Hybrid Interpersonal Violence in Latin America: Patterns and Causes

Abstract

In this review, we argue that to understand patterns and causes of violence in contemporary Latin America, we must explicitly consider when violence takes on interpersonal qualities. We begin by reviewing prominent definitions and measurements of interpersonal violence. We then detail the proliferation of interlocking sources of regional insecurity, including gender-based violence, gangs, narcotrafficking, vigilantism, and political corruption. Throughout this description, we highlight when and how each source of insecurity can become interpersonal. Next, we outline mutually reinforcing macro and micro conditions underlying interpersonal violence in its many hybrid forms. To conclude, we call for more multifaceted conceptualizations of interpersonal violence that embrace the complexities of Latin American security situations and discuss the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in this area.

Introduction

When is violence interpersonal? The question seems simple, yet, scholars have put forth a wide range of definitions, with some arguing that interpersonal violence is driven by personal motives and others viewing it as contingent on perpetrators’ social connection to or physical perpetration of violence against victims. Establishing the parameters of interpersonal violence becomes further complicated when trying to identify its limits. For example, where does interpersonal violence end and state violence begin? Take as an example a politician who orders the extrajudicial assassination of an outspoken, oppositional journalist. Is this an act of political violence? State sponsored violence? Interpersonal?

In Latin America, as in many regions in the global South, acts of violence frequently exhibit this kind of blurriness—a phenomenon we refer to as hybrid interpersonal violence, meaning violence that possesses interpersonal dimensions as well as organized, political, or gendered dimensions (among other possibilities). In this review, we integrate multidisciplinary literatures to highlight the interpersonal characteristics of various violent situations in Latin America, including gender-based violence, gang violence, drug wars, political and ethnic violence, and extrajudicial violence. Existing scholarship examining these violent situations sometimes downplays their interpersonal characteristics, especially when classifying violence based on the identity of perpetrators or on victims’ and perpetrators’ relation to the state. Here, we foreground manifestations of hybrid interpersonal violence that run throughout diverse literatures on Latin America so as to highlight this phenomenon as a cross-cutting theme that holds promise for deepening and broadening theoretical conceptualizations of violence in the region; how and why it spreads and to whom; and its multiple, interlocking causes.

When is violence interpersonal?

A vast, multidisciplinary literature explores the causes and consequences of interpersonal violence. Within this literature, scholars of interpersonal violence have attempted to define its contours based on a number of situational factors. These include, among others, perpetrators’ presumed motivations, social linkages between victims and perpetrators, their physical proximity to one another at the time of violence, and the extent of organizational mediation. Motivation-based conceptualizations assume that interpersonal violence occurs “between family members and intimates” and “acquaintances and strangers [and] is not intended to further the aims of any formally defined group or cause. Self-directed violence, war, state-sponsored violence and other collective violence are specifically excluded from these definitions” (Waters et al. 2005, p.304). In keeping with this perspective, some argue that interpersonal violence is driven by “either an economic or emotional motivation,” whereas “violence between groups of individuals is almost always…a strategic calculation where the economic costs of conflict are weighed against potential gains” (Baysan et al. 2019, p.435). According to these motivation-based perspectives, interpersonal and intergroup violence are distinguishable based on whether or not individuals’ actions are consistent with their larger group’s goals.

Other definitions leave room for group motives, but delineate interpersonal violence on the basis of social ties. According to this alternative perspective, espoused by the World Health Organization, interpersonal violence “involves the intentional use of physical force or power against other persons by an individual or small group of individuals” (Dahlberg and Krug 2006, p.5). This includes family or community violence, e.g. violence among individuals “who may know each other. It includes youth violence, bullying, assault, rape or sexual assault by acquaintances or strangers, and violence that occurs in institutional settings such as schools, workplaces, and prisons” (Mercy et al. 2017, p.72). Defined this way, what distinguishes interpersonal violence from other types of violence is that involved parties are socially connected to one another or occupy the same social spaces.

A third view is predicated on the physical specificity of how violence occurs. Namely, this view holds that interpersonal violence emerges “in direct face-to-face contact…from street fights, pub brawls, domestic abuse, nonorganized football hooliganism and dueling, to gang rape, suicide bombings” (Malešević 2017, p.16). Here, interpersonal violence is conceptualized as two or more people in direct contact with one another. However, some argue that not all face-to-face violence is interpersonal, particularly when it is “mediated by the presence of formal or informal organisations where individuals and groups are involved in violence on account of their membership/affiliation… when such interaction occurs, it is generally governed by the principles of organisational membership/affiliation… For example…young women’s exposure to constant humiliation through verbal insults on the street have regularly more to do with broader intergroup and gender relations than with interpersonal conflicts between the individuals involved” (Malešević 2017, p.16). This mediational perspective discounts the role of personal agency and draws distinctions accordingly. By the same token, mediational perspectives purport that violent face-to-face encounters are organizational but not interpersonal when violence is directed by or enacted through organizational structures (Malešević 2017).

Of course, not all scholarship adheres to such strict conceptualizations of interpersonal violence; yet, nor does it always embrace the interpersonal qualities of inter-group or organized violence. Overlooking these interpersonal dimensions has epistemological and political repercussions, especially in Latin America, where many complex criminological situations exhibit interpersonal dimensions even when they are not explicitly named and discussed. Indeed, Latin Americanists increasingly point to “constellations” or “concatenations” of violence (Auyero 2015; Cook Heffron 2019), or, overlapping and “multisided” manifestations of it (Walsh and Menjívar 2016).

Although there are numerous dimensions to interpersonal violence—and no one set of dimensions that are universally agreed upon—for the sake of simplicity, we focus on three criteria implied by the previously discussed definitions, and assume that violence is at least partly interpersonal if it minimally meets two of three criteria. First is if perpetrators are presumably motivated by the prospect of their own economic or psychic gains. Potential gains include monetary or material benefits, improved chances of long-term survival, or obtaining personal goals of revenge, dignification, or status consolidation. Second is if the involved parties are socially connected to one another, meaning that they know of one another and this knowledge enables or motivates the use of violence. This broad conceptualization of social connectedness, for example, views instances of drug-trade, gang, or political violence as interpersonal when the perpetrator (or the person directing the physical perpetrator) targets specific victims. Third is if the perpetrator utilizes his or her own discretion about when and how to behave violently. Conceiving of interpersonal violence in this way recognizes cases in which members of an organization, be it gangs, drug trade organizations (DTOs), paramilitaries, or the police, use personal discretion to go against or beyond the directives they receive from the law or from the group hierarchy to exert violence. In focusing on these criteria, we do not mean to imply that these are the defining or most important features of interpersonal violence. Instead, we leverage them to offer illustrative examples of hybrid interpersonal violence in Latin American settings, or in other words, instances in which violence possesses interpersonal qualities as well as qualities distinctly relating to surrounding organizational or macro conditions.

