In communities throughout Latin America, criminal organizations provide basic order and security. While multidisciplinary research on criminal governance (CG) has illuminated its dynamics in hundreds of site-specific studies, its extent remains understudied. We exploit novel, nationally representative survey data, validated against a compendium of qualitative sources, to estimate CG prevalence in 18 countries, and explore its correlates at multiple levels. Overall, 14% of respondents reported that local criminal groups provide order and/or reduce crime, corresponding to some 77-101 million Latin Americans experiencing CG. Counterintuitively, CG is positively correlated with both respondents' perceptions of state governance quality and objective measures of local state presence. These descriptive results are consistent with multiple causal pathways, including case-specific findings that state presence-rather than absence-drives criminal governance. We offer suggestions for both more precise data collection on CG itself and, given its pervasiveness, its inclusion in broader research on economic development, demography, and politics.

We helped design and evaluate a statebuilding intervention in Medell & iacute;n, Colombia. The municipal government dramatically intensified nonpolice state presence in 40 neighborhoods over 20 months. On average, perceptions of security and legitimacy changed negligibly, suggesting that returns to statebuilding investments are generally low, at least within electoral cycles. Prespecified heterogeneity analysis, however, reveals significant increases in security and legitimacy where state governance began relatively higher, while impacts were null or possibly negative where it began lower. This suggests increasing rather than diminishing returns to statebuilding. The divergence apparently resulted from city officials under-delivering in initially lower-governance sectors. One reason might be "start-up costs" in statebuilding. Alternatively, both initial state penetration and incentives to implement new programs might depend on neighborhoods' ability to hold agencies accountable. Whatever their source, increasing returns could drive persistent "neglect traps"-channeling political attention and investment to areas where state penetration is already robust, reinforcing existing disparities.

Criminal groups govern millions worldwide. Even in strong states, gangs resolve disputes and provide security. Why do these duopolies of coercion emerge? Often, gangs fill vacuums of official power, suggesting that increasing state presence should crowd out criminal governance. We show, however, that state and gang rule are sometimes complements. In particular, gangs could minimize seizures and arrests by keeping neighborhoods orderly and loyal. If true, increasing state presence could increase incentives for gang rule. In Medellín, Colombia, criminal leaders told us they rule to protect drug rents from police. We test gang responses to state presence using a geographic discontinuity. Internal border changes in 1987 assigned blocks to be closer or further from state security for three decades. Gangs exogenously closer to state presence developed more governance over time. They primarily did so in neighborhoods with the greatest potential drug rents. This suggests new strategies for countering criminal governance.

In the early 1980s, an innovation in the organizational technology of crime, born in the dungeons of Brazil’s military dictatorship, spread beyond prison walls and transformed Rio de Janeiro. Comando Vermelho was Brazil’s first facção, known as a comando, in Rio de Janeiro—a kind of sophisticated, prison-based criminal network whose collective capacity quickly eliminated or subsumed the autonomous donos (bosses) who then ruled over Rio’s favela communities and the illicit markets centered there. The CV’s initial hegemony soon gave way to internecine conflicts with rival factions and open confrontation with state forces that still continue. But the faction model—the splitting up of Rio’s favela territory among a handful of prison-based groups—proved incredibly resilient. This research focuses on factionalized states like Amazonas, Ceará, and Rio Grande do Norte, which have given a new appreciation of the transformational power that criminal technologies have on innovation—namely, of milícias.

For citizens across Latin America, basic order is provided by local criminal organizations. Existing studies establish that criminal governance is pervasive, persistent, and consequential --- not only for those governed but for macro-level political, social, and economic outcomes. Yet systematic assessments of its prevalence and characteristics are lacking. We leverage novel, representative survey data and a compendium of qualitative sources to create country-level estimates of people living under criminal governance. Across 18 Latin American countries, 13% of respondents --- representing nearly 80 million people --- report order provision and crime reduction by local criminal groups; we argue that this likely underestimates the true number. Counterintuitively, we find that criminal governance (relative to non-governing gang presence) is correlated with positive perceptions of state governance and higher income, as well as with objective measures of greater local state presence. Validating and untangling the causal relationships behind these correlations is a central challenge for future research.

