How can weakly institutionalised democracies control drug markets and produce order in Latin American metropolitan areas? Further, what happens to drug market competition when politicians lose control over their police forces? These are the core questions guiding Hernán Flom's book The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America.
Flom's work not only delves into the immediate questions surrounding the governance of drug markets but also takes readers on a profound journey through the delicate dance between legality and criminality. Flom's inquiry into how democracies with weak institutionalisation can assert control over drug markets in Latin American metropolitan areas challenges existing paradigms and lays the foundation for a deeper understanding of illicit governance structures.
The Latin American context, with its varying degrees of institutional development, provides a fertile ground for examining illicit market regimes. Flom's strategic selection of four key cases – Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil, and Buenos Aires and Santa Fe in Rosario, Argentina – facilitates a comparative analysis that not only allows for a nuanced examination of the factors at play but also ensures a robust exploration of his central arguments by controlling for confounding variables.
Flom's work engages in a theory-building through the development of a typology categorising regulatory structures based on their operation. He extends the typology to underscore how each lends itself to varying levels of violence amongst criminal actors and police as well.
Flom's argument considers three key factors: political turnover, political fragmentation, and police autonomy. Political turnover, characterised by frequent changes in political incumbency, becomes a critical variable in understanding the effectiveness of regulatory frameworks. Fragmentation, the degree of cohesion among leaders governing criminal-justice policies, emerges as another influential factor. Lastly, police autonomy, especially when elevated, becomes a pivotal aspect in determining the nature of engagement with criminal groups.
In dissecting these factors, Flom delineates a spectrum of four outcomes. On one extreme lies a particularistic confrontation – a scenario characterised by uncoordinated violence and corruption. This results from high political turnover, high political fragmentation and high police autonomy, creating an environment where illicit activities thrive unchecked. In contrast, a low turnover, low fragmentation, and politicised police structure produce coordinated protection rackets. While drug trafficking persists, it occurs within a context of reduced violence and centralised corruption – an optimal outcome in the absence of alternative mechanisms for controlling the drug trade. Between these extremes exists a middle ground, where low political turnover, high political fragmentation, and professionalised police result in a coordinated coexistence of competitive drug traffickers, marked by controlled violence and corruption. In essence, the more coordinated politicians and police are in their control over the drug market, the less violence. Further, the more uncoordinated police are and the less political intervention, the more violence.
Flom uses very impressive and extensive fieldwork, comprising 180 interviews with police and politicians across the four cases. This wealth of qualitative data, triangulated with newspaper sources and additional collected data on police killings and homicide rates, lends depth and authenticity to his analysis. By engaging with the voices of those directly involved in the intricate dance of governance and criminality, Flom ensures that his theoretical framework remains grounded in the lived realities of the Latin American context. The theoretical framework developed here provides a roadmap for scholars seeking to understand not only Latin American criminal markets but also the complexities of illicit activities on a global scale.
While Flom's cases are meticulously presented, certain methodological considerations warrant attention. For instance, the value of having four conceptual types may be questioned. It seems there is no need for four types of regimes, but instead two would suffice around coordinated or particularistic schema. For instance, is there enough of a difference in outcome of coordinated coexistence and the protection racket to warrant their separation? It is hard to believe that in a coordinated coexistence model, protection rackets and kickbacks are not occurring at the same rate as the protection-racket model implies. Further, the use of some data to underscore changes in criminal violence poses challenges. For instance, in every chapter, Flom utilises homicide rates to underscore how changes to underlying illicit market regimes lead to violent crime. Flom's reliance on this metric, though capturing a broader spectrum of violence, might inadvertently overlook nuances specific to criminal business competition. To his credit, he uses police killings as an alternative measure, but it is still not satisfactory in dealing with the problem that he is simply not measuring violence directly related to criminal homicides that are the result of changes to illicit markets themselves. How do we know that the change in violence is not epiphenomenal to changes in illicit market structures? Additionally, while Flom generally does a good job of controlling for alternative explanations, he does not do this consistently. For instance, Chapter 6 on São Paulo does not address that the decline in homicide rates might be more related to higher incarceration rates, stricter gun-control measures, and changes to alcohol-consumption policies passed at that time.
Overall, The Informal Regulation of Criminal Markets in Latin America is a discerning exploration into the complexities of governance and criminality. Flom's meticulous research, theoretical contributions and methodological considerations make this work an invaluable resource for scholars across various disciplines. The work not only enriches our understanding of the Latin American context but also offers insights that transcend geographical boundaries, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of how politics and crime are mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing in spirals of violence or periods of detente. Scholars of criminology, political science and Latin American studies would do well to read Flom and to use his ideas to teach and advance their own research.
