Paul Chevigny

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2003 5: 77Punishment & SocietyPaul Chevigny

The populism of fear: Politics of crime in the Americas

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The populism of fearPolitics of crime in the Americas

PAUL CHEVIGNYNew York University, USA

AbstractIn democratic countries, at least in the western hemisphere, there has been a politicaltrend toward appealing to the fear of crime as a popular issue in electoral campaigns,as well as more generally as a way of attracting public notice. The trend is likely to beparticularly strong in countries in which major offices are openly contested forelection, but economic inequality is pronounced and the willingness or ability of thegovernment to deliver social services is limited. Under those conditions, there is astrong temptation to find an issue that will appeal to all classes; the issue of crime andthe consequent fear of insecurity is an obvious issue that is frequently used and is some-times even exaggerated in the hope of enlisting popular support. This article examinesthis phenomenon in recent years in Argentina, particularly in Buenos Aires, in Brazil,particularly in São Paulo, in Mexico and Mexico City, and in the USA, as exemplifiedby New York State.

Key WordsLatin America • politics of crime • populism • security state

INTRODUCTIONFor elites in the Americas, north and south, ‘populism’ has often been a dirty word. Inthe USA in the 1890s, the word conjured up farmers in the heartland fighting the bigmoney for debt relief and agricultural sales cooperatives. In contemporary LatinAmerican politics, populism has included, as the Inter-American Development Bank(IADB) put it, ‘large public enterprises, massive subsidy schemes, unmanageableprogressive taxation, restrictive labor legislation, multiple exchange rates and pricecontrols’ (IADB, 1999: 7). Such economic populism, in short, represents policies thattend to lead to inflation as well as, sometimes, to social programs (Dornbusch andEdwards, 1990). At the local level, such populism often took (and still takes) the formof clientism, through which the politician undertakes to satisfy some basic need of theindividual voter; my favorite example is the Brazilian office-seeker who gave each personin the crowd one shoe – promising to give them the other one if he was elected.

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The IADB reports, with evident satisfaction, that the fiscal reforms and structuraladjustments of the past 20 years in Latin America, while they have not reduced economicinequality or alleviated much poverty, have at least slowed populism. ‘It is important topoint out that the process of economic reform has been carried out in almost all coun-tries by democratic governments rather than dictatorships. Increased democracy hasn’tbeen accompanied by populism, either. Instead, democracy has ushered in a period ofgreater fiscal discipline and smaller deficits’ (IADB, 1997: iii). It is perfectly true thatthe policies of austerity and the free-market have limited the possibilities for welfare andclientism. But they have not eliminated populism, because there are more kinds ofpopulism than are dreamed of by the bank.

In a democracy, politicians acquire the power to make policy, as Schumpeter put it,‘by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’ (1947: 269). When there iswidespread economic inequality in the society, the campaigners often try to win thecompetition through ‘populism’ – an appeal that pits one group against another, forexample, through fear of an enemy or through economic or racial conflict. The politicalsystems in the USA, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico are at present democratic by Schum-peter’s definition, and they are all riven by conflicts produced by severe economicinequality; these are natural seed-beds for populist democracy. At the same time, thescope for populism is limited. The foreign and even the subversive domestic enemybecame less of a threat after the end of the cold war, although the ground is shiftingagain in the USA since 11 September 2001. On the other hand, because of the commit-ment to control inflation, to budget deficits that are low or non-existent, and to privatiz-ation and a free market, the appeal to economic populism (for government-sponsoredjobs, much less for extensive social welfare programs) is largely foreclosed. My thesis hereis that in this era of limitations on the service state, the great temptation for democraticpoliticians is the appeal to fear of an internal enemy – the fear of violent crime. Theappeal is ready to hand, in many cases, because the policies of structural adjustment, andthe economic crises that brought on the structural adjustment, have led to so muchinequality and economic stress that they often contribute to an increase in crime; never-theless, politicians still try to exaggerate the crime problem. To be sure, commentatorshave seen similar tendencies elsewhere in the world for decades (Hall et al., 1978;Wacquant, 1999); nevertheless, the temptation of the populism of fear has beenespecially strong in the western hemisphere in recent years. I will show the prevalenceof the populism of fear and its influence on election campaign tactics and policy inArgentina, focusing on Buenos Aires, in Brazil, focusing on São Paulo, in Mexico, andin the USA, focusing on New York. It appears at the national level in all the countries Ishall discuss here, although more weakly in Brazil; it is strong everywhere in localpolitics, however, where much of the actual work of law enforcement is carried out.

The temptations of the populism of fear are prevalent in democracies. It is true thatopenly authoritarian regimes are often effectively repressive; they may, for example,incarcerate proportionately more people than democratic regimes (Greenberg, 2002,forthcoming). Social control is commonly carried out by close surveillance of the people,as in Cuba, with repressive actions well targeted for political effect (Chevigny, 1999).Such regimes, however, do not share the style found in the democracies, including flam-boyant police abuses in the streets and ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric, a style that creates anatmosphere of disorder that itself contributes to the politics of crime. Political scientists

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have remarked that populism casts itself as an ‘anti-system’, in conflict with the poli-ticians in power (Novaro, 1999: 26; Weyland, 1999); this characteristic is salient in thepopulism of fear in democracies. Political campaigners virtually ‘run against the state’,complaining that the judges, the executive, and the laws themselves are too weak in theface of crime. They run also against the experts, championing a vengeful, punitiveapproach to crime, as contrasted with the more nuanced approach of many criminolo-gists. The appeal of the politics of crime, moreover, is not limited to those who happento be in the opposition; the rhetoric that the voters are threatened with danger, both toperson and property, that the candidate’s anti-crime policies will make them safe, whilehis opponent’s proposals will increase the danger, is a pitch that few campaigners,whether in or out of office, can resist. The temptations of the populism of fear ensnarepoliticians, even when they are aware that such politics has something in common withauthoritarian rule, and pulls a democracy in that direction (Dahrendorf, 1985: 160; Hallet al., 1978).

