Trends and Patterns in Latin American Criminality

Author(s):  
Marcelo Bergman

This chapter presents a comprehensive evaluation of Latin American trends in violent and property crime over the past twenty-five to thirty years, displays short and long time series for different countries, and describes various types of crimes in the region. Different data sources depict the clear upward trend in criminality and country differences in the intensity of crime. This chapter also discusses the merits of transcending homicide data to fully assess the social transformations occurring in the region. Finally, it describes the dependent variable of this book.

Urban Studies ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (10) ◽  
pp. 2085-2107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Inzulza-Contardo

Although gentrification is an accepted process nowadays around the globe, little debate is found in the Latin American context—particularly, when considering that 70 per cent of this continent is urbanised and that major physical and socioeconomic changes have been observed in its historical neighbourhoods in the past 20 years. This paper focuses on the continuity and change that Santiago, Chile, has shown in recent decades. Empirical data are provided to reflect both the physical and socioeconomic patterns of change that have modified the urban morphology and the social capital of Santiago’s inner city. Furthermore, by selecting Bellavista—one of the oldest inner-city neighbourhoods of Santiago—this paper draws conclusions about how specific urban regeneration strategies can promote gentrification and then links them with wider patterns of ‘Latino gentrification’.


2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (06) ◽  
pp. 19-34
Author(s):  
Luis Mauricio Escalante Solís ◽  
Carlos David Carrillo Trujillo

Las sociedades comparten un serie de formas a través de las cuales se pueden identificar, conocerse y re-conocerse, sin hacer mucho caso a la especificidad, latitud o cultura que las caracterizan y las unen. Lo primero que comparten es una memoria social, entendida como un significado compartido por los miembros que lo conforman, sin importar su veracidad o autenticidad. El recuerdo es necesario para mantener unido a los integrantes de un grupo, es por ello que se manifiesta constante e intermitentemente en el transcurso de la existencia del grupo social, se vuelve un significado adoptado por dicho colectivo que debe ser manifiesto en las actividades y la cotidianidad.El presente trabajo describe y analiza tres prácticas sociales de conmemoración denominadas alternativas que se realizan en países latinoamericanos (Argentina, Chile y México), se fundamentan sus orígenes, causas sociales y formas de organización, así como sus acciones principales. El eje rector que unifica a estas tres prácticas conmemorativas es el hecho de que reivindican la lucha social y ejemplifican mecanismos contrahegemónicos de demanda social, antes las falencias, omisiones y acciones del Estado. El estudio y el análisis de las conmemoraciones abren la posibilidad de entender distintos usos del pasado. Los eventos históricos construyen un relato que otorga identidad y sentimiento de unidad. Sin embargo, recuperar el pasado a través de la conmemoración no elimina el surgimiento de grupos contrahegemónicos que proponen una reflexión crítica sobre lo sucedido. The societies share a number of ways through which they can identify and meet. However, often irrelevant specifics of culture. It is much more important social memory. Social memory is something that is shared by members of a group regardless of their veracity or authenticity. The memory is needed to hold together the members of a group. Therefore, the memory becomes a meaning adopted by the collective manifested in everyday activities.This paper describes and analyzes three social practices of commemoration taking place in Latin American countries (Argentina, Chile and Mexico), describing their origins, social causes, forms of organization and main actions. The guiding principle that unifies these three commemorative practices is claimed that exemplify the social struggle and counter-hegemonic mechanisms of social demand, given the failures, omissions and actions of the state. The study and analysis of the commemorations open the possibility of understanding different uses of the past. Historical events construct a story that gives identity and togetherness. However, recovering the past, through the commemoration does not eliminate the emergence of counter-hegemonic groups that propose a critical reflection about what happened.


