This volume deals with the threat to democracy and the rule of law posed by organised violence in Latin America.

Recent evidence illustrates how partial state failure in Latin America interacts with new forms of organized violence, undermining the democratic consolidations of the past two decades. This 'new violence' stems from a variety of social actors: drug mafias, peasant militias and urban gangs, the so-called actores armadas, and includes state-related actors such as the police, military intelligence agencies and paramilitary forces. The results include both 'governance voids' - domains where the legitimate state is effectively absent - and the erosion of the capacity and willingness of state officials to abide by the rule of law themselves. These tendencies in turn raise the threat that authoritarian regimes under the control of political armies will be re-installed, or, at the very least, that state violence in one form or another will spread. This book explores these developments and discovers links with the weakening of state structures undertaken in the name of neoliberal economic reforms.

List of Tables and Boxes
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Armed Actors, Organised Violence and State Failure in Latin America: a Survey of Issues and Arguments - Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt
2. The Military and Their Shadowy Brothers in Arms - Dirk Kruijt and Kees Koonings
4. Civil Defence Forces: Peru's Comites de Autodefensa Civil and Guatemala's Patrullas de Autodefensa Civil in Comparative Perspective - Mario Fumerton and Simone Remijnse
5. Violence as Market Strategy in Drug Trafficking: the Andean Experience - Menno Vellinga
6. Armed Actors in the Colombian Conflict - Francisco Leal Buitrago
7. Venezuela: the Re-militarization of Politics - Harold A. Trinkunas
8. A Failed State Facing New Criminal Problems: the Argentine Case - Marcelo Sain
9. Urban Violence and Drug Warfare in Brazil - Alba Zaluar
10.Youth Gangs, Social Exclusion and the Transformation of Violence in El Salvador - Wim Savenije and Chris van der Borgh
11.Violence and Fear in Colombia: Fragmentation of Space, Contraction of Time and Forms of Evasion - Luis Alberto Restrepo
Epilogue : Violence and the Quest for Order in Contemporary Latin America - Patricio Silva