The sense of danger due to crime as well as the appeal of repressive anti-crime policies,is amplified by a free press. In Buenos Aires, São Paulo, New York and Mexico City, theseveral competing daily papers as well as television and radio feed upon crime to drawreaders, listeners and viewers, who look on with fascinated horror as the media commenton murders, rapes, and other outrages. The candidates, in turn, seize upon the increas-ing fear, and the media obliges by reporting more crime. The situation was otherwiseunder the dictatorships in Brazil and Argentina; because the governments wanted toconvey a sense of control and tranquility, they often failed to release crime data, anddiscouraged the press from upsetting the public. In Mexico as well, before the govern-ing party began seriously to lose its grip, and the country passed into an economic crisis,people felt and the press conveyed a sense of tranquility that was difficult for observersfrom the north to understand.

Under the democratic regimes that prevail throughout the Americas at present, thepopulism of the fear of crime, far from being a dirty word, is just the sort of populismthat elites have been looking for. Free-market relations, together with the weakening ofthe service state, induce fear and anxiety in the middle class as well as the poor. Peopleare afraid that they will lose their jobs, that the economy will slow, or that some othercalamity will occur. Free-market policies only exacerbate such fears, leaving citizens withthe sense that there is no safety net in case of catastrophe, and that if something goeswrong, they have no one to blame but themselves. With such a constant background ofinstitutionalized economic and social anxiety, crime can be made a target for the fearsof the populace; it deflects anxiety away from demands for reform and alleviation ofmarket relations toward a demand for vengeance against criminals (Scheingold, 1991:174–5).

THE USA AND THE SECURITY STATEThe populism of fear and the politics of crime are familiar in the USA, where we areawed to hear that the nation’s jails and prisons incarcerate some two million people (evenif not, in most cases, for crimes of violence), where the death penalty has returned in amajority of states and hundreds of people have actually been and some are still beingexecuted, and where juveniles are routinely charged and sentenced as adults and are even

CHEVIGNY The populism of fear

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sentenced to death and executed. To cite just one example of a successful effort to‘mobilize outrage about crime and blame it on “liberal democrats” ’ (Beckett and Sasson,2000: 68), campaigners for the elder George Bush famously used an episode, during hispresidential race against Michael Dukakis in 1988, in which a black prisoner calledWillie Horton had raped a woman after having escaped from release on furlough inMassachusetts while Dukakis was governor of the state. Such tactics have been used withgreat success for more than 30 years, to the point where the control of crime has becomea dominant government policy that is non-partisan; candidates for both major partiesvie to be tougher on crime than their adversaries. In the name of a free-market ideology,the politicians have been successful in transforming the ‘welfare state’ into a ‘securitystate’; welfare expenditures have been dropping in the USA since the 1970s, while expen-ditures for criminal justice have been steadily rising (Beckett and Sasson, 2000: 63). Theuse of the war on crime as policy has reached the point in the USA where welfaremeasures are neglected even when they are available; New York City, for example, failedin the year 2000 to use federal funds that were available to create jobs in the city (Lueck,2000). The criminal justice system now forms a ‘prison-industrial complex’: a vastnetwork of prisons, both public and private, of criminal justice professionals, and ofprison guards and police, which has a power and a political life of its own.

One problem with advocating a war on crime as a replacement for the welfare stateis that social welfare measures themselves are, in part, an anti-crime policy; social welfarewas supposed to alleviate the social conditions that helped cause crime. It is an import-ant part of the populism of fear, then, to assert that crime is not caused by poverty andother dire social conditions, but instead, that it is the result of choices made freely bycriminals. As Richard Nixon put it in 1968, the cause of crime is ‘insufficient curbs onthe appetites or impulses that naturally impel individuals toward criminal activities’(Beckett and Sasson, 2000: 55). While this is an argument that is particularly congenialto anti-welfare conservatives in the USA, it is beginning to appear elsewhere in theAmericas.

Commentators have explained the growth of the security state and the increasingemphasis on crime policies in at least three different ways. The change may be seen as away of fostering the growth of a crime-control industry (Chambliss, 1994; Christie,1993), of polarizing the electorate along racial lines (Beckett and Sasson, 2000: Ch. 4),or as a program for the social control of that part of the poor that is commonly calledthe ‘underclass’, that is, those who are unskilled and irrelevant to the global economy(Davey, 1995; Parenti, 1999). All of these are consistent and can be seen as one policyaimed at the control of an underclass, characterized as largely black, with the result ofcreating a crime-control industry that supplies jobs and contracts to the larger society.This description is a powerful one for the USA and I do not propose to disagree withit; nevertheless, I think that it cannot fully explain the impact of the populism of fearand fails to explain why it is successful outside the USA. The point for me is not thatthe politics of anti-crime serves for social control of those who are marginal, but that itserves for the social control of the rest of us. As long as there is a strong fear of physicaldanger, the politicians can promise to alleviate that fear to get the votes of the middleclass as well as most of the poor who, after all, are often the chief victims of crimes ofviolence. If anti-crime policies served primarily to intimidate and control a fraction ofthe poor, they would have less popular appeal with all classes. The populism of fear is


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an enormously successful policy because it serves to intimidate and demonize some, andat the same time, to discipline the rest who are taught to be afraid of those demons.Since 11 September 2001, the focus has shifted toward international crime. It is easy todemonize foreign terrorists as criminals, to combine the fear of crime with the fear ofthe foreign invader.

NEW YORK STATE IN THE 1990S

After the election of Governor George Pataki in 1994, the characteristic policies of thepopulism of fear have become dominant in New York State. Rudolph Giuliani waselected mayor of New York City in the same year, running on a platform of support forlaw enforcement generally and for the police specifically. His police commissionerspursued a new campaign of ‘zero tolerance’ for minor offenses, accompanied by system-atic stops and frisks, especially of minority youths, for the purpose of creating an atmos-phere of order and surveillance (Harcourt, 1998). Mayor Giuliani touted the programworldwide for reducing crime in the city and was re-elected partly on the strength of it.