1975 ◽  
Vol 72 ◽  
pp. 9-22

The latest budget was the clearest indication yet of the break which is occurring in the way in which economic policy has been conducted since the war. Against a background of falling output and rapidly rising unemployment (actual, as well as forecast) the Chancellor introduced a deflationary package. The last time unemployment reached ¾ million on an upward trend, in mid-1971, policy was already moving towards stimulation of demand, and this was the tendency on all previous occasions when the unemployment figures had been rising for any length of time. The different reaction this time is a measure of the seriousness with which the Chancellor views the balance of payments situation and, more especially, wage and salary inflation. Demand management policy is evidently now being used not to maintain a high and stable level of employment but as a bargaining weapon in an attempt to get some effective tightening of the social contract. Wages have risen much faster than prices over the past twelve months, evidence that the Trade Union side of the contract is not being kept. The government is therefore showing that it can no longer keep its part of the bargain and that it will not, through its fiscal and monetary policies, continue to validate a rate of wage increase between 20 and 30 per cent per annum. While this policy is pursued, unemployment must rise unless or until the inflation of incomes slows down.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 142-163
Author(s):  
T. A. Vorotnikova

A protest wave which began in 2019 has swept across many Latin American countries. The Multinational State of Bolivia, where rapid destabilization of political situation has led to a serious internal crisis, was no exception. The paper examines the prospects for conflict resolution in Bolivia through the lens of the ‘divided society’ concept. The first section identifies the key fault lines in Bolivia including ethnic, cultural, and civilizational differences, economic disproportions, and high levels of social and political polarization. The author shows how the regime of Evo Morales managed to reach an internal balance and maintain it for quite a long time through complex balancing, concessions, and compromises. The second section identifies the causes behind the 2019 crisis. These include miscalculations of the government which has revealed general instability of the country’s political system and threatened to erode democratic institutions; changes in electoral behavior of the population; the increasing role of the armed forces. The author links the possibilities to overcome these challenges faced by Bolivia with the expansion of the social protection in conjunction with the principle of consociationalism, but stresses that even so the consolidation of the Bolivian society will be a time-consuming process.


Author(s):  
Paul Manuel Müller ◽  
Jobst Heitzig ◽  
Jürgen Kurths ◽  
Kathy Lüdge ◽  
Marc Wiedermann

AbstractIn the past decades, human activities caused global Earth system changes, e.g., climate change or biodiversity loss. Simultaneously, these associated impacts have increased environmental awareness within societies across the globe, thereby leading to dynamical feedbacks between the social and natural Earth system. Contemporary modelling attempts of Earth system dynamics rarely incorporate such co-evolutions and interactions are mostly studied unidirectionally through direct or remembered past impacts. Acknowledging that societies have the additional capability for foresight, this work proposes a conceptual feedback model of socio-ecological co-evolution with the specific construct of anticipation acting as a mediator between the social and natural system. Our model reproduces results from previous sociological threshold models with bistability if one assumes a static environment. Once the environment changes in response to societal behaviour, the system instead converges towards a globally stable, but not necessarily desired, attractor. Ultimately, we show that anticipation of future ecological states then leads to metastability of the system where desired states can persist for a long time. We thereby demonstrate that foresight and anticipation form an important mechanism which, once its time horizon becomes large enough, fosters social tipping towards behaviour that can stabilise the environment and prevents potential socio-ecological collapse.


2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon B. Schmidt

The focal article of Landers and Behrend (2015) persuasively argues that universally condemning potential convenience data sources outside of traditional industrial–organizational (I-O) samples such as college students and organization samples is misguided. This author agrees that instead we need to consider the context, strengths, and weaknesses of more recently recognized potential data sources. This commentary will focus on understanding the context of one particular potential data source, Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk; https://www.mturk.com/). While some existing research has looked at the demographic characteristics of Amazon MTurk workers and how those workers’ answers compared with more traditional samples (Casler, Bickel, & Hackett, 2013; Goodman, Cryder, & Cheema, 2013; Paolacci & Chandler, 2014), for this commentary I decided to take a primarily different tack. For the space of approximately 50 days, I acted as an MTurk worker on the site and participated in online communities at which MTurk workers congregate. The purposes of this were to experience the MTurk worker environment firsthand and observe how MTurk workers interact with each other and the site. This was done in the spirit of participant-observer research. Stanton and Rogelberg (2002) argue that online communities might be a particularly fruitful avenue for such participant-observer research within the field of I-O psychology. I am quick to note here that I don't see my efforts here as anywhere near as extensive as much of the participant-observer work of the past, and I did my time on MTurk in the spirit of such work rather than as a match for their methodological and analytical rigor. The observations I make in this commentary will be couched in my own experiences as well as the existing literature base on Amazon MTurk.


