ABSTRACT
During the decade of the 1990s, it was possible to observe in Latin America a signifi cant increase in criminal violence. The eventuality of suffering some type of assault in public or the possibility of being a victim of a kidnapping has turned into one of the most widespread fears in societies in this region of the world. In this sense, it is not surprising that the latter part of the past century saw an increase in the demand for public and private security services, the extended use of different types of electronic surveillance and security technologies, and the proliferation of closed neighborhoods, as well as the comprehensive use of citizen watchdog bodies such as “Neighborhood Watch” or the “culture of fi ling complaints,” each strategy more extensive than the preceding one. In the same way, during those years, one could also see the creation of institutions defi ned as “intelligence” specifi c, supposedly to create databases for monitoring criminal information; at the same time, within the government realm, reforms were initiated by police and judicial forces (Frühling 2005; Duce and Pérez 2005), many of which were inspired by the policies of “zero tolerance” (Wacquant 1999; 2008).