Pataki’s administration of the state government presents a particularly clear case of theadoption of policies intended to replace the welfare state with a security state. Patakicampaigned on promises to introduce the death penalty, which had been resisted fordecades by previous governors, and to cut taxes. He campaigned successfully for re-election based on having kept both promises; his appeal is epitomized by the memor-ably simple formula of capital punishment and lower taxes. New York led all other statesin the nation in tax cuts during Pataki’s first years in office, while the welfare rollsdeclined by one-quarter (Hernandez, 1998). Pataki did not miss the opportunity toemphasize his opinion that there was no connection between social ills and crime. Heargued ‘that criminals cause crime’ and ‘described as “nonsense” the argument that acriminal’s actions stemmed from “a culmination of social factors beyond his control” ’(Nagourney, 1998).

Pataki sought to reduce the rights of suspects and prisoners. He succeeded in elimi-nating parole (that is, release by a hearing board before the maximum term of a sentence,in recognition of the possibility of rehabilitation) for repeat offenders, and hecampaigned to eliminate it even for first-time offenders in violent felonies (Levy, 1995).He sought to increase criminal penalties and to limit the powers of the courts to excludeevidence in criminal trials (Levy, 1996). He hammered home his support of the deathpenalty by removing the district attorney in Bronx County (New York City), in a blazeof publicity, from the prosecution of one of the first cases eligible for capital punishmentin the state, on the ground that the prosecutor did not support the death penalty(Nossiter, 1996).

Pataki fanned the flames of fear by exaggerating the amount of crime in the state, andeven advanced policies that artificially increased the apparent amount of crime. In hiscampaign in 1994, Pataki claimed that New York led all other states in the nation inviolent crime, when in fact the state stood seventh (Hernandez, 1998). In 1997, thegovernor proposed to build thousands of new prison cells to handle violent offenders,when in fact the number of violent offenders was dropping; by any count, it seemed,thousands fewer cells were needed than the governor claimed (New York Times, 1997).

Most telling are the state’s policies toward the mentally ill. For decades, New York


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State has been releasing patients from its mental hospitals without providing them withadequate alternative housing or other care; the situation reached its nadir under Pataki,whose administration, because of tax cuts and systematic opposition to social welfare,provided even smaller funds for care for the mentally ill than its predecessors (Barr, 1999;Winerip, 1999). In many cases, the mentally ill who act bizarrely or violently are chargedwith crimes and incarcerated; thousands who would have been committed in earlieryears as mental patients are condemned to prison instead. This is a nation-wide problemthat is especially acute in New York; the effect of cutting social welfare has been toincrease the crime rate, directly and artificially.

This is the power of the populism of fear at work. The cut in social expenditures forthe mentally ill results in an increase in the apparent rate of crime, which contributes inturn to the fear of crime and the outcry for more anti-crime measures. Politicians suchas Pataki, nevertheless, do not favor the transfer of funds back to treatment for thementally ill. To voters who are opposed to social welfare and are concerned for their ownpersonal security, funds for the mentally ill are more unpalatable than expenditures forprisons. Funds for the treatment of mental illness would be spent directly to help others,and only indirectly to prevent possible acts of violence; the populism of fear speaks onlyto personal security, through the direct punishment and incarceration of those who aredangerous. Moreover, if the numbers of the mentally ill in the prisons declined, then thecrime rate would decline even more steeply than it has been, and the fear of crime thatis essential to the continued success of the populism of fear would be jeopardized.

SOCIAL CONFLICT AND THE POPULISM OF FEAR IN LATIN AMERICAAt the beginning of the 1980s, following a rise in oil prices and a rise in interest ratesin the USA, which quickly spread to debtor nations, there was an economic crisis asserious as any in Latin America since the Great Depression. Many nations confrontedspiraling debt and inflation; debt-service absorbed a large part of the value of exportssold (OAS, 1984). By the end of that lost decade, nations in the region, including thosewith the most serious problems of debt and inflation, such as Brazil, Argentina, andMexico, adopted neo-liberal measures of reform; they sought to stabilize their curren-cies, liberalize trade, deregulate industry and labor, and privatize public enterprises. Theysought also to equalize and reform their tax systems, although this has been much moredifficult (Thorp, 1998: 226–32). While neo-liberal policies were approved and ofteninsisted upon by creditors, the policies were also accepted, at least, by the voters andpoliticians in those countries. The effects of inflation, and of borrowing to try to avoideconomic collapse, had been so disastrous that many voters were willing to try policiesof austerity in hopes that an end to inflation, together with renewed investment, bothdomestic and foreign, would revive their economies (Vellinga, 1998: 87, 119; Weyland,1999).

The neo-liberal measures have served to control inflation and encourage investment,but they have alleviated the perennial social problems much less than economists hadhoped. The growth of the economies has been slow, and they are plagued by unem-ployment, poor education and by increasing economic inequality, which is now the mostextreme in the world. Between 35 and 40 percent of households in Latin America werepoor in 1995, proportions that had grown since 1980 (IADB, 1997: 33, 40–1, 70).


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Great economic and social dislocation and suffering lie behind these bare statistics.Millions are without work, and of those a great many have no unemployment benefits.Many are laboring at jobs, often in the alternate economy, that are so ill-paid thatworkers have to hold more than one job, without pension or other benefits. Many better-paying jobs that carried benefits, such as those in public enterprises, have been elimi-nated. In addition, in places such as Argentina, where organized labor has been relativelystrong and has built protections into the laws, the government has tried to eliminatethose protections in the name of deregulation.

Although governments in Argentina and Brazil have remained in place (shakily, in thecase of Argentina) and the government in Mexico is passing through a process of demo-cratization, the costs in social conflict are enormous. In Argentina, during the month ofMay 2000, the roadways were blocked in at least five provinces by drivers protestingagainst unemployment (CISALP, 2000). The protests led to a general strike throughoutthe country to protest against unemployment and austerity measures (Krauss, 2000).Finally, after months of trying to keep the economy afloat, as this is being written, theDe la Rua government has collapsed and has been replaced. In Brazil, the landlessmovement has been occupying underutilized land in the effort to accelerate land reform,and has frequently had bloody conflicts with the police (HRW, 2000: 107). In Mexico,guerilla movements have sprung up in several states.