Regional violence

Latin America has notoriously become the most violent region in the world, with thirteen of the highest national homicide rates globally (World Bank 2022). Four of the highest rates in the region are in northern Central America (Figure 1). Although homicide rates are currently declining or holding steady in these countries, they remain substantially higher relative to even most other Latin American countries. Likewise, homicide rates are considerably higher in Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil than in many other South American countries (Figure 1). Thus, while it is true that homicide rates are higher in Latin America than in most other world regions, substantial within-region heterogeneity also exists.

Figure 1.

Homicide rates in Latin American countries, 1990–2018

Source: World Bank Indicators. To access data, visit: data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5.

Accompanying high homicide rates are high rates of intimate partner violence (IPV), gang violence, and organized crime, including narcotrafficking. In Bolivia, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic for example, 30%, 22%, and 25% of women report emotional abuse from partners in the last year; 23%, 17% and 15% report physical abuse; and 6%, 4%, and 4% report sexual abuse from their partners (Figure 2). Scholars, governments, and international NGOs also consider gang violence a major problem in Latin America. Nevertheless, there are few reliable data sources on gang membership or the incidence of gang violence, making it difficult to estimate the prevalence of either one (Chávez 2018).

Figure 2.

Rates of intimate partner violence against women in the last year

Source: Demographic and Health Surveys (authors’ own calculations using survey weights to generate nationally representative estimates). To access data and view most recent years of collection, visit www.dhsprogram.com.

Further complicating matters is the weak rule of law throughout much of Latin America. This includes police corruption and brutality, inefficient and ineffective judicial systems, government repression, collusion between state-affiliated actors and criminals, and political conflict—each of which allows for the proliferation of violent crime, and in some instances, directly exacerbates it (Menjívar and Walsh 2017; Moser and Mcilwaine 2004). For instance, between 15% and 27% of residents in Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic report paying a bribe to a police officer in the last year (Figure 3a). Moreover, in six of these countries, between 15% and 26% of residents also report paying a bribe to another government official (Figure 3b). Rampant corruption, in turn, leads to a general distrust of government and government officials: only a third of residents or fewer in Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, Belize, Peru, and Colombia trust the police in their country (Figure 4a). In Colombia, Belize, Peru, and Haiti, residents report similarly low levels of trust in their municipal governments (Figure 4b). Only about half of residents or less trust their municipal governments in almost all Latin American countries where public opinion data are available (Figure 4b). These conditions reflect widespread impunity, in which crime often goes unreported and unpunished, and violence permeates multiple public and private social spaces.

Figure 3.

Rates of bribery in the last year

Source: Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) (authors’ own calculations). Data are weighted as appropriate to be nationally representative (following LAPOP guidelines). To access data and view most recent years of collection, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop.

Figure 4.

Trust in the police and municipal government

Source: Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) (authors’ own calculations). Data are weighted as appropriate to be nationally representative (following LAPOP guidelines). To access data and view most recent years of collection, visit www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop. We define “trust” as a score of 4, 5, or 6 on a Likert scale ranging from 0 (none) to 6 (very much).

Hybrid interpersonal violence in Latin American settings

Amidst these conditions, we highlight instances of hybrid interpersonal violence that possess both interpersonal and gendered, organizational, or extrajudicial qualities. For the purposes of this exercise, we focus on situations where (a) violence is both personally and organizationally motivated; (b) organized or group violence is targeted toward specific individuals; and/or (c) when physical perpetrators use violence without or beyond directives from superiors, such as in state or organized crime hierarchies. However, neither these criteria nor the examples we provide are exhaustive.

Gendered interpersonal violence

As a first example, gendered interpersonal violence occurs between two or more individuals in a way that takes advantage of and/or reinforces a gendered status quo that favors cis-men and heteronormative masculinity over other groups and gender performances (Gibbons and Luna 2015). Gendered interpersonal violence can include, for example, male-perpetrated IPV, workplace sexual harassment or sexual harassment on the street, stalking, non-partner rape or sexual assault, or femicide (Obinna 2021; Salzinger 2000). In some instances, it may also include sexual violence in conflict zones (Viterna 2013, p.92), especially when individual women are targeted for specific reasons, such as their community activism (Zulver 2022, p.70). Conceiving of gendered interpersonal violence, rather than gendered or interpersonal violence alone, calls attention to the mechanisms simultaneously at play at the micro—e.g. interpersonal—level and at the macro—e.g. gender systems—level.

A key example of gendered interpersonal violence is IPV perpetrated by men against women. Many criminologists view IPV “as a form of gender-based violence in which men, more than women, use violence to maintain power within their [intimate] relationships” (Weitzman 2018, p. 575). IPV can take many forms, including coercive control, psychological or emotional abuse, physical or sexual violence, and/or stalking by current or former partners. Studies spanning the region document that, in Latin America, IPV is both personally motivated and reflective of larger group (e.g. gender) membership. In Colombia, Mexico, and Peru, for instance, IPV rates are higher among employed than non-employed women (Canedo and Morse 2021; Friedemann-Sánchez and Lovatón 2012; Svec and Andic 2018). The fact that IPV is higher among employed women suggests that IPV is a tool for controlling and punishing women who stray from heteronormative gender scripts or who are better positioned to achieve economic independence from their spouses. Such an interpretation is corroborated by at least one study from Ecuador, which finds that women’s odds of IPV increase when they acquire employment, but not when they lose it (Treves-Kagan et al. 2022). In other words, employment-related IPV is less driven by the overall household economy and more by improvements in women’s economic status specifically.

