Abstract
The putatively unprecedented rise to prominence of Central American youth gangs during the past two decades and a half is widely seen to epitomize the critical transformation that the region’s post-Cold War political economy of violence has undergone, moving from being predominantly related to ideologically-charged conflicts over the nature of the political system to being overwhelmingly characterized by more prosaic forms of violence such as delinquency and crime, including extortion and drug trafficking. At the same time, however, neither Central American gangs nor their contemporary patterns of violence are necessarily new, with the latter being traceable at least to the 1940s, for example, while extortion and drug trafficking have long been features of the region. Drawing on a historical consideration of the phenomenon’s evolution in Nicaragua, this chapter will consider the significance of both changes and continuities in youth gang trajectories and drug trafficking in order to highlight the erroneous nature of claims that the present era in Central America is unique and fundamentally different from the past.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Bibliography
Cohen, Abner. 1969. Political anthropology: The analysis of the symbolism of power relations. Man (N.S.) 4(2): 215–235.
Dudley, Steven. 2012. Folk Singer’s Death Shines Light on Nicaragua Police Corruption. InSight Crime. http://www.insightcrime.org/nicaragua-a-paradise-lost/folk-singers-death-shines-light-on-nicaragua-police-corruption
Foucault, Michel. 1970. The order of things: An archaeology of the human sciences. London: Tavistock.
Fox, Edward. 2012. Nicaraguan at Center of Cabral Murder Case Convicted of Drug Trafficking. InSight Crime. http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/nicaraguan-farinas-cabral-murder-convicted
Grassi, Paolo. 2011. La Zona Roja: Potere ed utilizzo del territorio urbano a Città del Guatemala. Confluenze 3(2): 181–196.
Harootunian, Harry D. 2000. History’s disquiet: Modernity, cultural practice, and the question of everyday life. New York: Columbia University Press.
Hazen, Jennifer M., and Dennis Rodgers (eds.). 2014. Global gangs: Street violence across the world. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hernández, Paul B. 2001. Nicaragua News Service, 9, 6. http://www.tulane.edu/~libweb/RESTRICTED/NICANEWS/2001_0205.txt
José Luis, Rocha. 2007. Lanzando piedras, fumando ‘piedras’: Evolución de las pandillas en Nicaragua 1997–2006, Cuaderno de Investigación, vol. 23. Managua: UCA Publicaciones.
Jütersonke, Oliver, Robert Muggah, and Dennis Rodgers. 2009. Gangs, urban violence, and security interventions in Central America. Security Dialogue 40(4–5): 373–397.
Kates, Robert W., J. Eugene Haas, Daniel J. Amaral, Robert A. Olson, Reyes Ramos, and Richard Olson. 1973. Human impact of the Managua earthquake. Science 182(7): 981–990.
Koonings, Kees, and Dirk Kruijt. 1999. Societies of fear: The legacy of civil war, violence and terror in Latin America. London: Zed Books.
Lancaster, Roger N. 1992. Life is hard: Machismo, danger, and the intimacy of power in Nicaragua. Berkeley: University of California Press.
O’Neill McCleskey, Claire. 2012. Colombia Arrests Trafficker Who Helped Facundo’s Alleged Killer Escape. InSight Crime. http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/colombia-dismantles-gang-linked-to-author-of-cabral-murder
Pearce, Jenny. 1998. From civil war to ‘civil society’: Has the end of the Cold War brought peace to Central America? International Affairs 74(3): 587–615.
Quintero, Lesber. 2010a. Tres ejecutados. El Nuevo Diario.
Quintero, Lesber. 2010b. Una nueva ejecución. El Nuevo Diario.
Recio, Gabriela. 2002. Drugs and alcohol: US prohibition and the origins of the drug trade in Mexico, 1910–1930. Journal of Latin American Studies 34(1): 21–42.
Rocha, José Luis. 2000a. Pandillas: una cárcel cultural. Envío 219: 13–22.