One result of continuing economic inequality, unemployment and the attendantsocial dislocation has been a rise in crime in Latin America; in Brazil and Argentina, therise began in the 1980s, pushed by inflation, poverty and inequality. Although the factof such a rise seems clear enough, particularly regarding homicides, its dimensions arenot clear; in many countries, crime statistics are not systematically collected and recorded(CEPAL, 1999: Ch. 6). The fear of crime feeds on anecdotes in the press as well aspolitical rhetoric. It is not, however, much related in the public mind to racial conflict.In Argentina and Mexico, race is hardly recognized as an element in the crime problem,and racial groups are not particularly marked out as dangerous in the popular mind. InBrazil, there is considerable discrimination against non-whites, both by the police andthe population in general, but the rise in crime does not seem to be identified stronglyin the popular mind with any racial group.

The pressures to draw upon the fear of crime for political advantage are enormous.Because the governments adhere to neo-liberal policies, and usually cannot promise alarge number of jobs or other relief measures to their constituents, politicians areconfronted with constant social protest, to which they must make some reply, even ifthey cannot promise relief. Even in the 1980s, before the liberal policies were so firmlyadopted, the widespread depression and inflation presented the public with a bleakpicture. When the rise of crime is of great concern to the voters, it would seem all butirresistible for politicians to turn the voters’ attention to personal security.

The politicians have indeed made that choice as a way to mobilize the voters, in orderto be able to promise them something when they cannot do much against unemploy-ment and poverty. But the effects have been somewhat different in Brazil, Argentina andMexico than in the USA, as will become clearer in the sections on the individual coun-tries that follow. Governments are not committed to a program of reducing social expen-ditures, even though they have sometimes done so as an austerity measure. Traditionalclientism and public enterprises continue, although much reduced. During the 1990s,


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in fact, social expenditures have been rising in the region. The rise, however, has occurredafter a disastrous drop during the 1980s, and social-welfare expenditures are actuallyrelatively low in Latin America (CEPAL, 1999: Ch. 4; IADB, 1997: 104, 108).Moreover, because all three nations are having a difficult time expanding their incomethrough their tax base, while they continue to have heavy debts, they are unable to gomuch further in raising social expenditures without changes in debt or tax structure(IADB, 1997: 104–10; Vellinga, 1998: 19). Thus, we do not often hear rhetoric in LatinAmerica about ‘cutting welfare’ or ‘cutting taxes’ – there is not very much to cut.

There are, as yet, only weak signs of the development of a security state or a prison-industrial complex. One principal reason is that it is not clear just what the politicianscan practically promise their constituents about the criminal justice system. The deathpenalty has been systematically abolished in the region, and international law blocks itsrestoration. Politicians will speak vaguely of a ‘hard hand’ against crime, but the truthis that the criminal justice systems in the three countries are poorly developed. The pros-ecutors are often weak, and the judges are enormously overburdened and without properfacilities. The ‘hard hand’, then, tends to take the form of more violence against suspectsin the streets and interrogation rooms; it is a hand of brutality rather than effective lawenforcement. Although police violence is often popular in the case of individual suspects,it is suspect as a policy, because the police, even more than other elements of the criminaljustice system, are seen as corrupt and intimately tied to crime. Kidnapping gangs, whichare the nightmare of upper and even middle class people in all three countries, haverepeatedly been found to be linked to the police. Lastly, many voters and politicians aredoubtful that they want to give greater powers to law enforcement; they identify policeviolence and the denial of the rights of suspects with the dictatorships that are still onlyin the recent past.

ARGENTINA AND BUENOS AIRESDuring the recession of the 1980s, income per capita in Buenos Aires dropped by 25percent (Lustig, 1995: 56) and inflation and other signs of economic crisis were so direthat President Raul Alfonsin resigned office early in hopes that his successor might beable to grapple with the situation. As a Peronist, President Carlos Menem was able toundertake painful neo-liberal measures after 1989, partly because the populist traditionof his party had been opposed to such measures. He thereby gained some credibility inthe business community, without completely losing his political capital among hissupporters in the middle and working classes, particularly in light of the fact that he wasable to stabilize the currency and stop inflation. As the economist Pablo Gerchunoff(1998: 121) put it, ‘Menem’s successful turnabout proved that a president from apopulist tradition could launch a nonpopulist economic strategy and come through withflying colors.’ Menem soon found other sorts of populism.

The country enjoyed a modest boom until 1994. Social expenditures rose and thelevel of poverty began to decline. Since the collapse of the peso in Mexico in 1994,which led to higher interest rates and lower investment in the region, Argentina hasbeen plagued by recession. Poverty and unemployment have risen, accompanied byincreased inequality of wealth and income (CEPAL, 1999: 99–105). Nevertheless, inan effort to cut the deficit and retain access to credits from the IMF, at the beginning


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of his administration in 2000, Menem’s successor, Fernando de la Rua, felt compelledto increase the austerity measures, cutting public benefits, salaries and pensions in theface of an unemployment rate that was at 14 percent and still growing. After years ofadverse conditions, the new administration faced even more intense protest.1 Thispolicy failed; as the government was unable to meet its debts, international lendersrefused further support, and it was replaced by temporary governments.

