Business and the Politics of Urban Violence in Colombia

Eduardo Moncada

Published online: 10 July 2013# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract What explains variation in local government policy responses to urbanviolence? Existing research on the politics of urban violence overlooks the pivotal rolethat private sector interests play in shaping the public provision of security in majordevelopingworld cities faced with conditions of intense violence. I argue that business isa pivotal political actor that mobilizes through powerful private sector institutions toshape policy responses to urban violence in ways that advance its economic interests andpreserve its privileged status in local political arenas. The security policy preferences ofbusiness vary across economic sectors due to variation in relations to urban space andviolence. This cross-sectoral variation in security policy preferences generates bothopportunities and challenges for political and societal actors that seek to stem andprevent urban violence. Analysis of puzzling variation in policy responses acrossColombia's three principal cities—Medellin, Cali, and Bogota—and over time withineach shows that a focus on business can strengthen our understanding of the politics ofurban violence and, more broadly, its implications for development.

Keywords Business . Urban violence . Global cities . Medellin . Cali . Bogota

In Medellin, Colombia, known in the early 1990s as the world's most violent city,powerful business institutions develop strategies not only to increase profit margins ofmember firms but also to reduce violence in some of the city's poorest neighborhoods.Popularly referred to as Cali's “second mayor,” the Chamber of Commerce in Colombia'sthird largest city produces monthly statistical analyses of local violence that are moresophisticated and more frequently referenced by the media than those produced by theactual mayor's office. And, in the capital, Bogota, business institutions leverage ties tolocal media in their efforts to maintain constant pressure on mayors to safeguard the gainsin security that the city has achieved over the last two decades. This mobilization bybusiness in response to alarming trends in urban violence represents an empiricaldevelopment overlooked in the burgeoning scholarly research on the politics of urban

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330DOI 10.1007/s12116-013-9135-x

E. Moncada (*)Department of Political Science, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ, USAe-mail: eduardo.moncada@rutgers.edu

violence. Policy-oriented studies, meanwhile, limit their view of business' role in stem-ming urban violence to the provision of jobs for at-risk youth.1 Consequently, we lack ananalytic framework to systematically assess the political role that business plays inshaping how local governments respond to urban violence. This article offers such aframework.

Why are some cities unable to break with the status quo of reactive policy responsesto urban violence while other cities are able pursue reformist policy responses? Reactiveresponses to urban violence privilege short-term, coercivemeasures and often fuel ratherthan stem vicious cycles of violence. Reformist approaches, on the other hand, situatethe use of coercive force within broader political projects to incorporate the urbanunderprivileged into the local political arenas fromwhich they have long been excluded,to reduce socioeconomic inequality, to transform the urban built environment, and tochange cultural norms. I argue that business is a political pivot whose determination toeither endorse the status quo or turn toward reform weighs heavily on the nature andtrajectory of local policy responses to urban violence, which pose varied consequencesfor the quality of democracy in cities across the Global South.2

In the next section, I discuss how the omission of business in past research hasgenerated gaps in our understanding of the politics of urban violence. The thirdsection builds an analytic framework to assess the role of business in the politics ofurban violence. The framework identifies the economic and political incentives thatdrive private sector mobilization within the politics of urban violence and explainswhy business' security policy preferences vary across distinct economic sectors. Isubsequently introduce a dynamic perspective into the framework that shows howvarying relations between business and local governments have equally distincteffects on the politics that shape policy responses to urban violence.

In the fourth section of the article, I use the framework to conduct subnationalcontrolled comparisons of puzzling variation in local government policy responses tourban violence across Colombia's three main cities—Medellin, Cali, and Bogota—andwithin each over time. International donors have exported their policy responses tourban violence as models to other cities across the Global South faced with the challengeof urban violence (Castro and Echeverri 2011). In Medellin, an internationally orientedservice sector played a central role in the development of a reformist policy response tourban violence that transformed the city's tarnished international image in ways invitingto foreign capital, but also weakened the historically exclusionary nature of the localpolitical order. Conversely, in the case of Cali, an entrenched agroindustrial sector,concerned less with the city's image and more with the security of its productionfacilities and transport routes, consistently hindered the efforts of political reformiststo advance reformist policy responses that threatened to undermine business' political

1 Raphael and Winter-Ebmer (2001) find a positive correlation between unemployment and property crime,but a comparatively less robust relationship between employment status and inter-personal violence. Usingparticipatory research methods, Moser and Van Bronkhorst (1999, pp. 3–4) find that the strong associationbetween unemployment and violence is mediated by a broader set of relations linking individuals andfamilies with structural and socioeconomic conditions.2 See O'Donnell et al. (2004) on the concept of the quality of democracy. A political pivot is an actor whosedecision to either endorse or break with an established policy has substantial bearing on the continuation ofthe status quo. The concept has been fruitfully used in models to explain a wide range of politicalphenomena, including agrarian reform (Bates 1981, 1989), the process of preference change (Weingast2005), and economic policy reform (Bates and Collier 1995).

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 309

power. And, in Bogota, a globally oriented service sector helped to advance a reformistpolicy response that became the foundation for Bogota's rebranding as an emergingglobal city, but business also derailed proposals to deepen the reformist response'sincorporation of the urban underprivileged. The final section of the article summarizesthe argument and outlines directions for future research.

Building on Existing Approaches to the Politics of Urban Violence

Within research on the politics of urban violence, scholars focus on identifying thepolitical causes and consequences of violence as well as explaining variation in theoutcomes of state responses to violence, with particular consideration for efforts toreform recalcitrant police institutions.3 Both approaches provide valuable insightsinto the broader dynamics of the politics of urban violence. Yet, previous researchfails to theorize the role of business in the politics of urban violence and consequentlyhas difficulty satisfactorily accounting for the variation in policy responses to urbanviolence evident across and over time within Colombia's principal cities.4

Studies on the political origins of urban violence draw on both quantitative andqualitative methods to interrogate the relationship between socioeconomic inequalityand violence. While statistical analyses confirm the positive association betweeninequality and criminal violence (Gaviria and Pagés 2002, p. 189),5 qualitativeapproaches provide important insights into the specific factors that link the two,including relative deprivation (Briceño-León and Zubillaga 2002), societal demandsfor extra-legal violence or popular justice (Goldstein 2004; Snodgrass Godoy 2007),and the interaction between structural inequalities, identity, and constraints on theability to exercise agency in responding to insecurity (Moser and McIlwaine 2006,pp. 97–98).6 Other studies seek to account for the formation and violent behavior ofvaried local armed actors, including vigilantes (Huggins 1991) and youth gangs (Cruz2010; Rodgers 2006; Jones and Rodgers 2009). Studies in this volume (Arias 2013;LeBas 2013) show that variation in the nature of relations between states and localarmed actors yield distinct patterns of urban violence and types of localized orders,while other scholars examine how the structure of local illicit markets impact thedynamics of urban violence (Rios 2013; Snyder and Duran-Martinez 2009). Finally,studies consider the role of the state, specifically the police, in carrying out variedforms of extra-judicial violence within major cities across Latin America (Ahnen2007; Chevigny 1995; Ungar 2011).7 Yet, business is largely absent from this vein ofresearch, which has consequently produced gaps in our knowledge of how business'strategies for shaping policy responses, including support for the violent practices ofvaried state institutions and armed actors, can contribute to urban violence.

3 For a review of the extensive literature on the process of urbanization per se and its theorized linkageswith violence, see Moncada (2013) in this volume.4 The absence of business in the literature on the politics of urban violence stands in contrast to research onthe role of business in transitions to democracy within contexts of political violence (see Wood 2000).5 See Fajnzybler et al. (2002) for a statistical analysis of the relationship between inequality and violence atthe national level in Latin America.6 On the concept of relative deprivation, see Gurr (1970).7 See Brinks (2008) on the politics of judicial responses to police violence in Latin America.

