In many developing countries where formal institutions fail to guarantee rule of law, criminal organisations have emerged as intermediaries between citizens and the state. In some cases, these armed non-state actors adopt repressive strategies to govern their territories and local populations. This study asks under what circumstances local actors mobilise against criminal governance. Focusing on the case of Michoacán, Mexico, I argue that the emergence of vigilante groups, known as autodefensas, was prompted by the breaching of a social contract – a set of formal and informal agreements and obligations – between organised crime and civil society. As criminal governance spread in Michoacán, so did predatory behaviour against local communities, which gave way to an elite-organised social movement structured by rural inequalities.

Since the inauguration of Mexican democracy in 2000, organised criminal violence had been leaking into the political arena. Yet, it escalated in the 2018 elections, when dozens of local candidates were killed. In most of these cases, the concrete perpetrators and motives remained in the dark. How did Mexican society make sense of this opaque, unprecedented wave of electoral violence? On the basis of a qualitative content analysis of over 1,200 news reports, I examine the structuring power of a shared narrative: the frame of organised crime. By conceiving candidate killings as economic violence within the criminal community, this commonsensical frame of interpretation permitted Mexican society to ‘normalise’ these killings as ‘business as usual’ by criminal organisations.

This article unpacks the effect that the presence of diffuse licit and illicit power structures has on states and citizens in the modern world. It does so by investigating how a drug cartel undermined social movement organisation around electricity provision in the San Marcos province of Guatemala. The cartel's presence contributed directly to the demise of movement activity and impeded the effective development of movement strategies in the face of menacing – albeit veiled – threats. In addition, the state's inability or unwillingness to prevent the violent assassination of movement leaders undermined the legitimacy of the central state in the eyes of movement leaders. This also contributed to the reproduction of the ‘unrule of law’ on the ground through the movement's subsequent rejection of formal state institutions.

Homicide statistics are a widely accepted metric of security and democracy. This article argues for a focus on how bodies come or do not come to be counted – of what happens before states enumerate. The experience of São Paulo relates that how many people die and how many do not is connected to the governance of an organised crime group known as the PCC. The punishment practices of the PCC and groups like it throughout Latin America reshape the lived paradigm of governance over life and death, albeit in concealed ways. Statistics are produced by and are productive of a de jure state, different from the state de facto. The acceptance of state-made homicide figures, whether for analysis, visualisation or political claims, is consequential for the future of lived security and social science knowledge production.

In comparison to some illegal enterprises whose operations generate decisive moral rejection on the part of the public, vehicle theft remains an illicit underground activity that citizens largely tolerate or even exploit. In the province of Buenos Aires, the persistence, depth and breadth of transactions related to this black market cannot be explained without referring to the role of the state police. This article uses a theoretical approach to illegal police protection in order to understand the complicity between the police and criminals as fundamental to the market for stolen cars in the province. Using data from in-depth interviews and official documents, the article examines how exactly the police protect thieves, dismantlers and distributors of cars and/or auto parts. It analyses three elements that condition the sale of illegal protection to criminals by the police: threats and selective implementation of penalties; control of consequences; and bureaucratic falsification.