youth gangs and perverse livelihoods strategies...

Arusha Conference,“New Frontiers of Social Policy” – December 12-15, 2005 D. Rodgers, conference paper

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YOUTH GANGS AND PERVERSE LIVELIHOODS STRATEGIES IN NICARAGUA:

CHALLENGING CERTAIN PRECONCEPTIONS AND SHIFTING THE FOCUS OF

ANALYSIS

Dennis Rodgers , London School of Economics

[email protected]

Abstract: On the basis of longitudinal ethnographic research carried out in a poor neighbourhood in Managua (Nicaragua) in 1996-97 and 2002-03, this paper describes the dynamics of urban youth gangs and their violence in order to highlight the way in which under certain conditions they can be seen as not solely destructive but socially constructive. In particular, it shows how gangs in “fragile” states are often forms of “social sovereignty” that provide localised systems of “meta-political” order allowing for the coherent articulation of livelihood strategies and asset building in areas where the state is predominantly absent. Such an analysis suggests that instead of thinking about gangs as “perverse livelihood strategies”, it is perhaps more important – and more accurate – that we think about the fact that they tend to emerge in “perverse contexts”, and that it is these that constitute the principal problem from a developmental perspective.

Keywords: gangs, violence, perverse livelihoods, social sovereignty, Nicaragua

DISCLAIMER: This is a draft working paper produced for the World Bank conference, ‘New Frontiers of Social Policy: Development in a Globalizing World’. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction/The World Bank Group and its affiliated organizations, or its Executive Directors, or the governments they represent. If you wish to cite from this document please request the latest version from the author(s) or from [email protected].


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Introduction

“Actual society does not result only from ...social forces which are positive, and only to the extent that the negative factors do not hinder them... [but] is the result of both categories of interaction [positive and negative], which thus both manifest themselves as wholly positive” (Simmel, 1955: 16).

Levels of violence in contemporary Central America continue to be extremely high,

despite the fact that the last of the multiple conflicts that plagued the region during the 1980s was

formally brought to an end in 1996. As Pearce (1998) presciently remarked at the time, although

the region’s political conflicts were arguably “resolved” at the level of peace accords between

armies and insurgents, the everyday lives of much of the region’s population – including in

particularly the poor – remained overshadowed by a more social and multifaceted form of

violence, one that predominant ly took the form of crime and delinquency. Crime is in fact now so

prevalent in Central America that in many instances levels of violence are comparable to – or in

some cases even higher than - during the decade of war that affected most of the region during the

1980s. In El Salvador, for example, the annual tally of violent deaths during the 1990s

systematically exceeded the average due to war in the 1980s by over 40 percent (Pearce, 1998:

590), while in Guatemala the economic costs of crime were estimated to be US$565 million in

1999 (Moser and Winton, 2002: 33), compared to an annual US$240 million loss to the country’s

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) during the height of the civil war between 1981-85.1

Perhaps the most emblematic form of brutality that has emerged from these new Central

American “savage wars of peace” is youth gang violence. Youth gangs are widespread throughout

the whole of Latin America (Rodgers, 1999), and particularly virulent in Central America where

they are widely seen as something of a “social pathology” (Arana, 2001; Liebel, 2004). This vision

of the phenomenon has been at the roots of the recent spread of repressive “mano dura” – “strong

hand” – policy responses to gangs, particularly in Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Putting

aside the issue of whether such policies are effective and respectful of basic human rights – see

Forter (2005) for an overview – it can be argued that they are profoundly flawed because they

derive from a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of youth gangs. Drawing on

1 This latter figure is expressed in 1999 current US$, and calculated on the basis of data from Ahrend (1999) and the UN Statistics Division’s online Common Database, http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cdb/ (accessed 14 April 2004).


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fine-grained longitud inal ethnographic research carried out in a poor neighbourhood in Managua,

Nicaragua, in 1996-97 and 2002-03,2 this paper describes the dynamics of youth gangs and their

violence in contemporary urban Nicaragua in order to highlight the way in which they are not

solely destructive but also socially constructive. In particular, it is argued that they can be analysed

as forms of “social sovereignty” providing localised frameworks of order that allow for the

coherent articulation of livelihood strategies in poor urban neighbourhoods within a wider

structural context of failing state sovereignty.

