ABSTRACT
Through a comparison of recent gang suppression campaigns in Guatemala and Brazil, this chapter examines two distinct, if often intersecting, trends in contemporary Latin American urban policing. The first is an increasing recourse to military involvement in internal security and crime control. The second is a rise in the use of proximity policing that embeds security forces in the physical and social spaces of marginal urban communities as never before. Considering these urban security programmes from the perspective of residents of targeted neighbourhoods illustrates the dynamics that play out on the ground when gangs and state forces press overlapping claims on urban space, territorial power, and the means of violence.
I argue that the apparent failure of militarized policing operations to secure sustainable gang suppression in both Guatemala City and Rio de Janeiro is ultimately due to the ability of criminal gangs and state forces to cohabitate within insecure urban territories. Adapting the concept of the ‘garrison state’ to contemporary Latin America, the comparative analysis explores what happens when urban security becomes a focal point for political legitimacy. I ask what urban ‘wars on crime’ do to (and for) gangs and residents of gang territories but also what they do for (and to) the states that wage them.