Rocha, José Luis. 2000b. Pandilleros: la mano que empuña el mortero. Envío 216: 17–25.
Rocha, José Luis. 2008. La Mara 19 tras las huellas de las pandillas políticas. Envío 321: 26–31.
Rodgers, Dennis. 1997. Un antropólogo-pandillero en un barrio de Managua. Envío 184: 10–16.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2004. Disembedding the city: Crime, insecurity, and spatial organisation in Managua, Nicaragua. Environment and Urbanization 16(2): 113–124.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2006a. Living in the shadow of death: Gangs, violence, and social order in urban Nicaragua, 1996–2002. Journal of Latin American Studies 38(2): 267–292.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2006b. The state as a gang: Conceptualising the governmentality of violence in contemporary Nicaragua. Critique of Anthropology 26(3): 315–330.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2007a. Joining the gang and becoming a broder: The violence of ethnography in contemporary Nicaragua. Bulletin of Latin American Research 26(4): 444–461.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2007b. Managua. In Fractured cities: Social exclusion, urban violence and contested spaces in Latin America, ed. Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, 71–85. London: Zed.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2007c. When vigilantes turn bad: Gangs, violence, and social change in urban Nicaragua. In Global vigilantes, ed. David Pratten and Atreyee Sen, 349–370. London: Hurst.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2009. Slum wars of the 21st century: Gangs, Mano Dura, and the new urban geography of conflict in Central America. Development and Change 40(5): 949–976.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2010. Génèse d’un gangster? De la pandilla au cartelito au Nicaragua post-Sandiniste. Problèmes d’Amérique Latine 76: 61–76.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2012. Haussmannization in the tropics: Abject urbanism and infrastructural violence in Nicaragua. Ethnography 13(4): 411–436.
Rodgers, Dennis. 2014. “From ‘broder” to ‘don’: Methodological reflections on longitudinal gang research in Nicaragua, 1996–2014.” Keynote presentation to the FSW50 conference on “Anthropologists at Work: Challenges and dilemmas of qualitative fieldwork methodologies in sensitive settings”, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
Rodgers, Dennis, and José Luis Rocha. 2013. Turning points: Gang evolution in Nicaragua. In Small arms survey yearbook 2013: Everyday dangers, 46–73. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rodgers, Dennis, and José Luis Rocha. Forthcoming. The Myth of Nicaraguan Exceptionalism: Gangs, Drugs and the political economy of violence in Post-Cold War Central America. in Crime and Violence in Latin America, edited by David Smilde, Veronica Zubillaga, and Rebecca Hanson, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Romero, Elízabeth. 2010. General Avilés dice que controlan territorio. La Prensa.
Rushdie, Salman. 1987. The Jaguar smile: A Nicaraguan journey. New York: Penguin.
Scott, Peter Dale, and Jonathan Marshall. 1991. Cocaine politics: Drugs, armies, and the CIA in Central America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stone, Hannah. 2011. Nicaragua Deploys 1,000 Soldiers to Tackle Rural Crime. InSight Crime. http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/nicaragua-deploys-1000-soldiers-to-tackle-rural-crime
Thrasher, Frederic Milton. 1927. The gang: A study of 1,313 gangs in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Valdez, Al. 2011. The origins of southern California Latino gangs. In Maras: Gang violence and security in Central America, ed. Thomas Bruneau, Lucia Dammert, and Elizabeth Skinner, 23–42. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Vélez, Téfel, and Reinaldo Antonio. 1976. El Infierno de los Pobres: Diagnóstico Sociológico de los Barrios Marginales de Managua. Managua: El Pez y la Serpiente.
Zinecker, Heidrun. 2013. El bajo índice de violencia en Nicaragua: ¿Mito o realidad? Resultados empíricos, causalidades y enseñanzas (Centroamérica y el Caribe). Mexico: Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rodgers, D. (2017). Of Pandillas, Pirucas, and Pablo Escobar in the Barrio. In: Politics and History of Violence and Crime in Central America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95067-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95067-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-95066-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-95067-6
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)