Rising crime has been an issue in Argentina for more than a decade, even though thegovernment has never published systematic data about crime rates (Chevigny, 1995: Ch.6). Some commentators have remarked that the country, and in particular the city ofBuenos Aires, seem relatively safe (Krauss, 1999), while others have pointed out thatinformation on the dimensions of the problem are simply lacking (The Economist, 1999).Nevertheless, during his 10 years as president, Carlos Menem frequently campaigned onan anti-crime platform, rejecting the idea that the sources of crime should be sought inunemployment or poverty (Smulovitz, 1998). As reported in 1999, his program was alitany of the populism of fear:

Menem urged Congress to approve the penal reforms sought by his administration, includingstiffer penalties and delayed prison release. He called for an end to the common complaint that‘criminals enter by one door and exit by another’. Menem claimed that the 1983 penal law[immediately after the dictatorship] ‘went too far’ in favoring criminals over the justice system.He added that his administration will act ‘with a firm hand and with zero tolerance’ towardcriminals, but always ‘within the law’. (BBC, 1999)

The government manipulated public fears of crime to suit its purposes. In thecampaigns for president and for governor of the province of Buenos Aires in 1999, crimewas a leading issue, competing for first place with unemployment. The Peronist candi-date for president, Eduardo Duhalde, made a pilgrimage to New York City in 1998 toshow his support for a policy of ‘zero tolerance’ for crime, and advocated the reintro-duction of the death penalty (The Economist, 1999; Krauss, 1999). During the campaignPresident Menem dispatched military and border police to patrol the streets of BuenosAires, which revived memories of the dictatorship for many and provoked the opposi-tion presidential candidate, Fernando de la Rua, the mayor of the city, to suggest ‘thatcrime was rising because the Government was ineffective at fighting poverty’. Consistentwith his position that crime is not caused by economic dislocation, Menem replied thatde la Rua was ‘confusing the dignity of the poor with the pathology of delinquency’.The government cautiously leaked some fragmentary figures showing the rising crimein the city (Krauss, 1999), while in the same year, in an effort to glorify its efforts atincreased security, the government also claimed that crime was lower in Argentina thanit was in the USA (The Economist, 1999).

The politics of crime was even more bitter at the local level in the campaign forgovernor of Buenos Aires province.2 A popular independent candidate was Luis Patti, aformer police commander who has long been notorious for his contempt for the rightsof suspects; he proposed the use of armed vigilantes against crime. A more serious candi-date was the Peronist Carlos Ruckauf, who advocated ‘shooting murderers’ and ‘killingcriminals’ (HRW, 2000: 101). Ruckauf ’s flamboyantly tough rhetoric carried him tovictory over Graciela Fernandez Meijide, a human rights activist whom many had


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expected to be elected riding the coattails of president-elect de la Rua (The Economist,2000).

The meaning of anti-crime rhetoric is ambiguous in Argentina. Time out of mind,even before the dictatorships of the 1970s, the police have been notorious for corrup-tion and the profligate use of violence, including torture of suspects. Opinion polls in1998 showed that the population in Buenos Aires widely believed that the rise in crimewas caused by poverty and unemployment, despite the fact that Menem had tried topersuade them otherwise, and that a smaller percentage thought that the police them-selves were chief among the criminals (Smulovitz, 1998). After a colossal terroristbombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994, in which more than 80 were killed,investigation by magistrates revealed that a commander in the provincial police hadsupplied the car in which the bomb was planted; further investigation revealed that hehad amassed millions illegally. One reason that the government is reluctant to revealcrime statistics may be that so many of them involve the police; the Center for Legaland Social Studies has suggested that one-third of the homicides in Buenos Aires mayhave been committed by the police (The Economist, 1999; Rotella, 1999).

As a result of the scandals an effort was made in 1997 to reorganize the Buenos Airesprovincial police completely. Thousands of officers were fired, the force was organizedinto a number of districts with civilian oversight and community cooperation, andjudicial police were established, independent of other police and empowered to investi-gate cases for the judiciary (Rotella, 1999; Smulovitz, 1998). The reform encounteredwidespread opposition, from police as well as from others who pointed out that it wasnot immediately reducing crime; indeed, it may have added to crime through thenumbers of police who had been cashiered. In a few months, this very important experi-ment in reformed and decentralized policing was largely abandoned.

The problem of corruption, moreover, has not been limited to the police. During hisdecade in office, Menem was constantly dogged by charges of corruption in his adminis-tration; in some cases, judges were also found to be corrupt (Green, 1994). In the presi-dential campaign at the end of 1999, both of the chief candidates claimed to be toughon crime, but the Peronist candidate Duhalde carried the baggage of the police scandalsthat had occurred on his watch as governor of the province of Buenos Aires. A chiefappeal of Fernando de la Rua as president was undoubtedly that he had built up a repu-tation for incorruptibility as mayor of the city of Buenos Aires. The voters had graspedthe basic proposition that the government could not begin to be effective against crim-inals until it ceased to be criminal itself.

BRAZIL AND SÃO PAULOAt the end of the lost decade of the 1980s, 41 percent of Brazil’s people were poor by inter-national standards, among the highest proportions in Latin America, while almost 19percent were ‘extremely poor’, as the World Bank put it, making less than a dollar a day(World Bank, 1997: 62). A few were rich; Brazil had and still has the greatest disparity ofincome in Latin America. After the election of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in1994, when the government succeeded in stabilizing the currency and controlling in-flation, a slight boom ensued in which the lot of the poor improved (IMF, 1997). In 1998,Brazil had to devalue its new currency, which reduced the effective wages of the poor.


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Public social expenditures in Brazil were relatively high for Latin America, amount-ing to about $1000 per person in 1996–97 (CEPAL, 1999: Ch. 4); a large percentageof the expenditures, however, were sunk in pensions, which mostly aided the middleclass (IADB, 1997: 191; IMF, 1997). After the devaluation of the currency, the restric-tions imposed in return for IMF support of the currency forced the government to cutsocial benefits to the poor still more (Green, 1999).

The fear of crime is old in cities such as São Paulo; crime rates have been climbing atleast since the years of poverty and hyperinflation following the dictatorship in the1980s. In 1996, the homicide rate was 36 per 100,000 persons in the state of São Paulo,up from half that rate 15 years earlier, and more than a quarter of the residents of thecity of São Paulo reported that they had been the victim of a crime in 1997 (Mesquita,1998). It is characteristic of Brazilians that, although they would like to see somethingdone about crime, they have very little faith in the criminal justice system. They see itas slow, ineffective, and skewed in favor of the rich and powerful; many unhesitatinglybrand it as a ‘joke’ (Chevigny, 1995: Ch. 5). Brazilians rarely depend on the formal legalsystem to solve their problems, but instead draw on networks of personal relations. Oneresult has been the isolation of middle- and upper-class city-dwellers in a proliferationof high-rises with electronic entrances and private guards; the private security industryemploys thousands to work in the apartment buildings as well as to guard businesses.Another result has been an emphasis on vigilantism as a response to crime; in São Pauloand Rio de Janeiro, as well as other cities, storekeepers and others hire private gunmento kill thieves and even to eliminate political rivals (Holston and Caldeira, 1998).