310 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

Studies on the political consequences of violence examine how it weakens socialcapital and the prospects for development (Moser and McIlwaine 2004). Other scholarsanalyze the transformative effects of violence on the urban built environment and, morespecifically, the ability of elites to harness fear of criminal victimization to reshape thegeography of cities in ways that compound segregation along class lines (Caldeira 2001;Rodgers 2004). Research examines how violence reconfigures local social networks andrelations between political and societal actors in urban peripheries under the control ofcriminal groups (Arias 2006; Leeds 1996). Scholars find that violence and insecuritynegatively affect the legitimacy of democratic regimes (Pérez 2003/2004), and othersconclude that criminal victimization is positively associated with political participation(Bateson 2012). Thus, while past research has shed light on the varied consequences thatviolence poses for states, communities, and state-society relations, business has receivedmarkedly less attention. Several studies do examine the financial costs that violenceposes for macro-economic growth and levels of investment (Gaviria 2002; Pshisva andSuarez 2006). Yet, scholars have yet to develop disaggregated perspectives that theorizethe differentiated effects of violence for distinct economic sectors. And past studies donot consider the consequences that violence generates for business' political interests.

Previous research on policy responses to violence concentrates largely on politicalefforts to reform the police. Policy-oriented research on police reform provides an oddlyapolitical perspective that emphasizes the technocratic aspects of organizationalrestructuring and personnel training over the inherently political nature of institutionbuilding and reform. Scholars provide a corrective balance by situating police reformwithin the broader politics of democratization.8 Increasing police accountability is a vitalstep in reforming an institution that has long suffered from a lack of transparency inLatin America (Chevigny 1997) yet is one of the most visible manifestations of the stateon the streets (Hinton 2006). Because vested interests resist efforts to increase policetransparency (Frühling 2009, pp. 142–143), research on police reform provides insightsinto an otherwise inscrutable institution.

Past studies examine how the politicization of the police constrains the potential forits reform (Davis 2006; Eaton 2008; Ungar 2011), the societal factors that influencepolice practices (Chevigny 1995), the politics of strengthening police–community re-lations (Arias and Ungar 2009; Frühling et al. 2003; Fuentes 2004; Hinton 2006;Moncada 2009; Sabet 2012), and police use of extra-judicial violence (Huggins2000). Yet, the focus on police reform can overstate the impact and significance of suchefforts when they are not embedded in broader reform processes (Macaulay 2007, p.631). Zooming in on the police would neither fully capture nor account for the puzzlingvariation in local government responses to urban violence in Colombia, where reformistpolicy responses went beyond a focus on the police and instead conceptualized citizensecurity as a transversal issue that cuts across the domains of political participation,inequality, education, health, and housing, among others. This highlights the need tobroaden our scope of analyses to account for the full range of policy responses toviolence and introduce actors omitted in previous research, such as business, whoseinterests are affected by the significant distributive implications posed by distinct policyresponses to urban violence.

8 See Bailey and Dammert (2006) for an overview of this approach to police reform.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 311

Existing research has made critical contributions to our understanding of the originsand consequences of urban violence as well as the fortunes of efforts to reform policeinstitutions in response. The absence of business in previous studies, however, meansthat the existing literature provides limited analytical traction for explaining the empir-ical puzzle of variation in policy responses to urban violence in Colombia. The nextsection helps us move beyond this impasse by building a new analytic framework thatprovides a stronger understanding of the politics of urban violence through a focus onbusiness.

Business and Urban Violence: an Analytic Framework

Policy Responses to Urban Violence and Political Incentives for Business Mobilization

Major Latin American cities have long been characterized by their “divided” (Walton1978) nature, wherein political power is concentrated in the hands of a local rulingelite that includes powerful business interests (Blasier 1966; Botero 1996; Dent 1974;Morse 1971; Portes and Walton 1976; Roberts and Portes 2006; Sáenz Rovner 1992,2002; Walton 1976, 1977). In such contexts, business can influence a range of policydomains, including infrastructure, land development, and the provision of publicgoods. Yet, the privileged position of business in local politics hinges on exclusionarylocal orders that regulate class relations between the city's political and economicelites and the urban underprivileged. Such orders rest not only on business' favoredaccess to local government—either through close relations with political allies orprivate sector leaders securing public office—but also on the paternalistic practicesbusiness employs to inhibit political mobilization among the underprivileged. Pater-nalistic linkages forged by urban business interests have long structured the periodicprovision of basic goods to peripheral communities in exchange for acceptance oflocal socioeconomic and political hierarchies that preserve the private sector's pref-erential political status.9 Yet, the regional push for decentralization and local partic-ipatory politics during the late twentieth century has intersected in Latin America'scities with the need to build globally competitive metropolises amidst rising levels ofurban violence. Given these political and economic pressures, what implications dodistinct policy responses to urban violence pose for business' privileged position inlocal politics and its ability to advance its economic interests?

Reactive Policy Responses: Preserving the Status Quo

Reactive policy responses prioritize the use of coercive measures, including thedeployment of security forces to conduct militarized patrols of urban peripheriesand the targeting of poor young men from underprivileged communities for extra-legal detention. More broadly, reactive policy responses preserve exclusionary ordersand thus business' political power. Proponents of reactive responses neutralize

9 In her study of life in the favelas of Brazil, Perlman (1976, p. 17, emphasis added) notes that elites viewthe inhabitants of peripheries as “children…[that] need to be guided, taught and educated by the good willof those more fortunate…without necessarily modifying the basic structure of the situation.”

312 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

pressures to address the socioeconomic drivers of violence by dismissing suchapproaches as “soft” and naive (Prillaman 2003, p. 18). Reactive responses stigmatizeurban peripheries by proposing that only an “iron fist” is capable of stemmingviolence in such “anarchic” contexts.10 Stigmatization encourages the use of extra-judicial violence by state actors, sometimes in collaboration with local residents.Often, reactive responses are rationalized with longstanding elite narratives that traceviolence and other “deviant” behavior back to assumptions that the inhabitants ofurban peripheries are socially and culturally “underdeveloped.” Finally, reactivepolicy responses contribute to vicious cycles of violence that inhibit socioeconomicdevelopment and maintain the underlying conditions that both facilitate and areproducts of exclusionary local orders.

Reformist Policy Responses: Challenging Exclusionary Local Orders

Reformist policy responses to urban violence situate the use of coercive force within abroader set of measures that challenge the foundations of exclusionary local orders.First, reformist responses incorporate underprivileged segments of society into localpolitics via participatory mechanisms and institutions that enable the underprivileged toinfluence policymaking concerning citizen security and, more broadly, local gover-nance. The emphasis on political participation consequently influences how the addi-tional measures associated with reformist responses are developed and implemented.Among these additional measures is the transformation of urban space to alter existingsocial practices associated with violence. Specific measures here include establishingparks and green spaces to foster greater citizen interaction; building of libraries, mu-seums, and other cultural institutions to signal the presence of local government; andexpanding and regulating public space. Third, reformist responses challenge culturalnorms associatedwith violence through pedagogical exercises designed tomake citizensaware of alternatives to the use of violence for resolving conflicts as well as moredisciplinary measures, such as bans on alcohol sales during particular periods orlimitations on citizens' abilities to carry firearms in public (Moncada 2009, pp. 437–38). And, fourth, reformist policy responses extend public goods to underprivilegedcommunities in violent peripheral neighborhoods. Reformist policy responses thuscombine the use of coercive force with broader measures to tackle political marginal-ization and inequality, thus endangering exclusionary local orders.

Variation in Security Policy Preferences: Goods and Service Sectors

Because distinct economic sectors have varying relations to urban space and violence,security policy preferences vary across sectors. Goods-producing sectors, includingagroindustry and manufacturing, value the physical security of their assets and capacityto safely bring their products to market. These sectors are challenged by the fact thatcountless supply chains—both licit and illicit—are layered over a single road.11 While

10 Moser and McIlwaine (2004) describe this process as producing “area stigmas.”11 Geography is increasingly a key variable in models that explain micro-level patterns of violence. Kalyvas(2006) finds that variation in levels of territorial control held by the state and insurgents is a strong predictorof levels and dynamics of civil war violence.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 313

goods-producing sectors depend on the security of transport corridors to and fromairports and seaports to fulfill the basic but crucial function of moving their productsto domestic and international markets, these physical spaces are also vital to thesmuggling activities of a range of criminal actors. As a result, goods-producing sectorsface several dilemmas. First, competition between criminal groups for control oftransport routes limits goods-producing sectors' access to these routes.12 Second, evenwhere criminal control over transport routes is settled, as armed actors expand, theyoften diversify their illicit portfolios to include hijackings, piracy, extortion, and kid-nappings that target goods-producing sectors reliant on the same transport routes(Dudley 2012, p. 4).13 And third, the proximity of production facilities to transportroutes in order to bring goods to markets as quickly as possible also makes theseproducts more vulnerable to illicit extraction by criminal groups.14 Based on its partic-ular relationship with urban space and vulnerability to targeted physical violence, goods-producing sectors are more likely to favor reactive policy responses that privilege short-term, coercive measures that can swiftly bring order to these vital geographic terrains.

