The Political Economy of Crime and its challenges to Latin American Democracies.

Session of the seminar Global Destinies of Latin America.

This session proposes to analyze the complex influence that criminal organizations have acquired on the governance of nations in the subcontinent. Transnational organized criminality has evolved, creating a new powerful elite of violent entrepreneurs that influences the political dynamics and controls entire regions of cities, states and portions of global markets, beyond the expected democratic governance models and the Rule of Law. Sovereignty, government legitimacy, and citizen participation in the political community are now “intersected” by a myriad of transgressions in the formal order.  This is a new and different type of relationship between state actors that need to be explained with a revised paradigm of the current political systems paradigms of Latin America.

By Arturo Alvarado, sociologist, former director of the Sociology Center of Colegio de México. Holder of the Rodolfo Stavenhagen Chair on Indian Rights. Laureates of the DEA program (FMSH), 2018.