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Violence rising in Latin America since the early 1990s has puzzled media, policymakers and academia. Characterising high scales of violence in non-political confrontations has been one of the main challenges. The main argument of this essay is that the hybrid criminal nature of violence in Latin America by non-state organisations has pushed the discussion to several misinterpretations and conceptual stretching that produces fog rather than clarity. Instead, this essay proposes a concept of criminal war that can capture the complex nature of violence in Latin America by drawing convergences and divergences from diverse fields of literature and confronting usual mischaracterisations in current Latin American research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a recently published historical crime database that shows an unequivocal reduction of homicides in Mexico from the 1950s up until 2005, this paper aims to examine the effect of development policies on homicide reduction in 20th century Mexico. This research presents a panel regression of homicide rates in all 32 Mexican states from 1950 to 2005. Our research shows that the increase in schooling years in Mexico is correlated with the decline in homicide rates. This decline happened despite inverse pressure from social disorganisation caused by unequal economic growth and youth bulges during the period examined. Consequently, the paper shows that sustained development policies can be a pacifying mechanism in a country that has experienced accelerated urban growth and other structural problems associated with crime since the beginning of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long debated what is the role of inequalities in organised violence, but the causal mechanisms remain unclear. I argue that mainstream approaches (e.g. deviance, subcultures, grievances, rational choice and Marxism) fall short because they overlook that organised violence is an intensive form of work. These perspectives often exoticise individuals involved in violence for profit or political purposes. Violence is not a deviant feature of social life but an integral part of collective action. By applying occupational lenses, I position those engaged in violence as a specialised class of manual workers recruited in the protection labour market. Scholars can acknowledge the occupational stratification observed before in research about organised violence by understanding violence specialists as workers. This essay explores how the sociology of work can enhance our understanding of inequality reproduction within criminal organisations, guerrillas, armies, police forces, mercenaries and private military companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an increasing amount of research about the causes behind the extraordinary increase of violence in Mexico since 2007. In the current literature about this topic, various interpretations have emerged about why did homicides increased so quickly, which kind of events could unleash major violence and which structural conditions were necessary so that could happen. In this essay, I review this literature and I classify it in seven types of interpretations according to the kind of events that the authors emphasize as a main factor that explains the increasing of violence. The seven types are 1) governmental prosecution, 2) turf war, 3) state-federal lack of coordination, 4) state-weakness, 5) external influence, 6) economic dynamics and 7) State-Criminal war. Finally, I make a methodological suggestion to study the violence related to drug crime accordingly to the civil wars literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]