Moreover, IPV perpetrators typically have full discretion over when and how they abuse their partners. Thus, men choose to abuse their partners, whether employed or not. Likewise, they choose whether to perform IPV sporadically or frequently and moderately or severely (Friedemann-Sánchez and Lovatón 2012). Heterosexual IPV thus offers a straightforward example of gendered interpersonal violence because it occurs between two people who intimately know each other, through men acting violently but agenticly toward women in a way that consolidates men’s individual and collective power.

Studies of gangs in northern Central America reveal many other examples of gendered interpersonal violence in which gang members use sexual violence “against their own women, the ones from their own neighborhood, including against those who become members of their own gangs” (Rubio 2011, p.178). In northern Central America, for example, gang initiation rituals for women often entail being raped by one or more male gang members (Bruneau 2011; Rubio 2011). Some Central American gangs also use gang rape to foster cohesion among individual members and to bolster members’ feelings of personal power (Rubio 2011; Wolf 2011). These gang rapes have several interpersonal dimensions, including that perpetrators often personally know or know of their victims and that members derive personal benefits from them, such as an assertion of their masculine power, which bolsters their reputation among other men (Baird 2015). Male gang members in Central America also use sexual violence and the threat of it as a means of coercion, both in hostage and extortion situations and in their own intimate relationships (Cook Heffron 2019). For instance, some men weaponize their gang affiliation to strengthen the credibility of the violent threats they lobby against girlfriends and wives (Cook Heffron 2019). In these instances, what makes violence interpersonal is both gang members’ relationship to their victims and their undirected use of sexual violence.

Organized interpersonal violence

A second form of hybrid interpersonal violence in Latin America is organized interpersonal violence, which can occur among members of the same organized groups, between members of rival groups, and/or with the assistance of these groups. By organized, specifically we mean groups that are cohesive, structured, and/or socially recognizable to others. We include gangs within this broad definition, despite debates about whether or when gangs should be considered “organized” criminal organizations (Decker, Bynum, and Weisel 1998; Rodgers and Baird 2015). Social scientists often interpret violence related to gang and cartel activity in Latin America as strategic and rational calculations to obtain political, economic, and symbolic power (Antillano, Arias, and Zubillaga 2020; Bergman 2018; Trejo and Ley 2020; Zaitch and Antonopoulos 2019). Nonetheless, there are multiple circumstances under which violent interactions in these organizations can also be interpersonal. The notion of organized interpersonal violence not only spotlights such instances, but formally bridges theoretical conceptualizations of organized and interpersonal violence to reveal how individuals leverage their group membership and/or how organizations leverage interpersonal ties to conduct violence.

One example is when members of gangs and DTOs weaponize their membership to seek vengeance through the harm and intimidation of non-group members, such as against abusive parents or childhood bullies (Brenneman 2012, p.80; Garcia Reyes 2021, p.218). Indeed, members of these organizations sometimes cite the facilitation of personal violence vis-a-vis gang or cartel membership as a key motive for their joining (Garcia Reyes 2021; Moser and McIlwaine 2004).

Another example is in-group fighting, particularly as individuals strive to move up the ranks of their organization. In-group fighting, which can include beatings, rape, or even murder, are well documented as part of initiation processes and trial periods for both gangs and DTOs (Bruneau 2011; Garcia-Reyes 2021; Rubio 2011). When gang members’ violence is oriented towards building a reputation and deterring future personal victimization, it requires that the perpetrator assert absolute personal power over the victim: “hurting and killing become the ultimate means of fulfilling a sense of power and importance” (Fontes 2018, p.49). For men, this brutality also reaffirms their identity as hyper-masculine, which is prized among gangs and cartels (Baird 2018, 2019; Núñez-González and Núñez Noriega 2019), and more broadly, in popular culture (Malcomson 2019; Miller, Milena Barrios, and Arroyave 2019). Gaining a reputation as a hyper-masculine gang or cartel member thus confers additional, personal benefits.

Organized interpersonal violence can also occur when gang or cartel members target and attack specific members of their own group or of rival groups to retaliate for the harms attributed to that individual. Examples of targeted retribution are well documented in Brazil, El Salvador, and Mexico, for example (Grillo 2011: 121–122; Martínez and Martínez 2019; Magaloni, Franco-Vivanco, and Melo 2020). Narcomensajes epitomize this kind of targeted retaliation— they are written messages that organized criminal groups leave in public spaces to explain their motives behind previous or future acts of violence. For instance, a message allegedly signed by members of the Cartel del Golfo in Mexico addressed specific individuals by name, while stating that “you betrayed us, and betrayal is repaid with death” (BBC Mundo 2008). In cases like these, seeking vengeance not only serves group aims—as a way to reassert dominance and/or take back turf (Brenneman 2012, p.14)—but can also serve personal, emotional purposes. For example, members of Latin American gangs and criminal organizations often refer to their organizations as “families” (Dudley, Ávalos and Martínez 2018; García Reyes 2021). The death of group members therefore become equated with the death of kin, eliciting an “eye for an eye” response (Martínez d’Aubuisson 2019). When a member of such an intimate circle is killed, the search for vengeance is not only organizational—to reestablish the power and dominance of the most recently injured group—but is also personal in that it becomes an expression of anger and grief (Levenson 2013; Rodgers 2006).

Extrajudicial interpersonal violence

A third manifestation is extrajudicial interpersonal violence, which emerges in response to or takes advantage of insecure environments where criminal violence is pervasive. Extrajudicial interpersonal violence can occur, for example, when police leverage their power and resources to use violence for their own personal gains in a way that is not legally sanctioned. It can also occur in situations where individuals request non-state actors to protect them or to resolve criminal matters on their behalf with the use or threat of violence. These scenarios, and others like them, have been observed across many Latin American settings, including in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, among others (Auyero 2015; Davis 2009; Godoy 2004; Gordon 2020; Lessing 2021; Martínez and Martínez 2019; Vargas Reina 2022). Explicating instances of extrajudicial interpersonal violence helps reveal how a weak rule of law enables interpersonal violence within judicial systems or encourages it as a response to these systems’ perceived inadequacies.