Organizadores: Benjamin Lessing (UChicago, EUA), Joana Monteiro (FGV, Brasil) e Michel Misse (UFRJ, Brasil)

1 A faculty member in The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts, Chris Blattman focuses on why some people and societies are poor, unequal, and violent, and how to tackle these issues. In his day-to-day research, Blattman works with governments and civil society to design and test approaches to reduce violence and poverty. Most of Blattman’s work uses interviews, surveys, natural experiments, lab experiments, and field experiments. Blattman leads the Peace & Recovery program at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) and the Crime and Violence Initiative at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab. He is an affiliate at the National Bureau for Economic Research, UChicago Urban Labs, the Center for Global Development, and the International Growth Center. (blattman@uchicago.edu)

State penetration varies widely within cities, with well-governed areas abutting persistently neglected ones. Governments are seeking ways to improve penetration, local security, and state legitimacy. We experimentally evaluate a 20-month non-police intervention in Medellín, Colombia, that dramatically increased municipal personnel and agency attention to 40 neighborhoods. Despite the intensity, average impacts on security and perceived legitimacy were negligible. Prespecified subgroup analysis reveals important heterogeneity, however. Where state governance began relatively lower, impacts were null to negative, but in initially high-governance sectors, security and state legitimacy significantly improved. These divergent impacts apparently resulted from city staff and agencies systematically underdelivering in low-initial-governance sectors. Bureaucratic capacity and incentives to deliver often depend on baseline state engagement, trust, and accountability. This could result in increasing marginal returns to statebuilding, which in turn would lead to persistent "neglect traps"—political attention and investment where state presence is already robust, reinforcing existing disparities.

Medellín’s city government wanted to raise its efficacy and legitimacy, especially in neighborhoods with weak state presence and competing armed actors. The city identified 80 such neighborhoods. In half, they intensified non-police street presence tenfold for two years, attempting to improve social services and dispute resolution. Unexpectedly, despite increased attention from street staff, residents lowered their opinion of the state on average. We trace these adverse effects to communities where state presence was initially weakest. Staff in these neighborhoods worked to improve services, but the central administration struggled to deliver on these promises. Where state presence was already established, however, the intervention raised opinions of the government as expected. We hypothesize that it is costlier for states to improve services where it is weak—an incentive for bureaucrats and elected leaders to concentrate state-building efforts in established areas, widening inequality in public service access and local variance in state legitimacy.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

El objetivo de este capítulo es analizar, utilizando los resultados de la encuesta y las entrevistas anteriormente mencionadas, la forma como los grupos criminales de Medellín y el gobierno de la ciudad respondieron ante la pandemia del Covid-19. Este texto hace parte de un proyecto de investigación más amplio liderado por los profesores Blattman y Lessing de la Universidad de Chicago, y Duncan y Tobón de la Universidad EAFIT, con el apoyo de Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). En el marco de este proyecto, cuyo objetivo general es comprender el crimen organizado de Medellín, así como diseñar y evaluar políticas para disminuir sus efectos negativos, un equipo de investigación ha venido recogiendo información sobre el mencionado fenómeno desde mucho antes del inicio de la pandemia del Covid-19.

Organizers: Benjamin Lessing (UChicago, USA), Joana Monteiro (FGV, Brazil), and Michel Misse (UFRJ, Brazil)