While service sectors, including finance and commerce, also value physicalsecurity, their economic interests are particularly vulnerable to the perceptions ofsecurity associated with their cities. For large internationally oriented service sectors,global perceptions of the security conditions in their cities weigh heavily on clients'investment and travel decisions.15 The service sector has consequently become a keyproponent of “city branding” (Avraham 2004; Hernandez and Lopez 2011; Kavaratzis2004), which argues that cities should actively manage and control their global images,defined as “the sum of beliefs, ideals, and impressions people have toward a certainplace” (Kotler et al. 1993 as cited in Avraham 2004, p. 472). City branding enablesbusiness to appropriate negative local traits associated with their city, such as violence,and utilize them to draw sharp contrasts with more positive local developments and thuscause consumers to doubt their preconceptions (Avraham 2004, p. 475). Consequently,internationally oriented service sectors in major cities find several points of agreementwith reformist policy responses. First, acknowledging violence as a challenge and thencontrasting it with innovative and counter-intuitive policy responses can draw positiveattention. Second, drawing from policy responses forged in foreign settings, such as the

12 In 2010 in Mexico, facilities owned by state oil monopoly, PEMEX, were regularly inaccessible due toviolence by drug gangs on roads leading to these facilities, which resulted in daily production lossesamounting to $350,000 (Sullivan and Elkus 2011).13 In Colombia, cases of road piracy increased nearly 16-fold between 1985 and 2000, from 206 to 3,260cases, respectively (Sánchez et al. 2003, p. 128). A survey of business firms in Colombia also found that thedisruption of transport routes is among the most commonly highlighted security concerns among goodproducing sectors (Rettberg 2008, Figs. 29 and 30).14 Between 2007 and 2009, Mexican drug cartels siphoned approximately $1 billion worth of oil from thecountry's pipelines. See Washington Post. Widespread oil theft by drug traffickers deals major blow toMexican government. December 13, 2009. Goods producing sectors are often forced to compete with blackmarkets that then sell their own stolen products at a substantial discount. Mexican mining firms, forexample, acknowledge that the scrap metal they purchase on open markets may very well be that whichthey mined and that was stolen during acts of road piracy. Author interview with representative from theNational Chamber for the Steel and Iron Industry, Monterrey, Mexico, June 25, 2012.15 The América Economía magazine, an influential periodical among current and potential internationalinvestors in Latin America, produces an annual ranking of the competitiveness of Latin American cities,within which local security is a critical component. See http://rankings.americaeconomia.com/2010/mejoresciudades/metodologia.php. Accessed on September 26, 2011.

314 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

USA and Europe, also adds an element of novelty that can generate further positiveawareness among international audiences. And third, transforming public space as partof a reformist response to violence can also reshape the built environment in ways morealigned with international perceptions of what global cities should look like. Conse-quently, the service sector is more likely to endorse reformist policy responses capable oftransforming a city's international image and advancing the sector's economic interests.

Business–Local Government Relations: Collaboration and Conflict

I focus on two ideal-type relations between business and local government: collab-oration and conflict.16 The nature of business–local government relations has impli-cations for the strategies that business deploys within the politics of urban violenceand the scope of the politics that shape policy responses. Figure 1 conceptualizes thestrategies that business deploys to advance its security policy preferences within atypology of the broader range of strategies through which business can seek to obtainsecurity in contexts of urban violence. I conceptualize business strategies along twodimensions: whether business engages the state or non-state actors (Y-axis) andwhether the institutional channels through which it interfaces with either actor areformal or informal in nature (X-axis).17 The typology yields four types of businessstrategies.

Quadrant I (non-state/formal) indicates that business can turn to the formal privatesecurity sector, which has experienced significant growth throughout Latin Americaand now numbers approximately 1.6 million employees (Ungar 2007, pp. 20–23).18

Quadrant II (non-state/informal) depicts the alternative strategy of using informalinstitutional channels to enlist the aid of local armed actors, including unregulatedsecurity firms, organized criminal groups, vigilantes, social cleansing groups, andyouth gangs, among others. The use of local armed actors for security can be eithervoluntary or imposed upon business by the armed actors themselves.19 Business canalso obtain security by engaging the state through informal institutional channels,namely corruption, as shown in Quadrant III (state/informal). One key state institu-tion here is the police, which, given inadequate salaries and highly dangerousworking conditions, is particularly vulnerable to corruption (Ungar 2011).

16 The policy preferences of city mayors that head local governments can be shaped by varied factors,including the platforms of their political parties, preferences among their constituents, linkages to illicitarmed actors, and vested interest in the use of state institutions for clientelism and patronage politics,among others. Yet, it is the variation in the nature of relations between powerful business interests and localgovernment that most proximately affect the nature and trajectory of policy responses to urban violence.17 I acknowledge that the borders between the state and non-state actors, and particularly criminal actors,can be quite fluid. Here I conceive of the two as ideal types to facilitate theory building.18 The proliferation of private security raises a number of challenges for the state and questions about theprovision of security as a basic public good. The increasing number of private security firms has generatedsubstantial regulatory challenges throughout the region (Ungar 2011, p. 86). In several countries, publicpolice officers “moonlight” as private security guards (Hinton 2005, p. 85; Huggins 2000; Ungar 2007, p.23). Private security personnel in Latin America are not only the most heavily armed in the world outside ofthose located in contexts of civil conflict (Small Arms Survey 2011, pp. 101–33), but, in many countries,far exceed the number of public police. In Guatemala, for example, the ratio of private security to police is 6to 1 (Ibid: Annex 4.1).19 See Arias (2013) in this volume for examples of how local armed actors extract resources frombusinesses and economic markets in territories under their control.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 315

The strategies outlined in quadrants I through III require relatively low-levelinvestments of resources, minimal organizational capacities, and are most useful forachieving security at individual firms as opposed to shaping city-wide policy re-sponses to urban violence. Yet, when we shift to quadrant IV (state/formal), it quicklybecomes evident that state-focused strategies relying on formal institutional channelsdemand a higher level of financial resources and organizational capacities frombusiness. Measures that target the state via formal institutional channels in order toshape policy responses to urban violence are thus the realm of business institutionswith the ability to overcome collective action problems and aggregate the necessaryeconomic and political resources.20 Large-scale firms that are dominant in theirrespective economic sectors tend to be the principal voices within business institu-tions. Among the strategies business institutions can deploy are establishing thinktanks focused on security and violence; analyzing and disseminating research on localsecurity conditions and associated policy options; launching media campaigns;bringing international policy lessons, actors, and pressures to bear on local govern-ment; providing financial support for actors and initiatives aligned with its security

20 This part of the argument draws on the literature on state-business relations within the context of thepolitical economy of development (Bartell and Payne 1995; Cammett 2007; Gourevitch 1986; Kingstone1999; Payne 1994; Schneider 2004). I define business institutions using Doner and Schneider's (2000, p.280) definition of business associations: “long-term organizations with formal statutes regulating member-ship and internal decision-making in which the members are individual business people, firms, or otherassociations.” A business institution's organizational capacity hinges on its material resources—budget andprofessional staff—and ability to provide selective benefits, such as privileged access to centers of politicalpower, as incentives for members to support association policies and discourage “exit” (Doner andSchneider 2000, p. 263; Olson 1965, pp. 133–50; Schneider 2004, p. 7).

−Think tanks−Research−Media / public relations−International linkages−Campaign finance−Police infrastructure

−Private security

−Police corruption−Political corruption

−Illegal security firms−Vigilantes−Social cleansing

State

Non-state

Forma Il nformal

A Typology of Business Strategies in Contexts of Urban Violence

I II

IIIIV

Fig. 1 A typology of business strategies in contexts of urban violence

316 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

policy preferences; and forging direct ties with state security forces.21 Where busi-ness–local government relations are collaborative, business institutions can deploythese approaches to reinforce the efforts of their political allies; at the same time, ifrelations are conflictive, business can use the same resources to resist and derailpolicy responses that run counter to the private sector’s interests.