Ethnographic work highlights several ways in which extrajudicial interpersonal violence is borne out by police. For instance, through a detailed, ethnographic account of gang life in El Salvador, Martínez and Martínez (2019) reveal how police officers coerce gang members into cooperating with them. Reflecting on one officer, they explain: “The detective goes above and beyond his work. He doesn’t just carry out orders and make arrests… It excites him to get someone to snitch… He gives his own money to those snitches when the state forgets or simply refuses, and he does so even after he’s literally beaten snitches into collaborating.” (p. 57). As this example illuminates, police violence can sometimes be driven by personal motives, such as maintaining a sense of pride and personal power over others. To the extent that acquiring information about gang members and their activities benefits detectives’ careers, the prospect of professional gains should also partially motivate detectives’ use of violence in pursuit of intelligence, even if the information gleaned also benefits the police force and state. What is more, police officers’ use of violence outside the law is often based on their own personal discretion rather than on institutional directives they receive. This abuse of discretionary violence is further facilitated by states’ adoption of mano dura (iron fist) policies that prioritize the repression of alleged criminal actors rather than crime prevention (Hume 2007)—a point we return to below.

Other work on El Salvador further highlights that, in rural parts of the country, some police partner with local farmers to extrajudicially execute gang members who extort them (Moncada 2021, p.112). Similar to the example above, participating police officers’ willingness to resort to extrajudicial violence in rural parts of the country may reflect personal motives, such as personal affiliations with extorted farmers—which likely enhances their sympathy toward them—as well as underlying desires to establish their own power and fulfill obligations to protect the communities where they work (Moncada 2021, pp.109–110). In these cases, “the initial connection between victims and police emerged from the efforts of police agents who lacked institutional capacity but were nonetheless attempting to gather information from populations that could help them enforce the rule of law… police were aware of both their lack of capacity and the low likelihood that communities and victims would speak out publicly against the gangs” (Moncada 202, pp.109–110). Under such conditions, working with farmers to target and kill the individual gang members who extorted them may have conferred these officers a sense of purpose and professionalism in the absence of sanctioned, institutional means. At the same time, it represents a discretionary choice to use unlawful violence to achieve their professional objectives.

Abundant evidence further indicates that police and prison guards use discretionary violence in Latin American prisons. In countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, and Venezuela, prisoners live in overcrowded, inhumane conditions where impunity, insecurity, and corruption are also prevalent, providing strong motivations for inmates to establish or maintain affiliations with gangs (Ariza and Iturralde 2020; Dudley and Bargent 2017; Weegels 2020;). Given the low state capacity to run and control prisons, and the constant threat of victimization from inmates, guards must carve out their own personal authority and “respect” using extrajudicial, brutal acts of violence, strategically targeting individuals to make an example of them. One Guatemala-based ethnography, for example, recounts an instance where prison guards reacted to death threats by torturing and burning a prisoner alive while the prison chief yelled “I am in charge here!” (Fontes 2018; 120).

Police can also engage in extrajudicial interpersonal violence by colluding with criminal actors (Cruz 2016). In Buenos Aires, Argentina, for instance, some car thieves and drug dealers pay the police a commission for being left alone to conduct their illicit business. When criminals do not pay the police what they are owed, police extort them (Auyero 2015). This dynamic is not only perpetuated by police officers’ willingness to abuse their power as law enforcement officers, but more specifically, their willingness to use (threats of) violence to derive personal, economic gains. Moreover, to sustain this dynamic over time, police must develop personal relationships with the criminals they collude with and/or extort. Similar dynamics between the police, criminal actors, and paramilitaries are apparent in Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, and numerous other Latin American and Caribbean countries (Horne Carter 2022 p.124, p.129; Jaffe 2013; Vargas Reina 2022; Willis 2014).

Beyond police officers, extrajudicial interpersonal violence can be enacted by other armed groups who aim to protect civilians—whether these groups are collectively organized or privately contracted (Brienen 2018; Davis 2010). Indeed, extrajudicial community groups like rondas campesinas (peasant patrols) in Peru (Langdon and Rodiguez 2007) and autodefensas (community self-defense groups) in Colombia and Mexico (Herrera 2021; Ramírez 2010) are widespread in Latin America, though their specific operations, organizational structures, and rationale vary across contexts.¹ One example of when extrajudicial violence possesses interpersonal dimensions comes from ethnographic work in Medellín, Colombia, where residents of a socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhood pay a group of armed men—most of whom are former paramilitaries—to patrol their neighborhood zone as a way to supplement the incomplete protection they receive from police (Gordon 2020). The men who participate in the patrol group benefit from the income and “sense of purpose” they derive from participating (Gordon 2020, p. 1188). In other words, patrol group participation creates opportunities to display their skills as “violence specialists”—skills that set them apart from men who do not participate in the patrol and that they cultivated as paramilitaries earlier in life (Gordon 2020). These motivations highlight just some of the interpersonal dimensions of extrajudicial violence in this context: Residents, too, are motivated to employ this armed group—and to sanction its use of violence for personal, emotional reasons. In particular, they rely on the group for retribution, especially when they perceive police as unable to deliver a swift response (Gordon 2020).

Sometimes communities themselves engage in extrajudicial interpersonal violence, as exemplified by recent lynching cases. Present-day lynching in Latin America is typically a civil response to real or perceived interpersonal transgressions in communities that are distrusting of state authority (Cruz and Kloppe-Santamaría 2019), where residents’ perceptions of institutional legitimacy are low (Nivette 2016), and levels of interpersonal trust and cohesion are high (Zizumbo-Colunga 2017). In Zacatecas, Mexico, for example, a man “was beaten to death accused of having kidnapped his own daughter and having caused her death by abandonment. His wife, the mother of the girl, consented to the lynching” (Vilas 2001, p.144). In this case, violence was enacted collectively against a community member on behalf of his aggrieved wife. As this case exemplifies, lynching is often fueled by collective indignation and fear of individuals who are perceived to threaten their community (Godoy 2004). These accused individuals can and often do come from the same community: An estimated 62% of Latin American lynching victims live in the same municipality as their perpetrators (Nussio and Clayton 2022). Thus, lynching can have multiple interpersonal qualities, including being targeted against specific community members and interpersonally motivated.

Common Denominators of Hybrid Interpersonal Violence

Multiple conditions sustain hybrid interpersonal violence in Latin America. Here, we focus on key macro and micro conditions that have unfolded over the last half-century and that are mutually reinforcing. In our view, historical processes yield present-day social structures; social structures shape particular practices and cultural dispositions that lead people to perceive violence as appropriate in certain social situations; and in turn, people’s practices become constitutive of social structures. Violence thus becomes a “system of dispositions - a present past that tends to perpetuate itself into the future” (Bourdieu 1992, p.54).

