Farewell, Guatemala City

Fontes, Anthony W.

doi:10.1525/california/9780520297081.003.0012

Cited by 9 publications

(20 citation statements)

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“…Transnational criminal gangs called maras in the Northern Triangle 7 have also been subject to draconian mano dura (‘firm hand‘) anti‐gang policies that provided for the—in part unconstitutional—mass incarceration of suspected gang members solely based on their appearance, and spawned increasing confrontation between gangs and military forces that were deployed for domestic law enforcement purposes (Fontes, 2018; van der Borgh and Savenije, 2019). Owing to the resounding failure of this so‐called War on Gangs, governments across the region explored more cooperative strategies towards CAGs, including the brokering of gang truces.…”

Section: Cags Communities and The Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiating humanitarian space with criminal armed groups in urban Latin America

Lucchi¹,

Schuberth

2023

Disasters

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Humanitarian and development agencies intervening in Latin American cities increasingly face the challenge posed by criminal armed groups (CAGs). Yet, there is a need for evidence‐based comparative studies on how international agencies deal with them. Drawing on data collected in Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Mexico, this paper presents a novel typology of humanitarian organisations' access strategies that distinguishes between different levels of interaction with CAGs. The paper shows how humanitarian agencies assess a variety of risks and balance the potential consequences of their engagement with CAGs with the need to maintain constructive and trustful relationships with the state and the community with which they work. It finds that indirect dialogue or negotiation with CAGs via community leaders who act as intermediaries might provide a low‐risk alternative to direct negotiation with CAG leaders, provided that ‘do no harm’ and humanitarian protection considerations vis‐à‐vis communities and intermediaries play a central role.

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Section: Cags Communities and The Statementioning

confidence: 99%

Negotiating humanitarian space with criminal armed groups in urban Latin America

Lucchi¹,

Schuberth

2023

Disasters

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“…Wacquant, 2001; Bourgois and Schonberg, 2009). Such scholarship on the prison-street nexus shows how underneath the circulation of people between prison and street lies a continuum of violence which additionally marginalises those members of society who are already least fortunate (Fortes, 2015; Moran, 2015; Schneider, 2020a). Not only are the structurally most disadvantaged sent to prison much more often than other people are.…”

Section: Prison—a Palace Of Rest and Plentymentioning

confidence: 99%

Let me take a vacation in prison before the streets kill me! Rough sleepers’ longing for prison and the reversal of less eligibility in neoliberal carceral continuums

Schneider

2021

Punishment & Society

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In a steadily expanding carceral landscape, rough sleepers are using prisons in unforeseen ways: namely to escape violence, for survival, to access social or medical care, enhance their prospects or regain housing. Like most neoliberal welfare states, the German aid system is dispersed and based on individual responsibility, but in prison it concentrates due to the prison’s duty to rehabilitate which translates into care for the subject position ‘inmate’ but holds politically unwanted unhoused persons responsible to change their fates. Poor and disenfranchised people who use prisons as lifelines turn the carceral grip into an embrace. Their tactics reveal a reverse cycle of carcerality where the streets are the space of detriment and the prison, trough harnessing the productivity of penal power, offers a break or potential escape from carceral livelihoods. Rough sleepers who seek imprisonment to escape the hardship and confinement of the streets challenge the concept of less eligibility and offer new ways to theorise the carceral and to think through prisons and the iron rules of punishment.

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“…6 Yet in Guatemala City, with a post‐war homicide rate often twenty times the US average, crack cocaine has not been criminalized 7 . In fact, less than 1 per cent of Guatemala's prison population has been convicted on drug charges (Fontes 2018). Instead, drug use has been moralized, with the vast majority of Guatemalans turning to Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres for support with substance abuse.…”

Section: Political Failuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Moral failure: a jeremiad of the war on drugs in Guatemala

O’Neill

2021

Royal Anthropological Inst

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The current consensus among social scientists and political pundits is that the war on drugs failed, with a raft of failed programmes, failed interventions, failed policies, and even failed states. But these critics have tended to overlook a more existential form of failure that plays a key role in the ongoing effects of the war on drugs. This failure, which anthropologists of Christianity are well positioned to understand, is the perceived failure of Pentecostal Christians to make right with the Lord. Based on extensive fieldwork in Guatemala, a country profoundly transformed by the illicit movement of cocaine from the Andes to the United States, this article assesses how and to what effect a sense of moral failure among the country's Christian communities sustains a now expansive network of Pentecostal drug rehabilitation centres. Reading one such centre's archive of intake forms as a jeremiad – a Christian lament that bemoans the failures of society to keep its covenant with God – this article concludes that a sense of moral failure sustains the fading edges of today's war on drugs.

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Farewell, Guatemala City

Abstract: This chapter captures the scene of a farewell party in Guatemala City that brought together many of the central characters whose stories make up the book.

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Negotiating humanitarian space with criminal armed groups in urban Latin America

Negotiating humanitarian space with criminal armed groups in urban Latin America

Let me take a vacation in prison before the streets kill me! Rough sleepers’ longing for prison and the reversal of less eligibility in neoliberal carceral continuums

Moral failure: a jeremiad of the war on drugs in Guatemala

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