The nature of business–local government relations also has implications for thescope of the politics of urban violence, which refers to the range of actors beyondbusiness and local government, such as the national government or grassroots civilsociety, that are able to make substantive impacts on the nature and trajectory of localpolicy responses. Collaborative relations that unite the local government's formalauthority to define the policy response to urban violence and the private sector'sconsiderable political and financial resources represent a formidable political front toadvance a jointly preferred policy response. Because collaborative relations preservethe historical unity of the urban ruling class, they limit the potential political influenceof actors with opposing policy preferences. Conversely, conflictive relations forcebusiness and local government to engage in coalition building to consolidate supportfor each one's policy preference. Hence, conflictive relations widen the scope of thepolitics of urban violence by generating windows of opportunity for other actors toadvocate for their own policy preference as part of the bargaining inherent to anyprocess of coalition building. Conflictive relations, in brief, increase the capacity ofactors other than business and local government located both within and outside ofcities to influence the politics of urban violence.

Applying the Framework: Explaining Variation in Policy Responses to UrbanViolence in Colombia

In the late 1980s, amidst violence fueled by a longstanding civil war and efforts todismantle powerful drug cartels, the Colombian national government launched a decen-tralization project that shifted political powers and responsibilities to municipal govern-ments over a number of policy domains, including citizen security. Decentralizationbroke with the historically centralized nature of politics in Colombia (Bejarano andLeongómez 2002) and was undertaken parallel to the country's economic liberalization.The political and economic reforms yielded puzzling subnational variation in policyresponses to urban violence. Both Medellin and Bogota advanced reformist policyresponses that focused on the socioeconomic and political drivers of violence and hadtransformative consequences for local development. Though Cali was the first city inColombia to seek to advance a reformist policy response, the city's reformist politicalproject was ultimately derailed. This section uses the analytic framework developedabove to account for these contrasting policy responses.22 The empirical analysis isbased on extensive study of archival materials from both public and private archives andover 200 interviews that I conducted between 2006 and 2011 with representatives of

21 Use of the strategies in Quadrant IV, however, does not rule out business concurrently drawing from thestrategies in the other three quadrants.22 On the subnational comparative method, see Snyder (2001), and on controlled-comparison and within-case analysis, George and Bennett (2005, pp. 151–80).

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 317

business institutions; business owners; politicians from the local, regional, and nationallevels of government; grassroots civil society leaders; former and active members ofvaried local armed groups; and police and military officials.23

Medellin: from Industrial Workhorse to Global Service Sector Hub

By the mid-twentieth century, Medellin boasted one of Latin America's most vibrantindustrial sectors. In 1944, industrialists founded the National Association of In-dustrialists to advocate for their economic interests (Sáenz Rovner 1992, 2002),which at the start of the 1990s came under threat from widespread violence fueledin part by the conflict between the Medellin drug cartel and the Colombian nationalgovernment. Critical transport routes in and out of Medellin that were vital forindustry's ability to deliver goods to both national and international markets hadbecame prime targets for violent hijackings, road piracy, and kidnappings carried outby a range of local armed actors with varied linkages to the drug trade. Moreover, theprotagonists of local violence were largely poor young men from the city's urbanperiphery, over which the industrial elite had long exerted social control.24 Through-out much of the twentieth century, the city's industrial elites had relied on paternalismto encourage renouncement of class conflict (Roldán 1999). Industrialists thus framedthe violence as a result of the corrosive effects that illicit profits from the drug tradehad on the exclusionary local order. The city's industrial sector would mobilize toderail an ambitious reformist response to local violence proposed by grassroots civilsociety and the national government that emphasized reducing inequality and thebottom-up political incorporation of the city's underprivileged.

By the early 2000s, Medellin’s industrial sector had been eclipsed by a powerfulfinancial services sector represented by the Economic Group of Antioquia (GEA)(Franco Restrepo 2006, p. 155), a diversified economic group directed by the city'spremier financial services firms. The GEA sought to leverage the “name recognition”that Medellin had earned during the drug wars of the 1990s as a platform upon whichto “sell” the city as safe to international clients and thus transform Medellin into aglobal service sector hub focused on finance, banking, professional corporate ser-vices, and medical tourism.25 A far-reaching reformist policy response to localviolence would prove integral for business' efforts to rebrand Medellin and advanceprivate sector economic interests.

Cali: Agroindustry and the Building of a City Region

Agroindustry has long been a prominent force in Cali's political arena (Blasier 1966).The city is the regional capital of the Valle del Cauca department, which is amongColombia's principal producers of agricultural goods for both domestic and interna-tional markets. Throughout the twentieth century, the agroindustrial sector's main

23 Interviewees were identified and selected through non-probability purposive and chain-referral samplingtechniques (Tansey 2007).24 The resulting social control played a crucial role in neutralizing political opposition and labor unrest inMedellin and thus greatly facilitated the city’s remarkable economic development (Botero 1996, pp. 43–46).25 Author interview with business leader from a GEA firm, February 11, 2009, Bogota, Colombia.

318 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

institutional representative, the Cali Chamber of Commerce (CCC), defined andpromoted many of Cali's major infrastructural projects—including a railway systemconnecting the city to the country's principal Pacific port approximately 50 miles westin the municipality of Buenaventura. The CCC envisioned Cali as the anchor for acity region that would link neighboring municipalities into an export-oriented econ-omy focused on primary commodities and manufactured goods derived from localagriculture, including paper-based products and alcohol.

In the early 1990s, insecurity reigned on the transport routes leading in and out ofCali—particularly those linking it to the Pacific seaport—as well across the city'srural outskirts. A range of local armed actors along with the regionally based wings ofnational insurgencies used the transport routes to orchestrate hijackings, road piracy,and kidnappings. Insurgents also targeted agroindustrial facilities for extortion. Theagroindustrial sector consequently favored a reactive response to re-establish securityalong regional transport corridors and in the areas surrounding production facilities.In 1992, a reformist coalition led by a political independent backed by grassroots civilsociety won Cali's 1992 mayoral elections and proposed a reformist policy responseto urban violence that threatened to displace business from its privileged politicalposition. The CCC mounted a sophisticated counter-attack that would not only thwartthe reformist response but also compound a process of local institutional decay thatwould constrain the efforts of future reformist coalitions to break with the status quo.

Bogota: a Service Sector Aims for a Global City

Between 1980 and 1995, the service sector accounted for half of Bogota's economicproductivity, with a large share concentrated in an internationally oriented financialservices sector (CCB 2004, pp. 61–62) represented by the Bogota Chamber of Com-merce (CCB). The CCB viewed economic liberalization as an opportunity to consoli-date Bogota's position as an emerging global city (Fernandez de Soto 1994, p. 44), butwas also wary of the fact that Bogota could not escape being associated with Colombia'sinternational image as an epicenter of violence. The CCB believed that Bogota had tomeasure its competitiveness not against Cali or Medellin, but instead against BuenosAires, Argentina, or Santiago, Chile—cities that faced the task of attracting foreigninvestment without the burden of an international image defined by violence.26

When a political independent secured the office of mayor in Bogota in the early1990s with broad cross-class support and a platform to tackle violence through afocus on public space and cultural norms, the CCB quickly became a pivotal politicalally. Business would become the city's primary defender of the reformist response toviolence, not only against proponents of a return to the status quo but also againstthose political and societal actors that sought to deepen the reformist policy responseand provide even greater political voice to underprivileged segments of society.Having established cross-sectoral policy preferences, the next section shifts to adynamic perspective focused on the nature of business–local government relationsto explain the varied trajectories of the policy responses to urban violence.