Macro: Rule of Law

With only a handful of exceptions, most Latin American countries have experienced civil conflict or wars in the last half-century.² This recency of wars and conflict, combined with extensive foreign intervention in political affairs, colonial legacies, and multiple other factors have contributed to weak rule of law (Bruneau 2011, p.9), which is evident in persistently inefficient, ineffective, and often corrupt law enforcement and judicial systems across much of Latin America (Auyero 2015; Bobea 2010; Brienen 2018; Horne Carter 2022; Moncada 2021; Moodie 2010).

Violence from State-Affiliated Actors.

Weak rule of law enables corruption and collusion, as the power and abuses of public officials go unchecked. Studies elucidating police corruption in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, and Mexico make clear the extent of the problem (Auyero 2015; Bailey and Taylor 2009; Bobea 2010; Davis 2010; Horne Carter 2022; Martínez and Martínez 2019). Yet, police are not the only public officials to engage in corruption and collusion. Peru offers an extreme case in point: As of 2014, the Peruvian Attorney General’s office was investigating 92% of mayors and 76% of state governors for corruption charges, some of which purportedly entailed extortion and assassinations (Koven and McClintock 2018, p.57). Moreover, every president in Peru since 1985 has come under criminal investigation for alleged corruption (Koven and McClintock 2018, p.57). When public officials engage in extortion, assassinations, or other violent forms of corruption, they embody organized interpersonal violence by abusing the power, material resources, and social capital they acquire through their organizational membership for their own personal gains.

Government and police misconduct, of course, is not confined to collusion with gang members, drug dealers, or other criminals—it can also entail abuses of the general public. In El Salvador and Argentina, for instance, 8% and 9% of all adults report police abuse in the last year (Cruz 2009). In countries with authoritarian experiences like Brazil, such abuses are often committed by violence specialists who worked for the authoritarian regime and who, in the absence of transitional justice processes, have continued participating in extralegal forms of violence while affiliated with the state, criminal groups, or both (Trejo, Albarracín and Tiscornia 2018). Furthermore, when public institutions are weak, even officials who aim to uphold the law can find themselves so under-resourced, alienated, and/or hamstrung by the institutions they work for that they begin to feel justified in using extrajudicial violence to get their jobs done (Moncada 2021; González 2020), such as when pursuing specific suspects.

To compensate for weak rule of law, many Latin American governments embrace mano dura approaches to crime, which include the expansion of juvenile facilities, reduction of due processes, and use of profiling tactics, such as on the basis of tattoos (Frank 2018, p.3; Hume 2007; Moodie 2010, p.137, 203; Swanson 2013). Policies like these emerge, in part, from the politicization of fear during post-conflict democratization processes (Dammert 2019; Davis 2006). Thus, policing can become a political platform that otherizes suspected criminals while legitimizing governments’ violence, human rights violations, and disregard of due process (Hume 2007; Nivette 2016). By increasing police power and decreasing police accountability (Davis 2006; González 2020), mano dura can facilitate and/or abscond abuses of judicial power, thereby enabling extrajudicial interpersonal violence.

The militarization of security has been on the rise in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, and is another expression of mano dura, whether through increased military participation in constabulary actions or the militarization of police units by enhancing police capacities (Diamint 2015; Horne Carter 2022; Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). Militarization increases interventions’ lethality (Durán-Martínez 2017; Flores-Macías and Zarkin 2021, p.522; Magaloni and Rodriguez 2020, p.1015; Main 2014; Vilalta 2020, p.700) and enhances states’ capacity to surveil and target specific individuals, thereby enabling it to take on interpersonal qualities (Magaloni and Rodriguez 2020). However, militarized approaches to crime deterrence do not necessarily protect public officials from becoming targeted themselves. In the context of the “War on Drugs” in Mexico, for instance, mayors who lack political and military support from higher hierarchies of government have been personally targeted by organized criminal networks (Trejo and Ley 2020).

Crime Reporting and Prosecution.

A key way ineffective laws and law enforcement perpetuate violence is by creating a climate of impunity and mistrust of the judicial system (Walsh and Menjívar 2016; Menjívar and Walsh 2017; Moodie 2010; Wolfe 2011). Political repression and “dirty wars,” where governments target their own civilians, also contribute to citizens’ mistrust of government agencies and law enforcement officers (Langdon and Rodriguez 2007; Moodie 2010, p.13, p.46, p.47). These conditions minimize the extent to which individuals formally report crimes or involve the justice system (Moodie 2010) and can tacitly encourage more personal forms of retribution (Gordon 2020; Langdon and Rodriguez 2007).

Lack of legal codification and prosecution of interpersonal violent crimes is another underlying factor. Extensive studies of gender-based violence in northern Central America, for example, point to (a) the absence or reversal of laws against femicide (Neumann 2020; O’Brien and Walsh 2020); (b) the vague verbiage of existing laws about “domestic” violence that do not name male-perpetrated violence against women as a specific and main manifestation of this violence (Ortiz-Barreda and Vives-Cases 2013); and/or (c) cultural mismatches between laws against gendered violence and those whose job it is to see that laws are enforced, including police officers, lawyers, and judges (García-Del Moral 2020; Neumann 2017).

Macro: Transnational Factors

Wars and conflicts.

Foreign intervention in Latin American wars and conflicts is well documented, especially U.S. intervention during and after the Cold War (Frank 2018, p.3; Horne Carter 2022; Kruckewitt 2005; Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). For instance, the United States has facilitated the violence training of young men from across Latin America at the U.S. Army School of the Americas and funneled weapons to militaries and coups across the region (Kruckewitt 2005; Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005). For the last half-century, the United States has also politically and economically supported militarized anti-drug policies, trained anti-narcotics police and military units, and led its own anti-narcotics operations across Latin America (Frank 2018; Golnick 2018; Horne Carter 2022). Intense, protracted conflicts, exacerbated by foreign intervention, have left behind many weapons, making it easier for individuals to physically harm one another (Horne Carter 2022; Menjívar 2011a); and have trained thousands of individuals as violence specialists (Gordon 2020; Menjívar 2008; Menjívar and Rodríguez 2005) who subsequently joined community vigilante groups or organized crime networks (Horne Carter 2022 9–10; Gordon 2020). Furthermore, gun availability in the U.S. has had spillover effects in neighboring Mexico, with the expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapon Ban in 2004 leading to increasing homicides in Mexican border towns (Dube, Dube and Garcia-Ponce 2013).

