\xa1A Nosotros, nos Tienen que Respetar! (They Have to Respect us!): Gangs, Inter-Generational Conflict, and Graduated Governance in Urban Nicaragua

Dennis Rodgers

doi:10.1007/s10612-022-09616-1

Abstract

Gangs are often associated with violence and chaos, but they can also be institutional vectors for the imposition of particular forms of social order, based on their members’ status as locally hegemonic “violence experts”. This “gang governance” is often exclusive and volatile, however, and its underlying logic can easily change. Instances of the latter are frequently connected to generational turnovers within gangs. An obvious question in this regard is how old and new gang members interact with each other, especially in circumstances where the rules and norms upheld by the latter become detrimental to the former. Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article explores the conflicts that emerged between different generations of gang members following the gang’s transformation from a vigilante self-defence group to a predatory drug-dealing organisation, and what these might mean for the notion of gang governance.

Highlights

There exists a long-standing tradition of research highlighting how gangs can be institutional vectors for the imposition and promotion of different forms of local security orders, or what might be termed forms of “gang governance”
The overwhelming majority of exiting gang members tend to reduce their engagement in violent activities—this is seen as a primary characteristic of “desistance”—this does not mean that they lose their violence expertise
Considering that many former gang members remain within their local communities after leaving the gang, this means that they can potentially challenge the violent hegemony of new generations of gang members

Summary

Introduction

There exists a long-standing tradition of research highlighting how gangs can be institutional vectors for the imposition and promotion of different forms of local security orders, or what might be termed forms of “gang governance”. Collective gang wars became a significant practice of this new iteration of the gang and marked the beginning of a new cycle of evolving gang governance, whereby initially graduated and imitative iterations gave way to progressively more unitary forms, fuelled by ever-increasing levels of violence that were motivated by a desire for hegemonic territorial control, first in order to increase the profitability of low-level drug dealing, but subsequently as part of a campaign of state repression that followed a popular uprising in Nicaragua in April 2018, as gangs all over the country were brought under the aegis of the authoritarian government of Daniel Ortega as it sought to pacify and re-establish control over the country’s population and territory (see Rodgers 2021a) This arguably effectively constituted a scaling up of gang governance from the local to the national level, but its motivation was a challenge to the government’s authority, something that suggests that graduated forms of authoritarian governance, whether by gangs or otherwise, are unsustainable, and there is a tendency for them to become more unitary over time, just as occurred previous in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández in the 2000s

Conclusion

23. Managua