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Injustice for All: Crime and Impunity in Latin America

NACLA Report on the Americas, Sept/Oct 1996

This past April, a former police officer was convicted in Rio de Janeiro for the 1993 shooting of one of seven street children gunned down in front of the Candelaria church. The ex-officer, Marcus Borges Emanuel, admitted that police officers killed street kids in order to earn extra money from local shopkeepers. The police who participated in the killings with him, he said, were especially angry because the children had thrown stones at a police car the day before the shootings. This outrageous story highlights several of the themes discussed in this NACLA report on crime and impunity.

Crime is on the rise in Latin America. This surge in crime is intimately linked to the neoliberal policies that have been implemented regionwide over the past decade. Growing poverty and inequality forces many, especially young people, to turn to crime to survive. Yet identifying the social roots of the problem does not alleviate the anxiety it produces--not only among the well-to-do, who feel that they are the main victims of crime, but among the poor as well, who are in fact the primary victims of violent crime. Consequently, governments that promise to "get tough" on crime are broadly popular, and official abuse against suspected criminals is widely tolerated. In some countries, police violence goes hand-in- hand with vigilantism, in which local groups deal with alleged criminals by taking the law into their own hands.

If neoliberalism is the underlying cause of Latin America's crime wave, then the brutal way state agents deal with suspected criminals is rooted in the authoritarian legacy of military rule. Official violence has continued unabated, and in many countries the same tactics used against political dissidents during the dictatorship--arbitrary arrest, deadly force, torture--are used against activists as well as the more diffuse "criminal element" of society, i.e. the poor. Rarely are official acts of violence punished, enveloping police abuse in a cloak of impunity that serves to encourage more official violence.

The region's "new" democracies have failed to maintain public order and guarantee the rule of law for all citizens. Courts are underfinanced and understaffed, and corruption is rampant. Because cops are poorly trained at collecting evidence--often preferring to plant evidence or torture suspects into confessing--guilty parties go free while innocents often get tangled in bureaucracies that would astonish Kafka. The official abuse extends to the prison system, where rehabilitation is not even a concept, and prisoners endure inhumane conditions, extensive overcrowding and physical abuse. In order to overcome these failures of the judicial system, Colombia and Peru have created "faceless" courts--ostensibly to prosecute cases of narcotics and "subversion"--that have the intended effect of "chilling" social protest. To ensure high conviction rates, these courts stack the deck against defendants, effectively destroying due process. Throughout the region, the rotten system is sealed with widespread impunity for official violence and white-collar crime. As a result, ordinary people believe that the judicial system exists not to provide equality under the law, but to protect the wealthy and powerful.

In these "democracies without citizenship," as Paulo Sergio Pinheiro calls them, democratic institutions must be made to function for ordinary citizens. As several authors in this issue suggest, the impetus for such changes must come from below--from citizens' groups, NGOs and community organizations. The left must also take this issue head on, by developing concrete proposals to deal with the growing problem of crime in the region and the real anxiety it produces for ordinary people. Denouncing neoliberalism as the root of crime is not enough. The left must also devise ways to make the institutions charged with law enforcement function more effectively and more democratically. This will also go a long way in addressing the regionwide problem of impunity. Otherwise, police forces that act like vigilantes, "faceless" courts and lynchings will continue to assure "injustice for all."