Under the ensuing weak rules of law, drug wars and drug trafficking have proliferated. In the context of transnational drug trafficking, organized crime cells have increasingly outsourced violence to third-party violence specialists, like sicarios (assassins) and gangs, which has led to longer and looser chains of command. Because DTOs vary in the strength of their chain of command and internal discipline (Bergman 2018), members and affiliates’ use of violence may have varying degrees of connection to vertically-defined organizational goals (Durán-Martínez 2017), and in this way, can exacerbate organized interpersonal violence. For instance, pandillas and maras have been used by DTOs to outsource security and sales in Mexico, Colombia, and Central America (Rodgers and Baird 2015). In some cases, DTO leaders have had limited ability or willingness to monitor and control gangs they hire and arm, which has created spaces for nearly autonomous violent interactions among low-level actors (Bergman 2018; Durán-Martínez 2017).

Immigration policies.

Scholars of MS-13 and Barrio 18 point to the deportation of gang members from the U.S. to northern Central America in the 1990s as an important tipping point where gang membership proliferated, gangs became more violent, and their violence became more extreme (McGuinn 2018; Moncada 2021, p.94; Paarlberg 2021; Zilberg 2011). One explanation is that returned gang members brought with them new rivalries, which heightened interpersonal violence between members of different gangs. Returned gang members also brought back new network connections, including connections to organized crime networks and DTOs (Paarlberg 2021; Valdez 2011). These network connections introduced new economic incentives and structures that increased within-gang competition and generated more opportunities for discretionary violence. At the same time, deportations of non-gang members created large populations of socially alienated and politically disenfranchised youth who yearned for a sense of belonging and identity, which gangs can sometimes fulfill (Wolfe 2011, p.49).

Economic globalization.

Neoliberal economic policies are founded on the idea of free-market capitalism and therefore entail market deregulation, the elimination of trade barriers, and reduced state spending. These policies directly and indirectly contribute to hybrid interpersonal violence. In the case of Mexico, for instance, the proliferation of maquiladoras (sweatshops) employing low-skilled female labor, combined with a lack of labor protections and regulatory oversight following the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s, has exacerbated gendered interpersonal violence, including sexual harassment in the workplace, rape, and femicide (Arriola 2006; Pantaleo 2010; Salzinger 2000). Indirectly, neoliberal economic policies create the conditions for hybrid interpersonal violence by widening economic inequality, impeding upward mobility among lower socioeconomic strata, and reducing job stability for the working class (Menjívar 2011, pp.30–32; Moodie 2010, pp.42–44). Furthermore, they shrink welfare programs and social safety nets (Laurell 2000), which has opened voids that criminal organizations can exploit to bolster their presence or social legitimation in marginalized areas (Moser, Winton, and Moser 2005, p.133).

Micro: Socially Embedded Experiences

Exposure to violence.

Latin America’s extensive history of civil conflicts over the last half-century mean that many contemporary adults grew up in times of civil and political violence. Likewise, their children grew up in post-conflict societies where weapons, a distrust of government, and political or ethnic tensions lingered (Menjívar 2008). These circumstances affect the extent to which residents perceive violence as acceptable or even expected in various situations (Jokela-Pansini 2020; Menjívar 2011a).

Expectations of violence victimization and/or perpetration are further compounded by violence exposures in a person’s day-to-day life and a dearth of state protection against it, which together, create the conditions for individuals to view violence as a normalized, routine, or necessary part of life (Auyero and Berti 2015; Menjívar 2008). For example, because marginalized youth in countries like El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua are at high risk of violence victimization in their communities (Brenneman 2012; Levenson 2013; Rocha 2011), and in their own homes (Cárdia 2002), they learn at an early age that they must procure the means for their own security (Levenson 2013). Given these conditions, some come to see participation in gangs and organized violence as an inevitable byproduct of inhabiting violent communities, where their vulnerability to victimization means that they must choose between killing or being killed (Rodgers 2015). As explained by an ex-gang member from Mexico, “[w]e are born and grow up with this culture, even if we wanted to do things differently, I don’t think we would survive in the streets without fighting, without joining gangs… without violence” (Garcia Reyes 2021, p.106). Growing up in a violent home can also turn people against their families of origin and lead them to seek vengeance (Brenneman 2012, p.80; Garcia Reyes 2021, p.218). When this happens, young people may turn to gangs or organized criminal networks to gain access to weapons and human resources that can facilitate violent retaliation (Garcia Reyes 2021; Moser and McIlwaine 2004).

Violence victimization and exposure also constitute social learning processes that normalize ideas about when violence is expected or acceptable (Powers et al. 2020). For instance, children who are exposed to IPV are more likely to enter violent relationships and/or to behave violently in their own relationships as adults (Friedemann-Sánchez and Lovatón 2012; Svec and Andic 2018; Villareal 2007). This intergenerational repetition reflects that when boys and girls are exposed to IPV, they are socialized into gender norms that include the use of violence to establish and maintain a gender hierarchy (Menjívar 2011a).

Social and economic locations.

Sociodemographic attributes like gender, but also race/ethnicity, class, and urbanicity, shape the contours of hybrid interpersonal violence in multiple ways. For example, pervasive gender norms in Latin America equate masculinity with aggression and dominance, which socially tolerates or encourages violent behaviors among men and boys (Baird 2018, 2019; Menjívar 2011a). Implicitly, this can motivate their participation and displays of violence in gangs, organized crime, and vigilante groups (Gordon 2020; Rodgers 2007); perpetration of sexual harassment, IPV, rape, and sexual assault (Menjívar 2011a; Salzinger 2000); and use of violence to settle interpersonal conflict with family, friends, neighbors, and other acquaintances (Zubillaga 2009). In fact, many scholars link IPV and other forms of interpersonal violence to patriarchal norms that favor aggression and displays of male dominance (Gibbons and Luna 2015; Obinna 2021; Saunders et al. 2022). This not only translates to gendered interpersonal violence perpetrated by men against women, but also to men’s use of gratuitous violence to perform their masculine identity for other men in male-dominated spaces like in the police force, military, or gangs (Baird 2015; Gibbons and Luna 2015; Hietanen and Pick 2015; Zubillaga 2009). Studies of police violence in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, for example, highlight that a major driver of police brutality is men’s quest for respect (Gledhill 2015; Salem and Larkins 2021; Sørbøe 2020).