The course of the populism of fear is stark in the state of São Paulo. The first governorfollowing the waning of the dictatorship in the mid-1980s was determined to reduceviolations of human rights and to reform the police to minimize the excesses of tortureand summary executions. His team of reformers went to work in the face of rising crimeassociated with the economic dislocation of the 1980s, with the result that the policewere able to resist most of the reforms, and the protection of human rights was blamedby opposition politicians as well as a large part of the public for the rise in crime; thus,a nascent effort to create a ‘politics of human rights’ was largely buried by the populismof fear. That liberal interlude was succeeded in 1987 by a string of governors whopromised to be tough on crime; in São Paulo, faith in the criminal justice system as awhole was so faint that ‘tough on crime’ translated directly into increased police violence.In 1989, Luiz Antonio Fleury Filho, later to be elected governor, said, ‘The fact that thisyear there were more deaths caused by the [military police] means that they are moreactive. The more police in the streets, the more chances of confrontations between crim-inals and policemen. . . From my point of view, what the population wants is that thepolice act boldly.’ Public opinion polls did indeed show that a large part of the popu-lation supported police violence, including summary executions (Holston and Caldeira,1998).

Under the administration of the governors elected after 1987, police violence esca-lated beyond what it had been under the dictatorship. The number of police killings ofsuspects rose each year in the 1980s and early 1990s, to a high of 1470 in 1992, morethan a quarter of the homicides in the state (Holston and Caldeira, 1998); it appearedthat the police killed more people in those years than were killed for political reasonsduring the dictatorship (Chevigny, 1995: Ch. 5). For the dictatorship, political killings


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were secret; they were acts to which the administration could not admit. Under electedgovernors, the killings had the legitimacy of public support. They were open acts ofpolicy, for the ostensible purpose of crime control in a situation where the courts werescarcely taken seriously. As governor, Fleury made it clear that he did not see his anti-crime policy as an attack on the poor; on the contrary, he claimed it was taken on behalfof the common people against the tiny minority identified as bandits or more vaguelyas ‘low life’ (marginais). ‘The philosophy is what we always try to teach. A police thatmay be the friend of the worker, the householder, and of students, but very hard inrelation to bandits. For the bandits there is to be no mercy’ (Chevigny, 1995: 169). Itwas true then as it is today that most of the victims of police violence are poor and black,but the issue of race is never raised by those who advocate tougher anti-crime measures.

The Brazilian national government, which has traditionally had only a small role inlaw enforcement, has sometimes tried to control the worst anti-crime excesses by thestates.3 The year 1992 in São Paulo culminated in a crescendo of violence against a jailrebellion in the state House of Detention, when the police, armed with automaticweapons, killed 111 prisoners, none of whom had firearms. The ensuing scandal in theinternational human rights community as well as elsewhere in Brazil resulted in pressurefrom the federal government to reduce police violence in São Paulo, and the killingsdropped during the next year by more than two-thirds. Under a new administration inSão Paulo, police who killed civilians were sent to a special program of counseling andreassignment, while an ombudsman began to report on complaints against the police.But the appeal of the populism of fear has not passed away in São Paulo: police killingshave begun to rise again and a noted right-wing candidate, Paulo Maluf, campaignedfor governor against the new administration, claiming that it was responsible for risingcrime (Gazeta Mercantil, 1998). Maluf, however, was handicapped by his identificationwith corruption in São Paulo; the mayor of the city, a protégé of Maluf, was convictedin 1997 of a massive stock fraud (Wheatley, 1997).

The voters recognize the connection between increasing police power and corruption;they know that the police are involved in crime. In a poll conducted by the newspaperFolha de S. Paulo in 1996, an astounding 88 percent of those interviewed in Rio deJaneiro and São Paulo thought that the police were connected to organized crime(Alencar and Godoy, 1996). At the same time that they approve the actions of the policeagainst thieves and other criminals, people are afraid of police violence; they recognizethat the police are often mistaken and discriminate against the poor and minorities(Holston and Caldeira, 1998). Everyone recognizes that there is a serious need forimprovement of the police in almost all respects; in 1997, there was a wave of strikesamong the police themselves, not just for higher wages, but also for better workingconditions (Mesquita, 1998). Yet those who are most vociferous for the populism of fear,for ‘tougher’ police, are often not much interested in basic reform. One reason may be,as in the case of Paulo Maluf and his protégé, that some of the politicians and theeconomic elite are involved in activities that are corrupt or connected to crime; a trueanti-crime policy would implicate them. Helio Luz, a controversial left-leaning officerwho was chief of the civil (that is, investigative) police in Rio de Janeiro in 1995,commented that:


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the elite has given signs that it does not support a serious and less heavily armed police. A policeforce that uses the AR-15 is just papaya with sugar. It is violent, beats and tortures because thetop of society wants it that way. But I think that the elite does not support a police force thatwalks softly and uses a computer. It is more dangerous. As a policeman, I have been throughsituations in which it was patent that the elite likes the police for the poor, but not for itself.(Cesar and Vargas, 1995)

MEXICOAfter the financial crisis of the 1980s, and the institution of neo-liberal policies, thegovernment and private actors in Mexico accumulated still more debt, precipitating aneven deeper crisis when the peso was devalued in 1994; economic collapse was avertedby a guarantee of $40 billion from international lenders and the USA (Marichal, 1997),a debt that must be carried by the Mexican taxpayer. The real value of wages fell, whileunemployment rose (it is said that a million jobs were lost), and of those who could findwork, many were forced into the informal economy. Public social expenditures droppedafter the devaluation, while the level of economic inequality increased (CEPAL, 1999:Ch. 4). It appears that Mexico is unlikely to be able to restore its social expenditure inthe near future, because its debt service was at the level of $20 billion a year in 1995,and tax revenues were not sufficient to give the government a surplus for increased socialspending (IADB, 1999: 181; Shefner, 1998).