26 In 1992, for example, the CCB concluded a 2-year survey study that identified insecurity as the mainchallenge facing Bogota. The study emphasized that Bogota's level of violence made it among the mostviolent in the world. El Tiempo. “Las Cinco Plagas de la Capital.” December 28, 1992.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 319

Breakthrough to a Reformist Policy Response in Medellin

In 1990, President Cesar Gaviria (1990–1994) declared that escalating violence inMedellin had “transcend[ed] the dimensions of narcotrafficking and narcoterrorism”and had instead “acquired proportions of a social conflict with complex characteristics”(CPDSN 1994, p. 21). Gaviria established the Presidential Council for Medellin (here-after the Council) to direct the national government’s social investment into the city'spoorest and most violent neighborhoods as a way to sever the links between theMedellin drug cartel and the impoverished young men that the cartel was recruiting tocarry out violence against the state. Upon arriving in Medellin, the national governmentmet with two obstacles: Access to the underprivileged neighborhoods was controlled bya dizzying array of local armed actors, and local government could offer little help in thisregard given the widespread distrust among underprivileged communities of Medellin'straditional political elite amidst a social conflict in which the exclusionary nature of thelocal political order had become a central axis of the violence. The national governmentturned to grassroots civil society in hopes it would act as a “passport” into Medellin'sviolent peripheral neighborhoods. Civil society leaders strategically leveraged thenational government's dependence to pressure for an expansion of the proposed policyresponse to ensure the bottom-up political incorporation of the city's underprivilegedinto local governance. The resulting reformist political project sought to “reconstruct thesocial structure” of Medellin (PPMAM 1992, p. 3) as the Council became the institu-tional framework for an unprecedented reformist security coalition between nationalreformers and local grassroots civil society. The transformative nature of the reformistpolitical project quickly provoked a counter-mobilization by local government headedby the traditional Conservative party mayor, Luis Alfredo Ramos (1992–1994), incollaboration with Medellin's industrial sector.

Collaborative business–local government relations produced a daunting obstacle forthe reformist coalition. Business and local government appealed to the spirit of decen-tralization and local government autonomy to ensure that national funds for the reformistpolicy response go through local government before being disbursed to the Council,limiting the Council's autonomy as local government “dragged its feet” in transferringfunds it was assured direct oversight over all projects.27 Also, both business and themayor rejected calls for formal discussions with civil society on ways to incorporateunderprivileged communities into local politics and instead called on the Council toalign its political priorities with those of local government (CPMAM 1993, p. 227).Finally, business and local government used preferential access to local media todiscredit civil society organizations that were coordinating with the national governmentby labeling them as criminal groups.28 These reports minimized the impact of news thatcivil society leaders were being targeted for social cleansing campaigns that counted onthe collaboration and participation of local police and small business owners (CPMAM1993, p. 226). Amidst the opposition posed by business and local government, theCouncil's Executive Director resigned in 1993, and the national governmentrecentralized the Council's operations and resources.29 Local civil society leaders

27 Author interview with ex-Director (B) of the Council, October 28, 2008, Bogota, Colombia.28 See, for example, El Colombiano, April 5, 1992, pp. 4C–5C.29 El Tiempo. Renunció la consejera de Medellín. January 23, 1993.

320 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

lamented their inability to overcome the concerted resistance posed by business andlocal government, though many of these same civil society leaders would a few yearslater work in concert with a new business elite to revive the reformist policy response.

Indeed, by the late 1990s, Medellin's newly ascendant financial service sector wasmobilizing to transform the city's tarnished image among potential foreign investors.The GEA secured international consultants to help it design a series of citizen securitypolicies and then leveraged its international networks to obtain financial support forthe policies from the Inter-American Development Bank. Thus, business managed tohave local government adopt as public policy the measures business had producedbehind closed doors and which focused on changing cultural norms and expandingpublic space. The subsequent mayoral elections dealt a severe blow to the GEA’srebranding plans when the Conservative candidate it endorsed lost to the Liberalparty's Luis Pérez Gutierrez. In retaliation for their support of his opponent, Pérezabandoned the policies the GEA had developed and launched a number of coercivemeasures in response to local violence. These included a militarized operation thatwas coordinated with the national government against urban insurgent cells in thecity's peripheral neighborhoods that was wracked by accusations of extra-judicialviolence and collaboration between state security forces and local armed actors.

Business subsequently made a series of strategic decisions that were pivotal for thesuccessful advancement of a reformist response to local violence. The financialservices sector broke with the long history of close collaboration with local govern-ment forged by its industrial predecessors. Instead, the GEA turned toward grassrootscivil society, which had also found itself political marginalized by Pérez, to mount ajointly coordinated public relations campaign in opposition to the mayor. The GEAaligned with civil society as part of a broader political strategy to utilize civil society'scapacity to “convene the masses” to prevent another shock during the next mayoralelections.30 But civil society leaders made it clear to business that their politicalsupport hinged on whether the response to local violence by their candidate for mayorwould go beyond an emphasis on public space and cultural norms without upendingthe exclusionary local order.

Business and civil society together endorsed and supported the campaign of apolitical independent, Sergio Fajardo, an academic that had originally been brought toMedellin by the GEA to consult on education policy issues. Civil society pressuredFajardo and business to tackle socioeconomic inequality and undertake bottom-uppolitical incorporation of the city's underprivileged. The unprecedented reformist coa-lition won the 2004 mayoral elections with the largest number of votes for a mayoralcandidate in the city's history.31 Civil society leaders assumed key leadership positionsin local government under Fajardo, including heading the municipal institutions directlyresponsible for citizen security. Meanwhile, the reformist response drew widespreadinternational attention for its novel emphasis on socioeconomic inclusion, transforma-tion of public space, and political incorporation of the underprivileged amidst intenseviolence. After having been dubbed the world's most violent city in the early 1990s,Medellin was deemed among a handful of Latin American cities in 2008 that would

30 Author interview with business executive from GEA's governing firm, January 15, 2009, Medellin,Colombia.31 El Colombiano. Sergio Fajardo arrasó en Medellín. October 27, 2003.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 321

drive growth in the global economy, and in 2013, it was chosen as the “world’s mostinnovative city” in part due to the reformist response to local violence that was central tothe GEA’s rebranding project.32

Preserving a Reactive Policy Response in Cali

In 1992, a political independent named Rodrigo Guerrero won Cali's mayoral electionsafter having spent a decade working on development initiatives in the city's poorestneighborhoods as the executive director of a local foundation. Guerrero won the mayoralelections with ample support from Cali's grassroots civil society and underprivilegedcommunities, which informed his proposal to break with the city's reliance on hardlinepolicing and instead advance a reformist policy response to tackle inequality and politicalmarginalization.33 The reformist project quickly provoked a counter-mobilization fromthe city's agroindustrial sector coordinated through the powerful CCC.

Business first leveraged its research capacities to establish a citizen security thinktank that, according to one of its Directors, equipped business with a “veto” over localgovernment on security issues by shaping public opinion.34 Business used its preferen-tial access to local media to disseminate analyses and reports produced by its think tank,and the CCC thus soon became the media's “first stop for information and analysis onlocal security conditions” before turning to local government.35 Second, the CCC builtdirect linkages with the police, through which it provided resources ranging frommotorcycles to police stations, at a time when it was widely known that elements ofthe police force were engaged in social cleansing efforts against youth from theperiphery, civil society, and even local government staff working with at-risk youth.36

More broadly, business also leveraged the political consequences of the nature oflocal violence in Cali to advance its interests and constrain the ability of localgovernment and civil society to advance the reformist policy response. Unlike itscounterpart in Medellin, the Cali cartel preferred corruption over indiscriminateviolence. When the national government turned its sights to the Cali cartel, itapproached local government with significant wariness; even though Guerrero wasconsidered free from the cartel's influence, the police and other public institutionsaround him were not. Business took advantage of the emerging fissure between thecentral and local governments to position itself as the only credible actor that couldhelp the national government “purge” illicit interests and activities from local gov-ernment.37 It did this in part by arguing that it was the area’s small businesses that hadbeen complicit in the cartel's corruptive practices and that the city’s large-scale

32 MasterCard Worldwide. New MasterCard research ranks 65 cities in emerging markets poised to drivelong-term global economic growth. October 22, 2008. Available at www.mastercard.com/us/company/en/newsroom/pr_new_mastercard_research_ranks_65_Cities_in_emerging_markets.html. Accessed on Janu-ary 1, 2010. See Wall Street Journal Magazine. City of the year. Available at http://online.wsj.com/ad/cityoftheyear. Accessed on April 22, 2013.33 See Moncada (2010) on how the racial composition of some of Cali's peripheral neighborhoods impactsthe politics of urban violence.34 Author interview with ex-Director of the CCC's think tank, February 6, 2009, Cali, Colombia.35 Ibid.36 CCC PowerPoint and author interview with former Director of Cali's at-risk youth re-socializationprogram, August 24, 2008, Bogota, Colombia.37 El Pais. Nuestra sociedad fue permisiva. August 14, 1994.

