Gangs are widely considered major contributors to the high levels of violence afflicting Latin America, including in particular Central America. At the same time, however, the vast majority of individuals who join a gang will also leave it and, it is assumed, become less violent. Having said this, the mechanisms underlying this ‘desistance’ process are not well understood, and nor are the determinants of individuals’ post-gang trajectories, partly because gang desistance tends to be seen as an event rather than a process. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research carried out in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Nicaragua's capital city Managua, and more specifically a set of ‘archetypal’ gang member life histories that illustrate the occupational options open to former gang members, this article offers a longitudinal perspective on desistance and its consequences, with specific reference to the determinants of individuals’ continued engagement with violence (or not).

This article provides a picture of the political economy of tourism and violence in Medellín. It analyses the way criminal actors and tourism entrepreneurs share a territory, by shedding light on the extortion of tour guides, street performers and business owners in some of its barrios populares (poor neighbourhoods). The main objective is to demonstrate how intimate relationships – between and among kin, friends, long-term acquaintances – impact what is considered the criminal governance of tourism. This contribution shows that extortion in Medellín meets only limited resistance from tourism entrepreneurs. It also emphasises how criminals, tourism actors and tourists themselves contribute to the creation of fragile secured spaces in the developing touristscapes of Colombia's second city.

Drawing upon 40 life-history interviews with gang members in Medellín, Colombia, this paper argues that many young men join gangs to emulate and reproduce ‘successful’ local male identities. The accumulation by the gang of ‘masculine capital’, the material and symbolic signifiers of manhood, and the accompanying stylistic and timely displays of this capital, means that youths often perceive gangs to be spaces of male success. This drives the social reproduction of gangs. Once in the gang, the youths become increasingly ‘bad’, using violence to defend the gang's interests in exchange for masculine capital. Gang leaders, colloquially known as duros or ‘hard men’, tend to be the más malos, the ‘baddest’. The ‘ganging process’ should not be understood in terms of aberrant youth behaviour; rather there is practical logic to joining the gang as a site of identity formation for aspirational young men who are coming of age when conditions of structural exclusion conspire against them.

This article analyses the gang policies of the first years of the Funes administration in El Salvador, from June 2009 until July 2012. Using securitisation theory, it explains why the administration returned to an emphasis on extraordinary measures, most of them repressive, to deal with gangs. It argues that these measures were the product of an ongoing and dynamic process in which the government was but one of the players in a complex field constituted by numerous actors. The return to repressive measures as well as the support and facilitation of a ‘gang truce’ were not the result of a rational design or a predetermined agenda, but should be seen as a series of moves in a political conjuncture, in which the Salvadorean government needed to communicate to different audiences messages of being in control.

This article contributes to recent analyses of gendered violence in Latin America by highlighting the relative neglect of women's experiences of violence in the discussion of ‘new violence’. In Latin America, women are consistently missing from mainstream debates about violence, which concentrate on urban crime, youth gangs and the police. With a focus on urban Brazil, this article argues for a gendered approach to the range of different forms of violence in order to render visible the variety of roles that women play in the context and in specific incidents of urban violence. It also explores the gendered impacts of various forms of violence and the gendered socialisation of violence. The article challenges the un-gendered concept of new violence, questioning its ability to capture the full gamut of violences that men and women experience, and the connections between these various forms. By adjusting the parameters of the debate, this article highlights the complexity of the gendered social relations and processes that reproduce violence, and adds a further dimension to the discussion of violence and security.