Social and economic marginalization are also linked to hybrid interpersonal violence. Multiple quantitative studies, for instance, demonstrate associations between low education levels, poverty, and income instability with IPV (Friedemann-Sánchez and Lovatón 2012; Valdez-Santiago et al. 2013; Wheeler, Hutchinson, and Leyton 2021). Family stress theories posit that this is because economically stressful conditions exacerbate intrafamilial conflict to the point of violence (Gage 2005). Gender scholars, on the other hand, argue that poverty strips men of opportunities to perform their masculinity in alternative ways, such as through breadwinning or the provision of basic necessities for their families (Weitzman 2018). In turn, when men feel emasculated, they may resort to IPV to restore a gendered hierarchy and sense of dominance within their household (Svec and Andic 2018).

Qualitative and historical analyses also draw connections between “multiple marginalities” (Levenson 2013, p.7) like poverty, indigeneity, rurality, or living in the urban “fringes” with extra-household interpersonal violence via participation in gangs, organized crime, or vigilantism (Brenneman 2012; Gordon 2020; Martínez and Martínez 2019; Moodie 2010). There are several explanations for this as well. One is the need for self-protection: Individuals who are racially, geographically, or socioeconomically marginalized are more vulnerable to exploitation and crime victimization. When unprotected by the state, disenfranchised individuals may use extrajudicial violence or the threat of it to protect themselves, either individually or collectively (Davis 2010; Gordon 2020; Koven and McClintock 2018; Langdon and Rodriguez 2007; Ramírez 2010). Another reason pertains to economic opportunity. For poor and poorly educated individuals, becoming a violence specialist can engender a reasonable income in the absence of viable alternatives (Gordon 2020; Martínez and Martínez 2019). At the same time, social marginalization has the potential to make individuals feel poorly about themselves and their life chances in a way that results in intense anger or shame (Brenneman 2012; Levenson 2013). In these instances, interpersonal violence can become a form of social resistance, emotional evasion, or identity reclamation (Brenneman 2012; Brienen 2018; Levenson 2013).

Of course, hybrid interpersonal violence can play out in many different situations and across socioeconomic strata. This means that interpersonal violence is not exclusively perpetrated by individuals with the aforementioned characteristics. Indeed, studies increasingly recognize women’s involvement in gangs, including their appropriation of masculine norms that promote aggression, interpersonal violence, and violence against other women (Baird 2015; Rubio 2011). Likewise, wealthy elites play a critical role in the highest levels of organized criminal networks, often colluding with government officials (Grillo 2011; Rubio 2011). Thus, although certain individual characteristics are associated with a higher likelihood of violence perpetration, ultimately, perpetration hinges on other historical, structural, and cultural factors as well.

Challenges and Opportunities for Future Studies

Explicitly examining the interpersonal dimensions of violence that is connected to organizational or macro structures generates many opportunities for more deeply understanding the manifestations, causes, and consequences of violence in contemporary Latin America (and elsewhere). At the same time, however, scholars must contend with a number of practical and theoretical concerns before expanding research in this area. Most of these concerns are not unique to studying hybrid interpersonal violence, but rather, arise when studying violence more broadly.

Data and methods

Insecurity, corruption, and weak rule of law present data challenges for scholars interested in violence, including hybrid interpersonal violence. For quantitative scholars, administrative records may be incomplete, nonexistent, or inaccessible (Pinheiro 1999). Moreover, because some crimes are more likely to be investigated or solved than others (Beck 2021; Neumann 2017), public records can offer a skewed portrait. These challenges make it difficult for scholars of Latin America to apply criminological theories and approaches to violence developed in the United States or Europe, which are characterized by comparably more stable institutions and better record keeping (Arias and Montt 2018; Carrington, Hogg, and Sozzo 2018; Pereda 2022).

In the United States, for example, Papachristos et al. (2015) analyze police arrest records, quality-of-life summons, and field interrogation reports to reconstruct network connections between gunshot victims in Newark, New Jersey. Their analysis of comprehensive administrative records enables estimates of what percent of gunshot injuries occur among gang members and affiliates. Despite the incredible theoretical and empirical importance of this work, similar approaches are less feasible in northern Central America, Mexico, or Brazil, where few crimes go solved and records of them are often incomplete. Lack of reporting to the police contribute to this data dearth: The dark figure of extortion, kidnappings, and gender-based violent crimes is estimated to be over 90% in Latin America, reflecting victims’ lack of confidence in judicial institutions (Jaitman and Anauati 2019).

The inability or unwillingness of the police to identify homicide victims, particularly in cases when the state may be to blame, exacerbates another data issue for studying hybrid interpersonal violence in Latin America: desaparecidos (disappeared persons). In Mexico, for example, there are presently >26,000 unidentified bodies and >30,000 lost, disappeared, or missing persons (Fortuna et al. 2022). Given the lack of clarity surrounding their identities, perpetrators, and the circumstances of their deaths, desaparecidos undoubtedly lead to an underestimate of specific violent crimes and fatalities. In light of ongoing judicial deficiencies in Mexico, many families of desaparecidos organize themselves to learn forensic techniques, collect DNA samples, systematize information, and search for and identify bodies (Turati 2016). The data collected by these families offers an alternative source of information to further investigations of interpersonal violence and its hybridization in Latin America. Similarly, data on criminal activity collected by journalists and civil society groups represents another invaluable resource (México Evalúa 2023; FLIP 2023; Artículo 19 2022).

Multiple surveys also exist, such as the Violence Against Children Surveys (VACS) in Colombia, El Salvador, and Honduras. VACS include information on community, school, gang, and family-based violence victimization and perpetration, which allows for more nuanced analyses of hybrid interpersonal violence than surveys that only ask about family violence, for example. However, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) also provide information on IPV as well as non-partner sexual violence in Bolivia, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Haiti, and Peru. Because many DHS are geocoded, they enable researchers to link self-reported violence to contextual factors such as the intensity of surrounding armed conflict (Svallfors 2021), potentially (though not necessarily) pointing to hybrid interpersonal violence. Recent Protection Monitoring Surveys (PMS), collected by the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, also include information on targeted and diffuse violence victimization among Latin American migrants occurring before, during, and after migration.