322 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

business elites were ready to help Cali move past this dark phase in its history. Localgovernment was marginalized both by business and the national government, weak-ening Guerrero's ability to advance the reformist security project and causing it to bescaled back considerably.38

Over time, close relations between business in Cali and the national governmentconstricted the potential for future reformists to break with the status quo reactiveresponses to local violence. The rift between the local and national governmentscontributed to a process of local institutional decay wherein the de-legitimization oflocal government constrained its ability to fight corruption. In the mid-2000s, theCCC signed a precedent-setting agreement with the national government to serve asthe state's primary representative in Cali and the broader Valle region on a range ofpolicy issues, including citizen security.39 Future reformist mayors that seeking torevive the reformist policy response with the backing of civil society faced a localgovernment with weak institutions and an emboldened business sector opposed toreform and backed by the national government. As one reformist mayor who duringhis time in office in the mid-2000s failed to overcome business' resistance to areformist political project stated: “In Cali, business can do what it wants.”40

A Service Sector Safeguards a Reformist Response in Bogota

In 1994, a political independent named Antanas Mockus won Bogota's mayoral elec-tions following the collapse of the city's traditional parties (Pasotti 2010). Mockuscampaigned on a platform of tackling local violence through a reformist response thatemphasized expanding public space, changing social norms regarding violence, im-proving relations between communities and the police, and revamping a notoriouslyclientelistic local government into a transparent and accountable political institution(Moncada 2009). Mockus emphasized the need for greater political participation and thefostering of “citizen culture.”41 Business, meanwhile, perceived Mockus' reformistresponse as aligned with its own plans to revamp Bogota's international image.Amidst concerns that Mockus was prioritizing the city's image and social normsover concrete improvements in local infrastructure,42 the CCB emerged as oneof his principal political allies even as his base of support dwindled. In contrastto the broad-based endorsement that Mockus had initially secured, subsequentmayors—who continued to implement and deepen his approaches—were electedpredominantly on the basis of support from the city's upper classes andbusiness leaders. By 2001, Bogota and the surrounding department ofCundinamarca accounted for half of the financial sector's contribution to na-tional GDP (Caicedo 2001, p. 47).

38 Author interview with former security advisor to Cali's municipal government, August 31, 2008, Cali,Colombia.39 See CCC. Convenio presidencia de la republica—CCC. Press Release. November 5, 2005. Available athttp://www.ccc.org.co/Presid.html. Accessed on January 2, 2011.40 Author interview with former mayor of Cali, Jhon Maro Rodriguez, Cali, Colombia, July 3, 2009.41 Author interview with former mayor of Bogota, Antanas Mockus, Bogota, Colombia, June 2006.42 See El Tiempo. Amores y desamores hacia Mockus. June 23, 1996; author interview with formerPresident of the CCB, Bogota, Colombia, November 11, 2009.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 323

In 2004, however, a political leftist and former trade union leader, Luis EduardoGarzón, won the mayoral elections based largely on electoral support from Bogota'slow-income communities.43 During his campaign, Garzón capitalized on the notionthat previous mayors had privileged the city's image over social inclusion andsubstantive political participation.44 Garzón’s electoral victory was heralded as thearrival of a new approach to citizen security in Bogota wherein the socioeconomicand political drivers of violence would thus take center stage (Velasquez and Pinzon2008, pp. 262–63). After assuming office, Garzón proposed revisiting one of the keyissues in previous policy responses to local violence: the use of public space byinformal street vendors. Shortly before Garzón’s inauguration, Colombia’s Constitu-tional Court ruled that municipal governments would have to ensure that any informalstreet vendors relocated from public spaces would have access to gainful employ-ment. Informal vendors displaced under previous mayoral administrations returned toBogota’s streets believing they now enjoyed both legal precedent and, more impor-tantly, the support of the mayor given Garzón’s leftist political leanings. On the otherhand, business perceived Garzón’s questioning of the public space policies as a directthreat to a central dimension of the reformist policy response and thus launched acounter-mobilization.

To achieve this, the CCB framed Garzón as the harbinger of the city's demise and areturn to its “ungovernable” past. The editorial page of the city's main newspaper, alongtime collaborator of the CCB, played a key role in this regard. One newspapereditorial stated: “…it is inconceivable that the [Garzón] administration would not seek toresolve this [public space] problem via cooperation with business leaders…”45 Businessaccused Garzón of endangering previous administrations' gains against an informaleconomy that “facilitated contraband, piracy, child labor and insecurity.”46 Then, theCCB disseminated research indicating that removing informal street vendors fromBogota's commercial districts would produce a 15 % increase in business sales and spurnew commercial sector hiring.47 Finally, conflict with local government led business toside with the national government against Garzón when it began establishing militarycheckpoints and stationing armed soldiers throughout the city in response to intelligenceallegedly indicating that urban guerillas were present within Bogota's peripheral neigh-borhoods. The mayor was not made aware of the military operations, which eroded hislocal political credibility as he was increasingly depicted as marginalized by the nationalgovernment on the issue of citizen security within his own city. Business leaders framedthe national government's intervention as necessary given the mayor’s “unwill-ingness” to enforce measures to uphold security, including most notably thosedealing with public space.48 Garzón was forced to retract, and in 2005 heforcibly displaced several hundred informal street vendors and required them

43 Garzón secured 75 % of the votes among the city’s lowest socioeconomic strata, compared to 25 %among the highest socioeconomic strata (Gilbert 2008, Table 1, 253).44 See El Tiempo. Mi lucha es por la inclusión social. July 22, 2003.45 El Tiempo. Espacio público, a la deriva. February 14, 2004.46 El Tiempo. Al alcalde Garzón le ha faltado autoridad para aplicar la ley. February 6, 2005; El Tiempo.Gremios le piden a Lucho Garzón que cese violencia verbal. March 12, 2005.47 El Tiempo. Reubicación de vendedores reactivaría las ventas en el comercio organizado: CCB. May 11,2005.48 El Tiempo. Duro ataque de Garzón al gobierno. June 19, 2004.

324 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

to pay for the use of specially designated areas of public space dedicated tocommercial activity. The headline in the city's main newspaper describing thereversal of Garzón’s effort to reassess a central element of the reformist policyresponse to local violence read: “Public Space Will be a Business.”49

Conclusion and Future Research

I have argued that business is a political pivot whose mobilization influences thenature and trajectory of policy responses to urban violence. Business seeks to shapepolicy responses to urban violence in ways that not only favor its economic interestsbut also conserve its political power. Cross-sectoral variation in policy preferences,rooted in distinct relations that goods producing and service sectors have with urbanspace and violence, generates both political openings and obstacles for actors atvarying territorial and institutional levels of the state to influence the politics of urbanviolence. The nature of business–local government relations has a decisive impact onboth the strategies that business deploys and the scope of the politics of urbanviolence. While establishing the full theoretical power of the analytic frameworkrequires research beyond the cases of Medellin, Cali, and Bogota examined here, theempirical analysis does indicates that a focus on business can strengthen our under-standing of the politics of urban violence and its implications for development.

This article also raises several directions for future research. First, there is a need todevelop a more multi-layered understanding of the urban political economy ofviolence. By focusing on the role of business institutions that represent large-scaleprivate sector interests, this article unpacks one critical layer of this urban politicaleconomy. A second key layer is the realm of small business, which represents themajority of firms in Latin America (Angelleli et al. 2006, p. 7) and is both the mostdirectly vulnerable to the economic costs of violence and most likely to havesustained interaction with varied local armed actors. How do small businesses reactto and engage formal policy responses to urban violence, and how do their actionsimpact the way that policy responses actually unfold on the ground? In what ways dothe daily efforts of these enterprises to navigate urban violence affect social cohesionin their surrounding communities? Micro-level research designs would providestrong vantage points from which to analyze the political and socioeconomic conse-quences of small business responses to violence and thus refine and expand thetypology of business strategies to obtain security shown in Fig. 1.

Second, additional research is needed to identify the origins, types, and conse-quences of relations that exist between business—from individual firms of varyingsizes to business institutions—and local armed actors. How do relations betweenbusiness and armed actors influence the establishment and development of formaland informal institutions of order within violent cities? Identifying and analyzingdifferent types of relations between business and local armed actors admittedly raisesserious questions regarding both safety and feasibility. Nonetheless, previous re-search on the emergence and evolution of networks between citizens and local armedactors (Arias 2006; Rodgers 2009) suggests that multi-method research designs

49 El Tiempo. El espacio público sera todo una empresa. July 10, 2005.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 325

anchored in classic ethnographic approaches will help in this regard, while emergingstudies on the social roots of organized crime (Magaloni et al. 2012) highlight thepotential for applying experimental methods to the question of business–local armedactor relations.

