The Pandemic and Organized Crime in Urban Latin America: New Sovereignty Arrangements or Business as Usual?

Abstract

Using a focus on the ways that Covid-19 has impacted everyday life in urban Latin America, this article examines the shifting activities of organized criminal groups in the context of a global pandemic. Using grounded ethnographic fieldwork drawn from Brazil, it asks whether a health crisis with direct life and death consequences has empowered illicit actors, and by so doing changed longstanding relationships between illicit actors and citizens on one hand, and/or illicit actors and local authorities on the other. Its larger aim is to understand whether and how the global pandemic has impacted governance by producing new scalar and sovereignty tensions between state and non-state actors at the scale of the city, and with what implications for the legitimacy of national authorities and democratic governance more generally.