Survey data, however, also come with limitations such as underreporting (Palermo, Bleck, and Peterman 2014) and infrequent data collection (INEGI 2021). Moreover, those most likely to be victimized or to participate in violence may be least likely to be surveyed. For instance, the El Salvador VACS, conducted in 2017, was unable to survey all selected enumeration areas, or to survey all households within certain selected areas, because of safety concerns (Ministry of Justice and Public Security 2019, p.100). It is therefore impossible to know the exact extent of bias introduced by the omission of particularly vulnerable subsets of a given population.

Qualitative criminologists working in Latin America confront similar dilemmas. Foremost, conducting research in volatile sites can compromise the safety of the researcher, intermediaries, and participants. Numerous scholars working in the region have attested to witnessing violence or being intimidated or assaulted by gang members, police, military personnel, or mistrustful community members during fieldwork (Blake 2020; Gordon 2020). These safety concerns can delay or even block access to the field, hampering valuable observations and interviews (Blake 2020). When researchers are denied access to firsthand observations and interviews, they are forced to rely on partial, conflicting or official accounts of events. In turn, they may miss nuances of violent interactions and thus risk the reification of rigid categorizations of violence. Such safety and accessibility challenges are often accentuated for female scholars, who are more likely to be both sexually harassed or assaulted and to be denied permission for ethnographic observations in hyper-masculinized environments (Hanson and Richards 2019).

Participant safety is also an issue. In an interview-based study on the causes of IPV among indigenous women in Sololá, Guatemala, for instance, the authors struggled to recruit participants because of women’s concerns about maintaining their anonymity in a close-knit community (Wands and Mirzoev 2022). Likewise, one oral historian struggled to recruit participants for a study of the evolution of gang life in Guatemala City (Levenson 2013) because potential participants repeatedly declined invitations, telling her “to talk is to die” (Levenson 2013, p.89).

Despite these challenges, qualitative scholars have developed various strategies for managing insecurity in the field and improving data quality. Many of their tactics include (a) cultivating healthy interpersonal relationships in the field; (b) building rapport with communities and local leadership; (c) being transparent about research aims; and (d) establishing relationships with gatekeepers who advise on safety (Blake 2020). These are of course not infallible solutions. Reliance on gatekeepers in violent contexts, especially when these are community leaders, local elites, or state officials, for example, may unwittingly introduce bias by amplifying the voices of powerful groups over those of more marginalized members (Bell-Martin and Marston 2021). Keeping the positionality of gatekeepers and researchers in mind is therefore essential to understanding the limits of data interpretation.

Conceptualizing violence and its implications

Although examples of hybrid interpersonal violence run throughout the interdisciplinary literature on Latin America, rarely does the phenomenon itself take center stage. This leaves open many opportunities to intentionally explore hybrid interpersonal violence, including the forms that it takes, under what conditions it is most likely to arise, and what its social, demographic, and health implications are for the individuals who endure it. For example, to what extent do more targeted and personalized forms of gang violence, like extortion and recruitment, contribute to out-migration from northern Central America? How does this compare to the effects of less targeted gang violence like turf wars? Moving beyond gangs, when is violence against journalists, politicians, or activists interpersonal? And, when and how does political conflict take on interpersonal qualities? And more importantly, how does accounting for interpersonal qualities help us understand the processes leading to these violent situations?

At a conceptual level, thinking about hybrid interpersonal foregrounds connections between the micro and macro dimensions of violence. For example, the notion of organized interpersonal violence implies that not all violence committed by gang or DTO members is directed and in keeping with an organization’s goals. It also points to the contextual role of organizations in shaping norms that motivate violence and the resources that enable it. Asking how “organized” violence becomes interpersonal opens up the possibility for broader multidisciplinary discussions about when and why organizational members are not violent. Indeed, gang scholars recognize variation in the lethality of gang violence across different spaces (Baird 2021). To what extent are these differences driven by distinct interpersonal dynamics and structures versus disparate organizational goals? Likewise, how much do organizational goals drive or divert interpersonal violence within and between gangs? Answering these types of questions, and questions about alternative manifestations of hybrid interpersonal violence, may shed new light on what prevents people from behaving violently across different situations and settings.

Developing a more expansive, multidisciplinary evidence base on hybrid interpersonal violence also has political implications. For instance, in 2006, as the Mexican government began rolling out militarized drug-enforcement policies, it embraced a narrative about violence in Mexico, suggesting that almost all violent crime occurs solely between criminal organizations who fight for control of drug markets (Schedler 2016). According to this logic, violence in Mexico is largely limited to “bad guys killing each other” (Schedler 2016, p.1049). Over the last fifteen years, such messaging has resulted in the development of a dominant public discourse that equates victims with their perpetrators and blames homicide victims for their own deaths (Schedler 2016). The Guatemalan government has adopted similar narratives about gangs (Fontes 2018). State-propelled narratives about violence occurring primarily as a function of gangs and DTOs, or that homicide victims are primarily DTO or gang members, implies that most murders don’t need to be solved in order to know who is to blame. They further play into the political justification of mano dura policies and incomplete investigations of unresolved cases (Fontes 2018; Schedler 2016; Moncada 2021).

Concluding remarks

The concept of hybrid interpersonal violence calls attention to how and when violence takes on interpersonal as well as gendered, organizational, or extrajudicial qualities, among other possibilities. By directing attention to this complexity, it deepens understandings of the nature and causes of multifaceted security situations across Latin America today. Moreover, conceiving of hybrid interpersonal violence foregrounds the interpersonal dimensions of violence across many different scenarios and explicitly considers how these dimensions may be exacerbated or minimized by the surrounding organizational or macro context. We focus on Latin America, where this hybridization runs throughout a rich, multidisciplinary literature. Nonetheless, Latin America is not the only region where evidence of hybrid interpersonal violence exists. The intellectual exercise of hybridization thus holds promise for a range of theoretical and empirical innovations in other parts of the world, notably by drawing linkages between individual and structural dimensions of violence.