the firearms seized by Mexican officials originated in the US. That country, Chile, Colombia, and Brazil consumed almost two-thirds of the guns exported from the US to LAC between 2000 and 2014—Colombia and Mexico accepting almost half of the entire amount. As America’s nearest neighbor, Mexico unsurprisingly took the lion’s shared, passing along the rest to countries further south by various gun selling and smuggling routes. As Grillo, who has investigated the Western hemisphere gun trade, writes, between 2007 and 2018 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (and Explosives, as of 2002) linked over 150,000 guns in the hands of criminals to US manufacturers and retailers [34].

Authorities in LAC recognize the threat of American firearms. In August 2022 the Mexican government filed a multi-billion dollar lawsuit against several major US gun makers, alleging that 880,000 American firearms cross the border illegally each year [35]. The suit was predictably dismissed in a Boston federal court, but the plaintiffs have vowed to appeal. Meanwhile, leaders in other countries demand action from the US: in early 2023 the prime minister of the Bahamas pressed American vice-president Kamala Harris to curb the pipeline of illegal guns onto his island, and almost simultaneously the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines declared, “The United States has to do something about…the easy access to guns and the easy exportation of guns. They have the resources to help us with that” [36].

4. Gun policies and regulations in Latin America and the Caribbean

In January 2023 Dickon Mitchell, prime minister of Grenada, acknowledged the “constant threat” of small firearms in his small and relatively safe country. Despite that comparative calm—or maybe because of it—he stated, “I am not a fan of private people holding firearms, and that actually includes ex-police officers… I intend to take a zero-tolerance approach to firearms in our communities,” arguing that “the idea that we should be walking around with firearms in my view is inimical to our culture, to our way of life” [37]. Like him, although perhaps less adamantly, governments throughout LAC are aware of or concerned about the multiplication of guns and the concomitant propagation of gun violence in their territories. Yet, while LAC leaders do not labor under the equivalent of the American Second Amendment, restricting and regulating guns is a daunting task, given the factors just discussed.

Sanjurjo considers it bizarre that, “Despite being the region in which the dreadful consequences of gun violence are most notorious, gun control is largely absent from public and political discourses”; worse, with its many countries and their disparate politics, LAC is and always will be at best a patchwork of gun policies and, as we have already noted, “the literature and overall knowledge on guns, gun violence, and gun control are very limited and usually focus on the particular situation of a given country” ([6], p. v). In his own summary of five countries in the region, he finds that four (Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, and Uruguay) do not ensure private citizens’ right to own guns, although Mexico grants the right with some regulations. All five ban automatic weapons, and most prohibit at least some semi-automatic guns. Several also set limits on the number of firearms a person may possess (10 in Panama, 10 including one handgun in Mexico, three in Uruguay). All require some form of license and registration, and two (Brazil and Ecuador) forbid carrying weapons (the others allow carrying by permit or limited number). All but Mexico demand that the owner demonstrate a need for a gun, self-protection being the most basic valid reason. Of course, Sanjurjo is the first to admit that “it is uncertain how many gun owners actually go through the bureaucratic formalities needed to get a license and register their firearms” ([4], p. 282).

Other countries, especially in Central America and the Caribbean, have strict gun laws on the books:

• Barbados will not allow anyone convicted of gun violence in the past 5 years to acquire a license

• El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica, and Honduras restrict legal access (license suspensions and/or gun confiscations) for individuals who commit domestic violence

• St. Kitts and Nevis seizes guns in cases of threatened domestic violence

• Antigua and Barbuda and the Bahamas allow revocation of licenses or seizure of weapons if the owner is deemed dangerous or mentally unhealthy, and both can refuse to issue a license in the first place [38].

These statutes indicate that authorities comprehend the association between domestic violence and gun violence.

In recent years, some countries have passed tougher gun laws. For instance, in 2022 Argentina enacted Resolution 157/2022 to prohibit firearms from persons accused of domestic or gender-related violence and to take their guns. Even so, abusers are seldom denied their current weapons or the freedom to buy new ones [39]. Others have tried and failed to strengthen their laws. Goldstein described the case of a 2005 Brazilian gun ban referendum. This Disarmament Statute would have “legislated sweeping restrictions on the selling and carrying of firearms”; specifically, it would have

required very strict legal procedures for the possession of firearms, increased the age limit for those who could own firearms, lengthened prison sentencing for those who carried firearms illegally, forced gun manufacturers to imprint bullets so that homicides could be traced to the original weapon, and made arms trafficking illegal in a manner parallel to the illegality of drug and animal trafficking ([40], p. 31).

Unfortunately, it was defeated by a 64% no vote. In fact, during his 2018 presidential campaign, Jair Bolsonaro promised to abolish the gun laws already in effect and to “liberalize their acquisition and use by civilians,” a common right-wing refrain ([6], p. 3). Finally, despite the fact that homicide increased by 80% in 2022, Ecuador rolled back gun regulations adopted in 2011 that successfully reduced murder rates. However, with the current surge in homicides (almost five times the rate in 2017), president Guillermo Lasso reasons that Ecuadorians need greater freedom to carry weapons “in response to growing insecurity” [41]. Time will tell which approach is wisest.

5. Conclusion

Most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have a gun violence problem, some an extreme problem. But theirs is not the problem as witnessed in the United States, with its profligate and anomic mass shootings associated with interpersonal disputes, hate crimes, or simply wanton desire to hurt people. Accordingly, this chapter’s presentation on gun violence in LAC countries offers several salutary lessons:

• The United States cannot serve as a model or lens for understanding and curbing gun violence in other countries.

• Gun violence must be understood within the broader context of violence, homicide, and non-lethal injury.

• Like politics, gun violence is local, with significant variations by country, city, neighborhood, and time period.

• In gun violence, culture and history matter, but they matter not as destiny but as legacy. A culture and history of violence may make violence more likely, but outbreaks and escalations of violence are much more related to specific contemporary forces and experiences.

• There is no simple linear correlation between rates of gun ownership and rates of gun violence.

• While gun violence is frequently linked to gang activity and drug production and trafficking, it cannot be reduced to those factors.

• Gun violence is often related to real or perceived danger and insecurity, flowing from the state’s inability to rein in crime or in many instances the state’s participation in crime.

• Taking security into citizens’ private hands tends to increase the number of armed actors and can potentially increase, not decrease, gun violence while further eroded the legitimacy of the state.

• Finally, much more—and more current and more consistent—research on gun violence in Latin America and the Caribbean is urgently needed.

Hopefully this chapter has demonstrated this last need and helped to point scholars to immediate areas of investigation.