Criminal groups govern millions worldwide. Even in strong states, gangs resolve disputes and provide security. Why do these duopolies of coercion emerge? In many cases, gangs fill vacuums of official order. If so, increasing state presence should crowd out criminal governance. In this paper, however, we show that state and gang rule are sometimes complements. In particular, gangs can deter state predation by keeping neighborhoods orderly and loyal. If true, increasing state presence could increase gang rule. We investigate in Medellín, Colombia. Criminal leaders told us they rule mainly to protect drug rents. We test gang responses to state presence using a geographic discontinuity. Internal border changes in 1987 assigned some blocks to be exogenously closer to state security for three decades. Gangs responded to closer state presence by increasing governance services, but primarily in neighborhoods with the greatest potential drug rents. This suggests new strategies for countering criminal governance. Christopher Blattman Harris School of Public Policy The University of Chicago 1307 E 60th St Chicago, IL 60637 and NBER blattman@uchicago.edu Gustavo Duncan Department of Political Science Universidad EAFIT Carrera 49 N 7 Sur 50 Medellin, Colombia gduncan@eafit.edu.co Benjamin Lessing Department of Political Science University of Chicago 5828 S. University Ave Chicago, IL 60637 blessing@uchicago.edu Santiago Tobón Department of Economics Universidad EAFIT Carrera 49 N 7 Sur 50 Medellin, Colombia stobonz@eafit.edu.co

In informal urban areas throughout the developing world, and even in some US and UK neighborhoods, tens if not hundreds of millions of people live under some form of criminal governance. For them, states’ claims of a monopoly on the use of force ring hollow; for many issues, a local criminal organization is the relevant authority. Yet the state is far from absent: residents may pay taxes, vote, and even inform on gangs as punishment for abusive behavior. Criminal governance flourishes in pockets of low state presence, but ones that states can generally enter at will, if not always without violence. It thus differs from state, corporate, and rebel governance because it is embedded within larger domains of state power. I develop a conceptual framework centered around the who, what, and how of criminal governance, organizing extant research and proposing a novel dimension: charismatic versus rational-bureaucratic forms of criminal authority. I then delineate the logics that may drive criminal organizations to provide governance for non-members, establishing building blocks for future theory-building and -testing. Finally, I explore how criminal governance intersects with the state, refining the concept of crime–state “symbiosis” and distinguishing it from neighboring concepts in organized-crime and drug-violence scholarship.

Universidad EAFIT Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) The University of Chicago Proantioquia

Urban armed groups, especially criminal gangs, are a growing threat to peace and economic growth in cities across the world. These groups often exert state-like powers, enforcing contracts, policing, and taxing businesses in the areas they informally govern. The conventional wisdom suggests that criminal organizations provide governance when states do not, and that increasing state services could crowd gangs out. In partnership with the City of Medellín, researchers randomly introduced a program that intensified government outreach to gang-controlled neighborhoods. The study found no evidence that the city’s intervention reduced gang rule.

States, rebels, and mafias all provide governance beyond their core membership; increasingly, so do prison gangs. US gangs leverage control over prison life to govern street-level drug markets. Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) gang goes further, orchestrating paralyzing attacks on urban targets, while imposing a social order throughout slums that sharply reduces homicides. We analyze hundreds of seized PCC documents detailing its drug business and internal disciplinary system. Descriptively, we find vast, consignment-based trafficking operations whose profits fund collective benefits for members’ families; elaborate bureaucratic procedures and recordkeeping; and overwhelmingly nonviolent punishments for debt-nonpayment and misconduct. These features, we argue, reflect a deliberate strategy of creating rational-bureaucratic legitimacy in criminal governance. The PCC’s collectivist norms, fair procedures, and meticulous “criminal criminal records” facilitate community stigmatization of infractors, giving mild sanctions punitive heft and inducing widespread voluntary compliance without excessive coercion. This has aided the PCC’s rapid expansion across Brazil.

on Gang Governance in Medellín Researchers: Chris Blattman Gustavo Duncan Benjamin Lessing Santiago Tobón Sector(s): Crime, Violence, and Conflict, Political Economy and Governance Fieldwork: Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Location: Medellín, Colombia Sample: Eighty neighborhood units (sectors) Initiative(s): Crime and Violence Initiative Target group: Urban population Outcome of interest: Post-conflict recovery Social service delivery Intervention type: Community-driven development AEA RCT registration number: AEARCTR-0002622 Partner organization(s): Alcaldía de Medellín, Proantioquia, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)