Author(s):  
Roberto Blancarte

Latin American sociology of religion is a relatively young discipline, although institutionally speaking, it has not lagged as far behind European sociology as we usually think. There is, in fact, an early link between Continental Europe and Latin America in the development of institutions dedicated to the study of religions. They have witnessed an incredible expansion, particularly over the past three decades. The author offers a general panorama of the trajectory of the subdiscipline and the development of a robust academic field. The reasons for this intellectual explosion go from the development of a scientific institutional framework for social sciences in emerging economies to the changing structure of religions and the social awareness of a historical plurality of beliefs in Latin America.


2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Andrea Valdivia-Barrios ◽  
Daniel Pinto-Torres ◽  
Minka Herrera-Barraza

The social transformations related to digital technologies and new media offer important challenges to education. The school ceases to be the main space; ways of knowing and producing knowledge expand and diversify; and communicative practices become more complex. This makes it necessary to examine skills and learnings that should be promoted to act and participate in digital and media settings. This article presents a critical conceptual review on media literacy and learning from Latin American, American and European traditions. A reading integrating theoretical contribution from communication and education is proposed. Literacy is understood as a social practice that implies construction and social consensus for the generation and negotiation of meanings through language and learning. It offers pertinent guidelines for an educational curriculum in tune with the challenges of digitization and mediatization of society.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 90-95 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mengge Han ◽  
Xiao Ming Shi ◽  
Chun Cai ◽  
Yong Zhang ◽  
Wang Hong Xu

The 70-year experience of China in fighting against non-communicable diseases (NCDs) can be classified into three distinct periods: 1) the disease-oriented strategy period (from 1950 to 1994); 2) the risk factor-focused strategy period (from 1995 to 2008); and 3) the social and policy priority strategy period (since 2009). A number of projects were successful and valuable experience and lessons were accumulated during the three periods. Due to the underestimation of the ‘explosive’ epidemic of NCDs, however, it took China quite a long time to find the right path to curb the upward trend in these diseases. In this commentary, the authors review the evolution of strategies and the healthcare service system, examine advances and challenges, and summarize experience and lessons in NCD control in China. In view of development, China’s experience may have valuable implications for other low- and middle-income countries.


Author(s):  
Craig Webber

AbstractThis article revisits the concept of relative deprivation and asks whether it is still useful for criminology. The article traces the way relative deprivation has been used in the past to understand crime and how it has connections to other, more recent, additions to debates on social justice. I argue that relative deprivation has disappeared even in the place that it had become the key explanation for crime—left realism. In so doing, I explore the resurrection of left realism in criminology—what I refer to as “post-millennial left realism”—first, by those who were associated with it originally, and then with Hall and Winlow’s (2015, 2017) shift in emphasis to what they term “ultra-realism.” I maintain that relative deprivation is still a powerful concept for bridging several related areas that should still be central to the concerns of criminology—in part, because it is still a major concern in popular social science and social psychology. Why has it disappeared in criminology? I present an argument that suggests that the absence of certain research methods, such as ethnographic and qualitative or small-scale survey methods, has impoverished our understanding of the lived reality of people experiencing the social transformations of a networked, precarious society. The massive polarization and disruption in politics and social discourse, as well as the worldwide economic, public health, and social transformations (ranging from the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter protests to the COVID-19 global pandemic) have demonstrated the continued relevance and analytical power that relative deprivation, in its elaborated form, brings to questions of crime and justice.


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