Social unrest is intense. The Zapatista uprising in Chiapas against the effects of theneo-liberal reforms continued after 1994, and there were armed revolutionary move-ments in the states of Guerrero and Oaxaca. Since the devaluation of the peso and theensuing massive unemployment, crime and the fear of crime has been on the rise(Preston, 1996). Unlike the USA, Brazil and Argentina, where fear of crime is an oldissue, urban Mexico was curiously peaceful until well into the 1990s; officials were ableto say that Mexico City was safer than US cities, even though those cities were moreprosperous. The politics of the country was dominated by the Institutional Revolution-ary Party (PRI), which co-opted or quietly eliminated opposition, and encouraged thesense of peace (Chevigny, 1995: Ch. 8). The legitimacy of one-party rule has beeneroding for at least 15 years, as serious opposition to the PRI has grown. The sense thatthe country is open to change has coincided with the devaluation of the peso to producethe sense, since 1994, that there is an explosion of crime and that Mexico City hasbecome a dangerous place.

Politicians have played upon the fear of crime. President Ernesto Zedillo, whosucceeded President Salinas in 1994, proposed enormous changes in criminal procedurein 1996, including the use of faceless judges, anonymous witnesses, increased wire-tapping, autonomous intelligence services in the police, and lowering the age of criminalliability from 18 to 16. In support of the measures, which some thought smacked of a‘state of emergency’, the minister of the interior said, ‘Seven out of every ten Mexicansconsider that insecurity is nowadays the main cause of anxiety in the Republic’ (LatinAmerican Weekly Report, 1996). Although those exceptional proposals were notadopted, the powers of the state have been increased in criminal cases; the discretion ofthe police to arrest without a court order has been expanded and the rights of defen-dants under the writ of amparo, a protection similar to habeas corpus, have been limited.The powers of the military to participate in law enforcement have been expanded and


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codified (Lawyers Committee For Human Rights, 1999). The police have become moreviolent: in 1997, a special police squad in Mexico City killed six people in apparentretaliation for the killing of a policeman (HRW, 1998).

Crime was the central issue in the 1999 gubernatorial campaign in Mexico state,which surrounds Mexico City. The PRI candidate, Arturo Montiel, claimed that hewould show no mercy to criminals, adopting the campaign slogan ‘human rights are forhumans, not for rats’ (Associated Press, 1999). Montiel was successful in the campaign,but the PRI showed that it was unwilling to rely on any device as uncertain as populistrhetoric to assure the victory. As a pollster described its methods, ‘somebody comesaround and gives a family a bag of groceries or milk, in the context of a commitment tovote . . . The PRI also uses its control over state housing, street paving, agricultural subsi-dies and scholarships, to leverage votes’ (Dillon, 1999).

Mexico thus has not entirely emerged from government conducted by clientist devicesto a more open, democratic contest. In the presidential campaign of 2000, the PRI reliedheavily on vote buying, for example, by distributing washing machines in Yucatan, aswell as by threats of reprisal if voters did not stick with the ruling party (Dillon, 2000).Although the two leading candidates campaigned on the issue of crime, FranciscoLabastida, the PRI candidate, was unable to make a very credible argument. The govern-ment was so rife with corruption that it was clear that many people in the PRI wereresponsible for crimes; in the war on drugs, officials, even at the highest level, had repeat-edly been caught taking bribes from the narco-traffickers (Massing, 2000).

The police have always been recognized as corrupt. In 1996, President Zedilloassigned army officers to command the police in Mexico City because he believed thatthe army could be trusted to be less corrupt and even violent than the police (Dillon,1996). More important, the entire criminal process was corrupt and politicized to thepoint where most Mexicans had no confidence in it. In two politically importantcriminal investigations during the Zedillo administration, the killings of Luis Colosioand Jose Ruiz Massieu, investigators advanced theories and then dropped them amidcharges of torture and false confessions (Chevigny, 1999). But it is not only in sensa-tional cases that prosecutions are distorted and evidence tailored to fit a plannedscenario. In the case of a 1997 murder of a banker, police officers tried to frame a manfor the crime whom they had previously kidnapped and held for ransom, apparentlyin retaliation for his having exposed the kidnapping (Dillon, 1998). Mexicans knewthat even in routine cases torture was used and innocent persons were framed to suitthe needs of prosecutors, police, politicians and even judges. Human rights advocateshave said that the most pervasive problem in the criminal justice system is ‘falsecharges, framing suspects’ (Chevigny, 1995: 243). It is difficult to imagine Mexicanvoters, faced with examples of powerful people involved in crime and innocent peoplefalsely accused, showing strong support for any program that pretends to be a ‘war oncrime’.

CONCLUSIONSThe sociologist Charles Tilly (1985) wrote that one primordial function of the state hasbeen to act as a protection racket – promising to save us from the depredations of crim-inals; the imposition of a ‘king’s peace’ against marauders is one reason for the formation


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of the modern state. Thus, the appeal to personal safety as a source of government poweris nothing new. As the state has increasingly gained a monopoly of legitimate force, ithas been able to coerce people to keep order, while at the same time gaining legitimacyby showing that it is keeping order. Such order-keeping work of the state has usuallybeen used against the poor, but even more basic to that work seems to have been apromise of safety, to the poor as much as to everyone else.

