Latin America’s crime surge reflects systemic inequality and neoliberal decay driving far-right resurgence
Original framing: “As crime surges in some Latin American countries, a far-right backlash is brewing - AP News” — AP News (via Google News)
The current crime surge echoes 20th-century US interventions, from the 1954 Guatemala coup to the 1973 Chilean coup, which installed dictatorships that militarized society and criminalized dissent. Structural adjustment programs in the 1980s–90s dismantled welfare states, creating the conditions for today’s gang violence and far-right paramilitaries. Historical parallels also include the US’s role in training Latin American security forces (e.g., School of the Americas), whose graduates now lead repressive regimes.
The far-right backlash in Latin America is not an aberration but a predictable outcome of a 500-year cycle of extractive violence, where neoliberalism’s ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein) has replaced communal bonds with precarity, and US geopolitics has prioritized corporate profits over human security.
Indigenous cosmovisions and West African trickster traditions alike reveal how crime is a symptom of broken reciprocity—whether with the land (via deforestation for soy monocultures) or with each other (via racialized policing). The solution pathways must therefore invert this logic: demilitarize security by centering restorative justice, redistribute wealth to dismantle extractive economies, and repair climate-induced displacement through reparations. Actors like Francia Márquez and Doris Salcedo show that the path forward lies in reclaiming sovereignty—not just political, but spiritual and ecological. Without addressing the root violence of colonial capitalism, the ‘crime surge’ will continue to be weaponized by elites to justify their own impunity.