Political Violene

The informal justice system of garrison constituencies undermines the rule of law in Jamaica but this has not received much scholarly attention. The counter society framework is used to explain garrisons as informal governance units that challenge the state. Society abhors a governance vacuum. People will replicate polices when these polices are inadequate. Governments have reduced public spending in the inner city. The criminal dons have replaced the state as the major patrons of residents and replicated state services including an informal justice system. Participant observation and focus groups revealed that the dons tried the “cases” reported and the shooters meted out punishment. A man was shot in the leg for kicking a pregnant woman. Two women were warned not to fight. Perpetrators of physical assaults and domestic abusers were beaten. Police informers, renegade shooters and borrowers who refuse to repay the dons were executed. Switching party allegiance led to expulsion from the community. Since the demise of the Western Kingston dons by law enforcement, some residents have formally reported crimes. The state must use this opportunity to support these residents, reassert its authority in the other eleven garrison constituencies and outperform the dons with effective public policies thereby making them redundant.

The criminalization of social movements and protest remains underanalyzed as a problem intrinsic to democracy. Comparison of two seemingly different Latin American countries with regard to the degree of violence, Chile and Mexico, suggests that, far from being caused by the dysfunction of the legal system or other institutional factors, criminalization is a specific form of retrenching on well-established civil and political rights, rendering them synonymous with criminal behavior that must be sanctioned legally, and tolerates abusive behavior by state agents toward human rights defenders, who are viewed as enemies. As such, it is key to an understanding of the current violence in Latin America.
Fieldwork and interviews of human rights defenders in the two countries suggest that
criminalization of collective action is a systemic state response to the intense multifaceted mobilization in favor of democracy and new generations of rights that Latin America has been experiencing “from below” during the past decade.

SPANISH
La criminalización de los movimientos y protestas sociales sigue siendo un problema
intrínseco a la democracia pero es poco analizado como tal. Una comparación del grado de violencia en dos países latinoamericanos, Chile y México, sugiere que, lejos de ser el producto del sistema legal u otros factores institucionales, la criminalización es una forma específica de reducir derechos civiles y políticos bien establecidos y convertirlos en sinónimo de comportamiento criminal que debe ser sancionado legalmente. Dicho proceso tolera el comportamiento abusivo por parte de agentes del estado hacia defensores de los derechos humanos, quienes aparecen como enemigos. Esto es crucial para entender la actual violencia en América Latina. La criminalización de la acción colectiva es una respuesta estatal sistémica a una intensa y multifacética movilización de grupos de base a favor de la democracia y nuevos derechos en esta última década.
Keywords: Criminalization of protest, Violence, Drug-related violence, Democracy,
Latin America, Indigenous peoples, Extractive industry

Presentación en 3rd ISA Forum of Sociology en mesa redonda "Repression and protest control". 10-14 Julio, Viena, 2016.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the results of an ethnographic research that explores two phenomena that have gained great visibility in the latest round of global protests that began in 2011. On the one hand, it examines the incorporation of a performative, non-lethal, and small-scale violence in the repertoires of protest from minority groups such as noted in a diversity of cities like Athens, Cairo, Sao Paulo, and Santiago. On the other hand, it accounts for the return of direct confrontation tactics in policing protests, supported by a militarized logic of management of urban conflict. In a context of emerging alter-globalization movements, both issues compel me to (re)think, first, the role of violence "from below" in contemporary politics and, second, the apparent normalization of the conflict between police and protest, especially in recent years in Western democracies. Drawing on a qualitative perspective, I will thus analyze the intersections and overlapping of these two lines of force by inquiring the mobilization carried out by the student movement in Santiago, Chile, which started in 2011 and opened up the largest cycle of public protests in that country since the restoration of democracy in 1990. To do so, it is fundamental to situating these violent protest repertoires both in a synchronic and in a diachronic axis, the former to think of potential influences and similarities on a global scale and the latter to assess the weight the popular resistance against the Pinochet regime in the 1980s.