The problem of keeping the peace has been brought to prominence in the Americasthrough the contemporary limitations on the service functions of the state, in the faceof an increase in economic inequality accompanied by increased social conflict. Theimportance of the appeal to personal safety is writ large by the competition for thesupport of the voters and by the competition among the media for readers, listeners andviewers. The din about safety is often so loud that it creates a public fear that blows theproblem out of proportion. Such crime scares are difficult to understand if they are seenonly as a function of the effort to control the very poor; rather, they must be understoodalso as an effort to gain the allegiance of the populace so that they will forget, for themoment, the extent of inequality and government mismanagement. Particularly illumi-nating as an example of the use of the fear of crime for control of the populace gener-ally, rather than of the targets of the programs, are the policies of Governor Pataki ofNew York and his predecessors that have resulted in criminalizing the conduct of thementally ill. The neglect of their needs contributed poorly to the control of the mentallyill; no doubt a program of treatment and housing would have been a more effectivemeans of control. Relegating them to the criminal justice system increased the apparentcrime rate, however, and thus fueled the populism of fear. Furthermore, surveys of publicopinion suggest that the populace does not, for the most part, understand anti-crimeprograms as an attack on the poor. In the USA and Brazil, the lower classes are amongthe supporters of harsh measures against crime.4

In the USA, 35 years of the politics of the fear of crime have built institutions of asecurity-state that now fulfil some of the functions of a welfare state. In Romulus, NewYork, a once-depressed rural township 200 miles from New York City that now thriveson its prison and drug-treatment facilities, the town supervisor wisecracks, ‘The city[New York] is subsidizing us by producing these criminals’ (Purdy, 2000). The develop-ment of such carceral institutions requires a vast machinery (police, prosecutors, judgesand legislators, as well as prison personnel) for catching and sentencing people. To keepthe prison-industrial complex running, the bureaucracy has to be tolerably efficient, atleast in a narrow sense, and immune to petty corruption by money; it certainly appearsto be efficient in the USA, where it has condemned millions to prison and hundreds todeath.

In Brazil and Argentina, the forces pushing toward the populism of fear seem in someways more compelling than they are in the USA. In North America, the abandonmentof social services has been deliberate; the USA has the resources, if it chooses, tostrengthen many of its social programs. For Brazil and Argentina, on the other hand,due to the strictures imposed as a result of their external debts as well as political limitson their ability to collect taxes, it is more difficult to revert to the level of public expen-ditures that prevailed under economic populism. Hence the fiery rhetoric of the ‘hardhand’ against crime, and the numbers of people who suffer death or harassment at thehands of the police. In Mexico, similar forces are at work, but crime as a political


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problem is relatively new and the clientistic way of seeking the allegiance of voters hascontinued to be strong.

Some of the building blocks of a security state have long been present in Brazil,Argentina and Mexico. There are the police themselves, who have huge numbers ofpersonnel in Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Mexico City. In addition, the military hoversin the wings – while most democratic politicians hesitate to use it for domestic crimecontrol because of the risks to civil government. The government apparatus, however, isimplicated in crime, through corruption as well as outright involvement in other crimessuch as kidnapping and drug-trafficking. Moreover, virtually everyone in each of thecountries hears about scandals of corruption and high-level crime because the pressreports them and opposition politicians use them to discredit the party in power. Thedemocratic competition thus functions, on the one hand, to support the populism offear, but at the same time to reveal enough of the dangers in the administration ofcriminal justice so that everyone, voters and politicians alike, hesitates to cede it morepower.

It is inevitable that there should be a drive throughout the region for reform of thecriminal justice system. And, of course, the relatively bureaucratic and efficient systemin the USA is a model. Presidential candidates such as Duhalde and de la Rua inArgentina make the obligatory visit to New York City, the temple of ‘zero tolerance’policing, while president-elect Fox of Mexico promises to model changes on the USsystem (Thompson, 2000). There are programs to introduce plea-bargaining, tostrengthen the powers of prosecutors and the independence of judges, of witness-protection programs and of community policing. There are also more home-grownprograms, such as the attempted reform of the Buenos Aires provincial police in 1997;as the fate of that program shows, however, the best reforms make little differencewithout a desire on the part of officials and elites for at least a minimum of honesty andaccountability. As Helio Luz from Rio pointed out, until elites decide that corruptionand criminality have to be minimized in the justice system, it cannot become much moreeffective.

Lastly, even if corruption were much reduced, there is a doubt in the minds of manywhether they want to find reform in the direction of a more repressive, even if lessviolent, criminal justice system. Under pressure from the populism of fear, the deathpenalty has become more popular; nevertheless, most legislators continue to consider ita relic of the past. Proposals such as those of Menem or Zedillo for limiting libertieshave been viewed with suspicion, as harbingers of dictatorship. The encounters thatBrazilians and Argentinians have had in the last generation with institutions callingthemselves ‘security states’, or some similar name, are not likely to make them want torepeat the experience. Nevertheless, the temptations of the populism of fear willcontinue to push in that direction.

AcknowledgementsMy thanks are due to colleagues who assisted me. Among them are my excellentresearchers, Julie Stewart and Cesar Rodriguez and discussion groups at NYU’s Institutefor Law and Society. I am also grateful to Human Rights Watch and the LawyersCommittee for Human Rights, Centro de Estudios Legales y Sociales and Centro deInvestigaciones Sociales Asesorias Legales Populares in Buenos Aires, Nucleo de Estudos


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da Violencia and Paulo Mesquita in São Paulo, as well as to Philomena Mariani and theanonymous readers for this journal.

Notes1 The chief candidates for president of Argentina in the 1999 elections were the Peronist

Eduardo Duhalde, governor of the province of Buenos Aires and of the same party asthe incumbent Menem, and Fernando de la Rua, then mayor of the city of BuenosAires, candidate of the center-left coalition called the Alianza. De la Rua was elected.

2 As the capital of the nation, the city of Buenos Aires is policed by federal police. Theprovince of Buenos Aires, a enormous area surrounding the capital, is policed byprovincial police. It is the latter who were accused of massive corruption and werereorganized in the 1990s.

3 São Paulo, economically the most important state in Brazil, surrounds the city of SãoPaulo. The police are organized at the state level; as in many other states, the policein São Paulo are divided into military police, who do the patrol work, and the civilpolice, who investigate crimes and generally present the case to the prosecutor.

4 In the case of Brazil, see Pinheiro (1998). For the USA, see Tyler and Boeckmann(1997) and Cohen et al. (1991).

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World Bank (1997) ‘World Bank technical paper 351: Poverty and income distributionin Latin America – The story of the 80’s’. Washington DC: World Bank.

PAUL CHEVIGNY is Joel S. and Anne B. Ehrenkranz Professor of Law at New York University Law School.


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