Inside Criminalized Governance: How and Why Gangs Rule the Streets of Rio de Janeiro, Nicholas Barnes, 2025, Cambridge University Press
The recent extradition by Mexico to the US of 29 drug cartel leaders reminds us of the scale of organized crime in the Americas.
Up to 100 million people in the most marginalized communities of Latin America may be subject to the control of criminal gangs.
Crime in all its permutations visits fear, bloodshed and mayhem on vast swathes of the region, particularly its cities, as rival groups compete for territory and illicit spoils.
This explains why organized crime has become a hot political potato, moving up domestic agendas and increasingly shaping regional relations.
Issues generated by crime are likely to play a crucial role in elections in Ecuador, Honduras, Chile and Colombia, for example. The US has put this theme—with predictable hypocrisy—front and centre of its relations with Mexico and Central America. President Donald Trump has even inserted levers into economic relations trying to pressure America’s neighbours to tackle crime, by threatening Mexico with tariffs on cars.
And the problem is not getting any better—crime syndicates are currently enjoying an unprecedented financial boom fuelled by a surge in cocaine production, which has more than doubled in the past decade according to the UN.
The largest countries in Latin America all either produce or smuggle cocaine, with South America generating double the amount of the drug it did 10 years ago. A record amount of cocaine produced in 2022—almost entirely in the Andean countries, dominated by Colombia (61 per cent of total production)—represented an increase of 20 per cent on the year before.
And the market is now truly global, with Europe increasingly on the front line: in just six years, from 2014 to 2020, growing production led to a 416 per cent increase in the European cocaine market.
Alongside drugs, criminal coffers are also swelled by profits from human trafficking and illegal gold mining in remote areas away from state scrutiny.
Yet ill-gotten gains are only one side of the story: gangs prosper because they offer opportunities and benefits that are otherwise absent.
In short, gangs bring a modicum of order in lawless deserts abandoned by the state or where it fears to tread—these criminals can exert a form of governance, filling gaps left by venal, weak authorities and corrupt “justice” systems.
Given the scale of this phenomenon in Latin America, the behaviour of “organized criminal groups” (OCGs)—drug-trafficking cartels, mafias, smuggling networks and protection rackets—has become the subject of growing scholarly attention.
And lest we should be inclined to lapse into stereotypes about the lawless character of the Latin population, academics are simultaneously examining gangs from the US to South Africa.
Yet as author Nicholas Barnes points out, despite the prevalence of criminalized governance, OCGs have been mostly ignored as political actors, with social scientists concentrating their attention on states, insurgents, paramilitaries and terrorists.
Reasons for this, he notes, include the lack of gangs’ overt political ambitions in terms of capturing state power, allowing academics and observers to sideline them less as mere “criminal” enterprises.
In this, many scholars reflexively assume—according to the Weberian bias—that only states enjoy a monopoly of legitimate violence within their territories, an assumption that is clearly deficient.
Another explanation for this gap in research may be racial bias, with political science blind to the strategies adopted by marginalized sectors—victims of prejudice condemned to live in ghettos, whom Barnes argues undertake counterhegemonic behaviours, such as joining a gang, which are inherently political.
His focus is Brazil, which offers notable examples of criminal governance. The São Paulo prison gang, Primeiro Comando da Capital, for example, has established a parallel system of justice over large areas, and Rio de Janeiro’s 1,000 favelas—the subject of this book—is home to numerous gangs that exert a broad spectrum of control in the areas they dominate.
Barnes has studied this spectrum carefully and developed an intriguing set of observations that shed new light on how gangs control their turf—and, in particular, how they modulate coercion with the provision of benefits.
This is a masterful study in the essentially materialist motivations of gang behaviour within a certain type of social economy, redolent of Eric Hobsbawm’s fascination with “social bandits”. In his groundbreaking studies Primitive Rebels (1959) and Bandits (1969), Hobsbawm explored social banditry as a crude form of class struggle and resistance.
Barnes argues that the key motivation of gangs is not the pursuit of governance per se, but the threat level—it’s a dangerous world for mobsters, and to survive they need the obedience and support of local communities.
Gangs therefore use varied patterns of both coercion and the provision of benefits to maintain control against rivals and the police. Coercive practices can include violent punishment for those who break their rules, while the provision of benefits includes dispute resolution and economic stimulation.
It is the degree of threat that determines the form and level of coercion a gang applies, and the most active threat occurs when a competitor seeks to seize territory: this unleashes the dogs of war—and coercion becomes extreme.
Barnes writes: “They will remove any existing limits on their coercive behaviour because, in the fog of war, gangs cannot put concern for resident well-being above the need to defend their territory.”
The author develops typologies of gangs and their behaviours that will be of great value to social scientists studying, among other things, the behaviour of rebel groups which, like gangs, often compete over territory and populations.
Barnes writes: “While many rebel groups may obtain the obedience or acquiescence of local populations through the threat of violence, they must also gain the willing or active support of at least a segment of the population if they are said to govern.”
A version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star
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Categories: Brazil, Central America, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, North America, South America