ON STUPID HIGH CRIME LEVELS IN A ‘TOTAL MESS’ COUNTRY LIKE GUATEMALA 🇬🇹
When you visit a ‘Total Mess’ Central American country like Guatemala or Honduras, formerly El Salvador, you get a lot of people spontaneously materialising out of the aether to tell you “don’t go outside in the cities they aren’t safe” “don’t walk anywhere at all it isn’t safe” “don’t go out at night there are dual machete-wielding werewolves on the streets” etc. This danger is a bit exaggerated on a personal level, I often find these claims of danger exaggerated anyway, if you are a moderately sized male you will be basically fine walking around many slightly dangerous places at night. Walk with a swaying gorilla gorilla gait so banditos know you are the big bossman, make shrieking gorilla noises to ward them off t…
ON STUPID HIGH CRIME LEVELS IN A ‘TOTAL MESS’ COUNTRY LIKE GUATEMALA 🇬🇹
When you visit a ‘Total Mess’ Central American country like Guatemala or Honduras, formerly El Salvador, you get a lot of people spontaneously materialising out of the aether to tell you “don’t go outside in the cities they aren’t safe” “don’t walk anywhere at all it isn’t safe” “don’t go out at night there are dual machete-wielding werewolves on the streets” etc. This danger is a bit exaggerated on a personal level, I often find these claims of danger exaggerated anyway, if you are a moderately sized male you will be basically fine walking around many slightly dangerous places at night. Walk with a swaying gorilla gorilla gait so banditos know you are the big bossman, make shrieking gorilla noises to ward them off too if you want, no problem. Obviously though the slums, barrios, favelas etc, yes you would be retarded to go into. Really just needs a good spider sense to intuit where is it and isn’t okay to go.
Either way, it is true there is a lot of crime. You do think, how is there this much crime? It isn’t even like in the west, Yookay, were crime is overlooked for asinine human rights reasons. What exists in a place like Guatemala is a special type of state that ‘some’ have called the ‘Mafia-Corporation Complex’. This is a kind of state where corruption has become so endemic that gangs are basically intertwined with the structure of the state - they are almost an extension of the state itself because they are so enmeshed in its political patronage networks that the state’s formal institutions (customs, immigration, judiciary, police etc) become penetrated, manipulated and co-opted. Rule of law is weak and impunity is high so gangs function as a kind of parallel state structure.
What is the ‘corporation’ part here? In a ‘Total Mess’ country like Guatemala crime-groups will run extortion, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, illegal logging, mining, money laundering, whatever etc. through legitimate businesses. Legitimate businesses (or hybrids) facilitating that money-laundering then obtain government contracts through corrupt channels and / or get kickbacks for serving as fronts. This is de facto state capture (where state institutions serve private illicit interests rather than public good and governance is undermined) which vis-a-vis crime results in a huge spike in violence & insecurity (where criminogenic markets incentivise high homicide rates, arms proliferation and the formation of gangs to control competing territorial claims).
The high levels of gang violence then have downstream effects across society - in the creation of a culture of crime among more ‘normal people’ that is both more incentivised and less commonly prosecuted (on top of the regular incentives that exist already) and in actual physical space where physical territory disputes encourage more crime. In Guatemala some of these gangs are even transnational and associated with the Mexican cartels which leads to state capture by international networks of interests and violence; everything all just so entangled and entrenched that unless you ‘have the balls’ the inducements are really not there to undertake the thankless task of dismantling the ‘Mafia-Corporation Complex’. You would have to upset a lot of people *and* be immune to bribes, threats of violence and fake legal prosecution yourself to begin to fix it.
THE POPULIST EFFECT TURBO-CHARGED
When you have a country that is this captured almost all popular politics becomes about fighting crime and corruption. Guatemala is interesting in this way in that it doesn’t have long-standing political parties. Almost every Guatemalan president since the country’s democratic transition in 1985 post civil war has come to power with a different political party - and that party usually collapses or fades soon after leaving office. This is because almost every party comes to power on a populist pledge to defeat crime and corruption - unlike the previous party that promised that - and then immediately fails in its pledge to defeat crime and corruption. Then the next new party promises to defeat crime and corruption and the cycle continues. Actually a lot of the parties making these pledges are corrupt to begin with, have crime ties to begin with, so it isn’t like they are all Bukele-style noble crusaders who fail because they encounter institutional obstacles.
One example - Guatemalan President Jimmy Morales (2016 - 2020), a political ‘outsider’ former much-loved comedian who campaigns on the slogan ‘not corrupt, not a criminal’. Morales rides a wave of populism to defeat the ‘corrupt establishment’. Soon afterward it transpires that Morales’ family is corrupt, that Morales himself was getting kickbacks, taking illegal donations, that he tried to expel an independent UN commission on corruption in Guatemala because it considered recommending removing his legal immunities as president etc.
Many such cases, the cycle just continues…
The UN Commission (CICIG) was incredibly popular domestically and had succeeded in significantly reducing corruption levels in Guatemala. Morales expelled it from the country for abuses of power and overreach in who it (probably rightly) said needed to be prosecuted (ie Morales)