A third direction for future research centers on how local armed actors react to theimplementation of policy responses to urban violence within territories under theircontrol. Whereas the reformist policy response in Medellin played a central role ineroding the local exclusionary order, it has not been a panacea. Indeed, there is evidencethat local armed actors have captured elements of the reformist policy response in orderto obtain financial and political rents. Future studies could examine the factors that shapethe strategies of either resistance or capture by local armed actors vis-a-vis differentcomponents of local government policy responses to urban violence.

Finally, andmore broadly, the analysis developed here highlights the potential analyticdividends to be gained from greater dialogue and debate between scholars of “citypolitics”—historically anchored in the experiences of major cities in the USA andEurope—with those scholars examining urban politics in the emerging cities of theGlobal South. The focus within this article on the pivotal role of business in shapingpolicy responses to a critical issue confronting cities across the developingworld parallelsthe emphasis on the urban private sector as a key political actor within the extensiveliterature on urban regimes (Stone 1989) and growth machines (Molotch 1976).50 Futureresearch should engage in more comparative analysis of cities across distinct regions ofthe world in order to advance a stronger understanding of urban politics.

Acknowledgments I thank Enrique DesmondArias, John Bailey, Kent Eaton, BenjaminGoldfrank, RichardSnyder, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. Thispaper benefitted from feedback received during workshops at Yale University's Program onOrder, Conflict andViolence and NewYork University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. I also gratefully acknowledgethe support for this research that was provided by the American Society of Criminology, Brown University'sGraduate Program in Development, the Ford Foundation Predoctoral Diversity Fellowship program, theFulbright-Hays program, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, andthe Latin American Security, Drugs and Democracy Fellowship Program administered by the Social ScienceResearch Council and the Universidad de Los Andes in cooperation with and with funds provided by the OpenSociety Foundations.

References

Ahnen RE. The politics of police violence in democratic Brazil. Lat Am Polit Soc. 2007;49(1):141–64.Angelleli P, Moudry R, Llisterri JJ. Institutional capacities for small business policy development in Latin

America and the Caribbean. Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank; 2006.Arias ED. Drugs and democracy in Rio de Janeiro: trafficking, social networks and public security. Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press; 2006.Arias E D. The impact of differential armed dominance on politics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Studies in

Comparative International Development 2013; 48(3). doi:10.1007/s12116-013-9137-8.Arias ED, Ungar M. Community policing and Latin America’s citizen security crisis. Comp Polit.

2009;41(4):409–29.Avraham E. Media strategies for improving an unfavorable city image. Cities. 2004;21(6):471–9.

50 Weinstein's (2013) contribution to this volume also shows how business is a key actor in shaping localpolitics within a major city in the Global South.

326 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

Bailey J, Dammert L. Public security and police reform in the Americas. Pittsburgh: University ofPittsburgh Press; 2006.

Bartell E, Payne LA. Business and democracy in LatinAmerica. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1995.Bates RH. Markets and states in tropical Africa: the political basis of agricultural policies. Berkeley:

University of California Press; 1981.Bates R H. Beyond the miracle of the market: the political economy of agrarian development in Kenya.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1989.Bates RH, Collier P. The politics and economics of policy reform in Zambia. J Afr Econ.

1995;4(1):115–43.Bateson R. Crime victimization and political participation. Am Polit Sci Rev. 2012;106(3):570–87.Bejarano A M, Leongómez E. From “restricted” to “besieged”: the changing nature of the limits to

democracy in Colombia. Kellogg Institute Working Paper No. 296; 2002.Blasier C. Power and social change in Colombia: the Cauca valley. J Inter-Am Stud. 1966;8(3):386–410.Botero F. Medellín: 1890–1950: historia urbana y juego de intereses. Medellin: Universidad de Antioquia;

1996.Briceño-León R, Zubillaga V. Violence and globalization in Latin America. Current Sociology.

2002;50(1):19–37. 50.Brinks DM. The judicial response to police killings in latin america. Cambridge University Press; 2008.Caicedo MC. El proceso de internacionalización de Bogotá, D.C. Papel Político. 2001;12:45–59.Caldeira T. City of walls: crime, segregation and citizenship in Sao Paulo. Berkeley: University of

California Press; 2001.Cámara de Comercio de Bogotá (CCB). El sector servicios en la región Bogotá-Cundinamarca: dinámica

sectorial. Dirección de Estudios e Investigaciones. Bogota: CCB; 2004.Cammett M. Globalization and business politics in Arab North Africa: a comparative perspective.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2007.Castro L, Echeverri A. Bogota and Medellin: architecture and politics. Archit Des. 2011;81(3):96–103.Chevigny P. Edge of the knife: police violence in the Americas. New York: Norton; 1995.Chevigny P. Edge of the knife: police violence in the Americas. New York: Norton; 1997.Consejería Presidencial para la Defensa y la Seguridad Nacional (CPDSN). Una política de seguridad para

la convivencia. Vol. 1. Bogota: Avance Gráfico; 1994.Consejería Presidencial para Medellin y su Área Metropolitana (CPMAM). II Seminario alternativas de

futuro: Antioquia hacia un pacto social. Medellin: Editorial Lealon; 1993.Cruz JM. Central American Maras: from youth street gangs to transnational protection rackets. Glob Crime.

2010;11(4):379–98.Davis D. Undermining the rule of law: democratization and the dark side of police reform in Mexico. Lat

Am Polit Soc. 2006;48(1):55–86.Dent D. Oligarchy and power structure in urban Colombia: the case of Cali. J Lat Am Stud. 1974;6(1):113–33.Doner RF, Schneider BR. Business associations and economic development: why some associations

contribute more than others. Bus Polit. 2000;2(3):261–88.Dudley S. Transnational crime in Mexico and Central America: its evolution and role in international

migration. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars; 2012.Eaton K. Paradoxes of police reform: federalism, parties and civil society in Argentina’s public security

crisis”. Lat Am Res Rev. 2008;43(3):5–32.Fajnzybler P, Lederman D, Loayza N. Inequality and violent crime. J Law Econ. 2002;45(1):1–40.Fernandez de Soto G. Bogota: Crisis es oportunidad. Revista de la Cámara de Comercio de Bogota.

1994;89:39–46.Frühling H, Tulchin JS, Golding HA. Crime and violence in Latin America. Washington, DC: Woodrow

Wilson Center Press; 2003.Fruhling H. Research on Latin American Police: Where do We go From Here? Police Practice and

Research. 2009;10(5–6):465–81.Fuentes C. Contesting the iron fist: advocacy networks and police violence in democratic Argentina and

Chile. New York: Routledge; 2004.Gaviria A, Pagés C. Patterns of crime victimization in Latin America. Journal of Development Economics.

2002;67(1):181–203.Gaviria A. Assessing the effects of corruption and crime on firm performance: evidence from Latin

America. Emerg Mark Rev. 2002;3(1):25–68.George AL, Bennett A. Case studies and theory development in the social sciences. Cambridge: MIT; 2005.Gilbert A. Un alcalde de izquierda: los logros y fracasos de Lucho Garzón. In: Gilbert A, Garcés MT, editors.

Bogotá: progreso, gobernabilidad y pobreza. Bogota: Editorial Universidad del Rosario; 2008. p. 244–89.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 327

Goldstein D. The spectacular city: violence and performance in urban Bolivia. Durham: Duke UniversityPress; 2004.

Gourevitch P. Politics in hard times: comparative responses to international economic crises. Ithaca: CornellUniversity Press; 1986.

Gurr T. Why men rebel. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1970.Hernandez J, Lopez C. Is there a role for informal settlements in branding cities? J Place Manag Dev.

2011;4(1):93–109.Hinton M. A distant reality: democratic policing in Argentina and Brazil. Criminol Crim Justice.

