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What are the factors behind citizen support for the use of extralegal violence in Latin America? The prevailing argument is that, in countries overwhelmed by skyrocketing levels of criminal violence, people endorse the use of extralegal violence as a way to cope with insecurity. Other scholars believe that support for extralegal violence is the result of state withdrawal and failure. Few empirical studies, however, have tested any of these arguments. In this article, using regional data from the 2012 AmericasBarometer, we examine different explanations regarding citizen support for the utilization of extralegal violence in Latin America and the Caribbean. We developed a multi-item scale that gauges support for different forms of extralegal violence across the Americas, and we hypothesize that support for extralegal violence is higher not only in countries with extreme levels of violence but especially in countries in which people distrust the political system. Results indicate that support for extralegal violence is significantly higher in societies characterized by little support for the existing political system. Resumen ?Cuales son los factores que determinan el apoyo ciudadano al uso de la violencia extralegal en America Latina? El argumento predominante es que en paises con niveles altos de violencia criminal, las personas apoyan el uso de la violencia extralegal como un mecanismo para hacer frente a la inseguridad. Otros trabajos consideran que el apoyo a la violencia extralegal es el resultado del fracaso o ausencia del Estado. Pocos estudios empiricos, sin embargo, han tratado de probar dichos argumentos. En este articulo, utilizando datos regionales de la encuesta de 2012 del Barometro de las Americas, analizamos las diferentes explicaciones detras del apoyo ciudadano al uso de la violencia extralegal en America Latina y el Caribe. Desarrollamos una escala que contiene multiples items, la cual estima el apoyo a distintas formas de violencia ilegal en las Americas y planteamos la hipotesis de que el apoyo a la violencia extralegal no es solo alto en paises con niveles de violencia extrema, sino que lo es especialmente en aquellos en los cuales las personas no creen en el sistema politico. Los resultados obtenidos indican que el apoyo a la violencia extralegal es significativamente mas alto en sociedades caracterizadas por bajos niveles de apoyo al sistema politico existente.

This article examines the role of rumors in the collectivization of violence in twentieth-century Mexico. By focusing on a series of cases of lynching driven by rumors of child theft and the stealing of children’s bodily fluids and organs, the article reveals the hierarchies of credibility that make rumors an effective tool to trigger and escalate violence. The article’s main argument is that rumors become deadly or “weaponized” in the form of lynchings in contexts where anxieties and fears regarding processes of modernization and economic exploitation intersect with citizens’ perception of the state as unable or unwilling to provide security and justice. In twentieth-century Mexico, what made rumors vectors of lethal violence was not only a context of collective fear and economic uncertainty, but also their credibility vis-à-vis other forms of knowledge. Such credibility was grounded on citizens’ keen sense of distrust in state authorities and on people’s belief that without recourse to lynching, crimes would go unpunished. Adding to the credibility of these rumors was also the lynched victim’s actual or perceived condition as foreign or external to the community where the lynching took place, a condition that made them more likely to be the subject of rumors involving the extraction and exploitation of local resources. Child-theft rumors occupy a central place in Mexico’s contemporary context of insecurity. This article provides a historical reflection on the connections between hearsay, mob violence, and citizens’ long-term experiences of exploitation, state neglect, and impunity.

This article analyzes the impact that religion had on the act of lynching and its legitimation in postrevolutionary Mexico. Basing its argument on the examination of several cases of lynching that took place after the religiously motivated Cristero War had ended, the article argues that the profanation of religious objects and precincts revered by Catholics, the propagation of conservative and reactionary ideologies among Catholic believers, and parish priests’ implicit or explicit endorsement of belligerent forms of Catholic activism all contributed to the perpetuation of lynching from the 1930s through the 1950s. Taking together, these three factors point at the relationship between violence and the material, symbolic, and political dimensions of Catholics’ religious experience in postrevolutionary Mexico. The fact that lynching continued well into the 1940s and 1950s, when Mexican authorities and the Catholic hierarchy reached a closer, even collaborative relationship, shows the modus vivendi between state and Church did not bring an end to religious violence in Mexico. This continuity in lynching also illuminates the centrality that popular – as opposed to official or institutional - strands of Catholicism had in construing the use of violence as a legitimate means to defend religious beliefs and symbols, and protect the social and political orders associated with Catholic religion at the local level. Victims of religiously motivated lynchings included blasphemous and anticlerical individuals, people that endorsed socialist and communist ideas, as well as people that professed Protestant beliefs and practices.

Despite the formal end of civil war and armed conflict, Mexico continued to experience significant levels of violence during the 1930s and 1940s. This period has traditionally been associated with the process of pacification, institutionalization, and centralization of power that enabled the consolidation of rule in postrevolutionary Mexico, a process epitomized by the marked national decline in levels of homicide that began during the 1940s and continued during the second half of the 20th century. The dynamics of coercion and resistance that characterized state-society relations at the regional and local levels reveal, however, that violence pervaded all aspects of society and that it was perpetrated by a multiplicity of actors, including vigilantes, pistoleros, private militias, lynch mobs, military, police, and other violent entrepreneurs. Violence was used as both a means to contest the legitimacy of the postrevolutionary state project as well as an instrument of control and coercion on behalf of political elites and local power brokers. Conversely, violence superseded the realm of traditional politics and constituted a central force shaping Mexican society. Violence against women in the public and private spheres, violence driven by economic interests, and citizens’ attempts to control crime and social transgressions reveal that citizens—and not only state actors—contributed to the reproduction of violence. Although violence in postrevolutionary Mexico was neither centralized nor exercised in a top-down manner, impunity and collusion between criminal and political elements were central in the production and perpetuation of violence both within the state and within civil society. When examined in light of these two decades of the postrevolutionary period, the character and levels of violence in contemporary Mexico appear less as an aberration and more as the latest expression of a longer, though uneven and nonlinear, historical trajectory of decentralized, multifaceted, and multi-actor forms of violence.

A number of scholars have analysed lynching in Latin America as a response to the recent upsurge in insecurity and crime in the region. This article turns our attention to historical and deeper socio-political undercurrents behind this practice. Drawing on several cases of lynching that took place in post-revolutionary Puebla, the article argues that, rather than signalling state absence, the occurrence of lynching expressed communities’ reactions towards a state presence that was perceived as intrusive and illegitimate. It furthermore shows that lynchings emulated the brutality and visibility of extralegal forms of violence perpetrated by public officials at the local level.