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Citation: Fernando Brancoli (eds.) 2025. Beyond Militarism: Reimagining Security and Resistance in Contemporary Latin America. Security in Context Report 25-01. May 2025, Security in Context.
Introduction by Fernando Brancoli
In contemporary Latin America, the legacies of militarism and authoritarianism are colliding with new crises of violence, insecurity, and social upheaval. Decades after formal democratization, many communities still endure daily realities shaped by militarized policing, organized crime, socio-economic precarity, and political repression. Yet alongside this persistent violence, there are also vibrant currents of grassroots resistance forging alternative paths. Latin America today stands at a crossroads that forces us to ask fundamental questions about the nature of violence and the meaning of security. But what kind of violence is this, exactly? Who defines it, and above all, which political projects does it serve?
Our point of departure is an unsettling realization: violence in contemporary Latin America is neither residual nor a mere symptom of weak states or informal economies. On the contrary, it is systematic, highly organized, and—most importantly—functional to specific political and economic agendas. Whether in the form of paramilitarism, fiscal austerity, international sanctions, or the judicialization of repression, these phenomena share a logic of governance through fear—a reconfiguration of state and transnational power that instrumentalizes insecurity as a means of social control.
This dossier emerges from that shared concern. It brings together five critical interventions that interrogate how violence is produced, legitimized, and resisted across Latin America today. Rooted in diverse disciplines and geographies, these contributions collectively map an “insecurity complex” in which legal, economic, and militarized mechanisms converge to normalize fear and suppress dissent. The project is inspired by the mission of Security in Context, which calls for a fundamental rethinking of security—not as domination or control, but as a commitment to human dignity, global solidarity, and the conditions for a livable world. In amplifying situated knowledges and grassroots struggles, this dossier seeks to contribute to that broader conversation: not by prescribing solutions, but by clarifying the stakes and illuminating the sites where alternative futures are already being imagined.
Unraveling Insecurity: Five Critical Perspectives
As we read the articles that comprise this special issue, a disturbing pattern comes into focus: violence in Latin America is never accidental, random, or merely “criminal.” Rather, it is systematic, spatially targeted, and politically profitable. Far from being collateral damage, violence often follows a precise cartography—one that coincides with drug trafficking routes, extractive megaprojects, and expanding agricultural frontiers. As Simone da Silva Ribeiro Gomes demonstrates in her study on paramilitarism, the assassination of activists in Colombia or Mexico is not the result of “stray bullets” but of addressed ones. These are targeted acts of terror that form part of a deliberate strategy to clear territories of “undesirable bodies” and impose a spatial regime of domination.
Gomes analyzes how this violence is not merely tolerated but actively integrated into broader security assemblages. Paramilitary groups, often entangled with formal state forces, operate as shadow extensions of the state—enforcing order through fear and the elimination of dissent. Her investigation uncovers intricate networks linking police, military, and criminal actors, who collectively sustain a system of what she calls a “parallel state order.” Yet, crucially, the article does not stop at diagnosis: it also foregrounds the enduring capacity of social movements to adapt under fire. Despite lethal repression, activists continue to resist—devising new strategies, seeking transnational solidarity, and reimagining what dissent looks like in an age of militarized insecurity.
This spatial and operational logic of violence finds its economic counterpart in the sophisticated “wars by other means” analyzed by Flávio A. Combat and Carolina Silva Pedroso. Combat interrogates Brazil’s post-Bolsonaro austerity regime, framing it as a form of “violence by spreadsheet”—where Excel formulas and budget ceilings determine who has access to health care, education, and basic social protections. Rather than a neutral fiscal tool, austerity becomes an ideological weapon: one that privileges financial markets while systematically withdrawing support from the most vulnerable. Combat’s analysis shows how economic policy itself becomes a site of conflict, producing insecurity by design. Even as the current Lula administration seeks to chart a different course, it remains constrained by a hostile Congress and institutional inertia that continues to reproduce neoliberal orthodoxy.
Pedroso’s article complements this view by examining Venezuela’s entrenchment in a biopolitical crisis fueled by both internal authoritarianism and external sanctions. Her contribution explores how international financial systems—through banking algorithms, contractual clauses, and embargoes—now wield destructive power previously reserved for military interventions. U.S.-led sanctions, especially after Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025, have deepened economic collapse, producing shortages of food, medicine, and basic supplies. Pedroso contends that this is not an unintended side effect, but a new mode of warfare—one in which geopolitical punishment is rationalized as diplomacy. The Venezuelan state, in turn, leverages this perpetual emergency to justify its own authoritarian crackdowns, invoking “external threats” as a pretext to suspend civil liberties. Her analysis urges us to move beyond binary framings—regime vs. opposition, imperialism vs. sovereignty—and confront the layered violence produced by global economic coercion and domestic authoritarianism alike.