2005;5(1):75–100.Hinton M. The state on the streets: police and politics in Argentina and Brazil. Boulder: Lynne Rienner; 2006.Huggins M. Vigilantism and the state in modern Latin America: essays on extralegal violence. New York:

Praeger; 1991.HugginsM.Urban violence and police privatization inBrazil: blended invisibility. Soc Justice. 2000;27(2):113–34.Jones GJ, Rodgers D. Youth violence in Latin America: gangs and juvenile justice in perspective. New

York: Palgrave Macmillan; 2009.Kalyvas S. The logic of violence in civil war. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2006.Kavaratzis M. From city marketing to city branding: towards a theoretical framework for developing city

brands. Place Brand. 2004;1(1):58–73.Kingstone P. Crafting coalitions for reform: business preferences, political institutions and neoliberal

reform in Brazil. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press; 1999.LeBas A. Violence and urban order in Nairobi, Kenya and Lagos, Nigeria. Studies in Comparative

International Development 2013; 48(3). doi:10.1007/s12116-013-9134-y.Leeds E. Cocaine and parallel polities in the Brazilian urban periphery: constraints on local-level democ-

ratization. Lat Am Res Rev. 1996;31(3):47–83.Macaulay F. Knowledge production, framing and criminal justice reform in Latin America. J Lat Am Stud.

2007;39(3):627–51.Magaloni B, Diaz-Cayeros A, Romero V, and Matanock, A. The enemy at home: exploring the social roots

of criminal organizations in Mexico. Unpublished paper; 2012.Molotch H. The city as a growth machine: toward a political economy of place. Am J Sociol.

1976;82(2):309–32.Moncada E. Toward democratic policing in Colombia? Institutional accountability through lateral reform”.

Comp Polit. 2009;41(4):431–49.Moncada E. Counting bodies: crime mapping, policing and race in Colombia. Ethn Racial Stud.

2010;33(4):696–716.Moncada E. Introduction: the politics of urban violence: challenges for development in the global south.

Studies in Comparative International Development 2013; 48(3). doi:10.1007/s12116-013-9133-z.Morse RM. Trends and issues in urban Latin American research, 1965–70. Lat Am Res Rev. 1971;6(1):19–

75.Moser CON, Van Bronkhorst B. Youth violence in Latin America and the Caribbean: Costs, causes, and

interventions. World Bank, Latin America and the Caribbean Region, Environmentally and SociallySustainable Development SMU; 1999.

Moser CON, McIlwaine C. Encounters with violence: in Latin America: urban poor perceptions fromColombia and Guatemala. New York: Routledge; 2004.

Moser CON, McIlwaine C. Latin American urban violence as a development concern: towards a frame-work for violence reduction. World Dev. 2006;34(1):89–112.

O’Donnell G, Vargas Cullell J, Iazzetta OM. The quality of democracy. South Bend: University of NotreDame Press; 2004.

Olson M. The logic of collective action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 1965.Pasotti E. Political branding in cities: the decline of machine politics in Bogotá. Naples: Cambridge

University Press; 2010.Payne LA. Brazilian industrialists and democratic change. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; 1994.Pérez O J. Democratic legitimacy and public insecurity: crime and democracy in El Salvador and

Guatemala. Political Science Quarterly 2003/2004; 118(4): 627–44.Perlman J. The myth of marginality: urban poverty and politics in Rio de Janeiro. Berkeley: University of

California Press; 1976.Portes A, Walton J. Urban Latin America: the political condition from above and below. Austin: University

of Texas Press; 1976.Prillaman W. Crime, democracy and development in Latin America. Washington, DC: Center for Strategic

and International Studies; 2003.

328 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330

Programa Presidencial para Medellín y Su Área Metropolitana (PPMAM). Medellín: en el camino de laconcertación. Medellin: PPMAM; 1992.

Pshisva R, Suarez G A. Captive markets: the impact of kidnappings on corporate investment in Colombia.Finance and Economics Discussion Series. Washington, DC: Federal Reserve Board; 2006.

Raphael S, Winter-Ebmer R. Identifying the effect of unemployment on crime. J Law Econ.2001;44(1):259–83.

Restrepo F. V L. Poder regional y proyecto hegemónico: el caso de la ciudad metropolitana de Medellín ysu entorno regional, 1970–2000. Medellin: Instituto Popular de Capacitación; 2006.

Rettberg A. Explorando el dividendo de la paz. Bogota: Ediciones Uniandes; 2008.Rios, V. Why did Mexico become so violent? A self-reinforcing violent equilibrium causes by competition

and enforcement. Trends in Organized Crime 2013; 16(2): 138–55.Roberts B, Portes A. Coping with the free market city: collective action in six Latin American cities at the

end of the twentieth century. Lat Am Res Rev. 2006;41(2):57–83.Rodgers D. Living in the shadow of death: gangs, violence and social order in urban Nicaragua, 1996–

2002. J Lat Am Stud. 2006;38.2:267–92.Rodgers D. “Disembedding” the city: crime, insecurity and spatial organization in Managua, Nicaragua.

Environment & Urbanization 2004;16(2):113–24.Rodgers D. Slum wars of the 21st century: gangs, mano dura, and the new urban geography of conflict in

Central America. Dev Chang. 2009;40(5):949–76.Roldan M. Cocaine and the “miracle” of modernity in Medellin. In: Gootenberg P, editor. Cocaine: global

histories. New York: Routledge; 1999. p. 165–82.Sabet DM. Police reform in Mexico: informal politics and the challenge of institutional change. Stanford:

Stanford University Press; 2012.Sáenz RE. Colombia años cincuenta: industriales, política y diplomacia. Bogota: Universidad Nacional de

Colombia; 2002.Sáenz Rovner E. La ofensiva empresarial: industriales, políticos y violencia en los años 40 en Colombia.

Bogota: Tercer Mundo Editores; 1992.Sanchez F, Diaz AM, Formisano M. Conflicto, Violencia y y Actividad Criminal en Colombia: Un Analisis

Espacial. Documente Cede. Bogota, Colombia: Universidad de Los Andes; 2003.Schneider B R. Business politics and the state in 20th century Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press; 2004.Small Arms Survey. States of security. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2011.Snodgrass Godoy. Popular injustice: violence, community, and law in Latin America. Stanford: Stanford

University Press; 2007.Snyder R. Scaling down: the subnational comparative method. Stud Comp Int Dev. 2001;36(1):93–110.Snyder R, Duran-Martinez A. Does illegality breed violence? Drug trafficking and state-sponsored

protection rackets. Crime Law Soc Chang. 2009;52(3):253–73.Stone C. Regime politics: governing Atlanta, 1946–1988. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas; 1989.Sullivan J, Elkus A. Open veins of Mexico: the strategic logic of cartel resources extraction and petro-

targeting. Small Wars Journal 2011.Tansey O. Process tracing and elite interviewing: a case for non-probability sampling. Polit Sci Polit.

2007;40(4):765–72.Ungar M. The privatization of citizen security in Latin America. Soc Justice J Crime Confl World Order.

2007;34(3/4):20–37.Ungar M. Policing democracy: overcoming obstacles to citizen security in Latin America. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press; 2011.Velásquez AV, Pinzón VG. Violence urbana, seguridad ciudadana y politicas publicas: la reducción

de la violencia en las ciudades de Bogota y Medellin. Pensamiento Iberoamericano.2008;2:249–70.

Walton J. Elites and the Politics of Urban Development. In Alejandro Portes and John Walton, editors.Urban Latin America: The Political Condition from Above and Below. Austin, TX: University ofTexas at Austin. 1976:111–35.

Walton J. Elites and economic development: comparative studies on the political economy of LatinAmerican cities. Austin: Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Texas—Austin; 1977.

Walton J. Guadalajara: creating the divided city. Lat Am Urban Res. 1978;6:25–50.Weingast BR. Persuasion, preference change, and critical junctures: the microfoundations of a macroscopic

concept. In: Katznelson I, Weingast BR, editors. Preferences and situations: points of intersectionbetween historical and rational choice institutionalism. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; 2005.

St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330 329

Weinstein L. Demolition and dispossession: toward an understanding of state violence in millennial Mumbai.Studies in Comparative International Development 2013; 48(3). doi:10.1007/s12116-013-9136-9.

Wood E. Forging democracy from below: insurgent transitions in South Africa and El Salvador.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000.

Eduardo Moncada is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Rutgers University (Newark). Moncadaobtained his Ph.D in political science at Brown University. His research focuses on comparative urbanpolitics in the developing world, violence, citizen security, and the political economy of development. Hiswork has appeared in Comparative Politics and Ethnic and Racial Studies, among others. He is currentlycompleting a book manuscript on the role of business in the politics of urban violence in Latin America.

330 St Comp Int Dev (2013) 48:308–330