Rodrigo Facundo Videla takes us into the juridical machinery that sustains this architecture of repression. His concept of “repressivization”—a punitive tactic involving extralegal violence, strategic illegality, and the targeting of non-criminalized subjects—exposes how contemporary Latin American states use legal frameworks not to uphold rights, but to suppress them. In the case of Argentina’s 2024 protests against the neoliberal Bases Law, Videla reveals how courts and prosecutors functioned less as guarantors of constitutional order and more as extensions of the security apparatus. This “repression 2.0” is especially insidious: it dresses itself in the language of legality, rights, and due process, while producing outcomes that closely resemble those of past dictatorships. Videla’s contribution shows that, even within formal democracies, the judiciary can become complicit in silencing dissent, creating a gray zone in which legality serves as a cloak for violence. At the same time, the emergence of sustained protest movements—and the legal and political backlash they have provoked—signals that civil society is not standing still. On the contrary, new forms of collective mobilization are challenging the normalization of punitive governance.
Perhaps the most disquieting article in the dossier is that of Manuela Trindade Viana, which traces the transnational circulation of “security models” across Latin America. Her essay exposes how militarized strategies—such as Colombia’s counterinsurgency frameworks or Rio de Janeiro’s Pacifying Police Units—have become standardized “solutions” exported throughout the region. These models are presented as technical, apolitical “best practices,” while in fact they erase local histories, dynamics, and needs. Viana argues that what is being exported is not public safety but a profitable formula: a securitized product marketed to governments in crisis, often with support from international donors and security consultants. This global security industry, she contends, is not aimed at ending violence but at managing it—profitably and indefinitely. In this shadow market, every new wave of violence becomes an opportunity: for more contracts, more surveillance equipment, more training programs, and more political leverage. Violence is thus commodified—no longer a social emergency to be solved, but a resource to be governed and extracted. Viana’s critique is sharp yet generative: she challenges us to recognize the role of “expertise” and foreign intervention in shaping regional security paradigms, while also pointing toward more grounded, community-driven alternatives. Her work underscores the need to reclaim the concept of security from the logic of domination and instead reimagine it as collective care and democratic empowerment.
Taken together, these five contributions do more than critique Latin America’s crisis of violence—they expose the machinery that reproduces it, from the courtroom to the spreadsheet, from paramilitary zones to international finance. And importantly, they do not lose sight of resistance: each article illuminates how ordinary people continue to confront insecurity not just as victims, but as agents of transformation. Whether it is through legal contestation, grassroots organizing, or intellectual intervention, these struggles invite us to see security not as a tool of control, but as a horizon of justice.
Mapping Insecurity, Envisioning Alternatives
The reflections gathered in this dossier underscore a sobering reality: insecurity in Latin America is not a side effect of institutional fragility or social disorder—it is a tool of governance, a strategy deployed through multiple mechanisms to maintain control, discipline dissent, and enable accumulation. Whether through militarized policing, judicial repression, fiscal austerity, or geopolitical sanctions, violence has been normalized as a mode of rule. These modes do not operate in isolation. As the articles show, they are part of a broader system—a regional architecture of insecurity sustained by political elites, market logics, and international alliances.
But to map insecurity is not merely to diagnose its structure; it is also to trace the points at which it is resisted, contested, and reimagined. Across all five contributions, we see how violence does not eliminate agency. Rather, it transforms the terrain of struggle. From grassroots activists facing death threats, to protesters criminalized by courts, to communities navigating the fallout of economic warfare, Latin American societies are not only enduring insecurity—they are challenging its terms and redefining its boundaries.
In this sense, the notion of security itself becomes a field of dispute. Whose security is protected? At what cost? And who gets to decide what counts as a “threat”? These articles push us to treat “security” not as a fixed category, but as a contested concept shaped by power. They invite us to ask whether security, as currently practiced, is compatible with justice—and what it would take to build security rooted in dignity, equity, and care.
Rather than offering definitive models, the dossier opens space for situated reflections. It shows that alternatives are not abstract ideals, but practices already unfolding: in feminist organizing that reclaims the right to exist in public space; in indigenous resistance that defends land as life; in policy debates that challenge the tyranny of austerity; and in transnational solidarities that counteract isolation and fear. These are not utopias. They are proposals grounded in lived experience—fragmented, imperfect, but real.
By mapping the infrastructures of violence and the movements that rise against them, this collection gestures toward a plural horizon. One where security is no longer synonymous with control, but with the conditions for collective flourishing.In a region where the future has often been imagined through the lens of crisis, this dossier insists on a different kind of imagination—one anchored in the politics of refusal, the ethics of care, and the courage to build beyond fear.