Although there exist clear differences between Nicaraguan youth gangs and their

Honduran, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran counterparts, including most crucially the fact that the

former are not an importation of US gang culture and nor are they as violent as the latter – even if

they are by no means as innocuous as Nicaraguan government crime statistics imply (see Rodgers,

2004b: 116-18, for a discussion of their fallibility) – they can nevertheless be said to epitomise

dynamics that are relevant to the whole region, and indeed, to Latin America more generally.3 The

data and analysis presented in this paper therefore arguably at the very least contribute to thinking

generally about violence reduction policy formulation. The paper begins by considering youth

gangs as livelihood strategies, and explores how this exposes certain limitations of the livelihood

framework. It then moves on to discuss the nature of “fragile” states, characterising Nicaragua as

an example of such a state due to its fragmented and incomplete sovereignty, as reflected

particularly by its lack of a monopoly over the use of violence and concomitant inability to

guarantee security universally within its boundaries. Nicaraguan youth gangs are then shown to be

a form of local level sovereign political authority, critical to the coherent constitution of livelihood

strategies in poor urban neighbourhoods. A final section concludes, considering the analytical and

policy implications of the case study.

2 The first period of fieldwork was carried out between July 1996 and July 1997, as part of a social anthropology PhD (Rodgers, 2000). The second period was conducted in February-March 2002 as part of the London School of Economics Crisis States Programme (see http://www.crisisstates.com), which also sponsored a further visit in December 2002-January 2003. For methodological details about the research see Rodgers (1997; 2004a; 2007). 3 See Goldstein (2003: 174-225) and Penglase (2005) for similar analyses to the one presented in this paper on the dynamics of gangs in the favelas (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil).


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Youth gangs as perverse livelihood strategies?

Classic social science conceptions of youth gangs tend to interpret them as dysfunctional

social forms, variably the reflection of the “social disorganization” of poverty and exclusion

(Whyte, 1943), lower class “subculture” (Cohen, 1955), forms of resistance to “blocked

opportunities” (Cloward and Ohlin, 1960), instances of “savage capitalism” (Sánchez Jankowski,

1991), the result of deviant personality traits (Yablonsky, 1963), or macho identity creation

processes (Bloch and Niederhoffer, 1958). As Horowitz (1990: 53) points out, however, these

different interpretations are not contradictory and simply correspond to different dimensions of the

gang experience, which in many ways she argues can be seen as a “way of life”. Another way of

putting this from a developmental perspective would be to conceive of gangs as “livelihood

strategies”, insofar as they arguably represent institutionalised practices that provide gang

members with a range of social, cultural, and economic capabilities, assets, and means of living

within generally difficult circumstances.

Such a characterisation is obviously a very uncomfortable one due to the intimate

association of gangs with violence. Beyond the moral and ethical issues – which are eminently

debatable (see Rodgers, 2004a) – the basis for this discomfort is that violence is generally

considered to erode the assets that social agents draw upon to constitute their livelihoods, thereby

inevitably increasing their vulnerability. As Moser (1998) points out, the more physical, financial,

human, social, and natural capital assets social agents accumulate, and the greater the spread of

assets they possess or can access, the less vulnerable they will be. Violence negatively affects both

these dimensions of asset portfolio building, albeit in a variety of ways and not necessarily

consistently (see Moser and McIlwaine, 2004). While there is no doubt that violence is frequently

a highly destructive phenomenon, there also exist numerous instances where it can clearly

constitute a means for groups and individuals to enhance their asset portfolios, for example by

enabling the accumulation of physical or financial capital assets through the dispossession of

others (see Bates, 2001),4 or by building up intra-group forms of social capital, most obviously

when violence is directed against scapegoats (see Girard, 1972).

Rubio (1997) suggests that a distinction can be made between “productive” or “perverse”

livelihood assets. He focuses in particular on social capital, describing how the “perverse social


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capital” of Colombian youth gangs fosters “socially unproductive… rent-seeking activities and

criminal behaviors” (Rubio, 1997: 815), in contrast to the “productive social capital” assets of

business elites in Antioquia province that lead to “institutional changes have favored efficiency,

competitiveness, and productivity” (Rubio, 1997: 808). Such an analysis can plausibly be

extended to the notion of livelihoods in general, such that youth gangs can be conceived as

“perverse livelihood strategies”. At the same time, however, Rubio’s theoretical framework is

arguably flawed insofar as it can be claimed that what makes a livelihood strategy “productive” or

“perverse” is not so much the strategy itself or the assets upon which it is based but rather the

structural context within which it is articulated. As Cohen (1969: 219) points out in a classic article

of political anthropology, neither the forms nor the functions of any given social practices are

inherent to these practices; the nature of their articulation is instead contextually determined. From

this perspective, labelling violence as intrinsically “pathological” is at best Panglossian, and at

worst obscuring of the fact that “coercion and force are as much a part of everyday life as markets

and economic exchange” (Bates, 2001: 50). To this extent, any violent social practice such as

youth gangs must be critically considered in relation to the context within which they emerge as

livelihood strategies before being rejected as negative; under certain conditions it may well be that

social practices which initially seem “perverse” are actually “productive”.

Livelihood strategies in “fragile” states

The fact that the dynamics of livelihood strategising are largely determined by the wider

structural circumstances within which social agents operate is perhaps most obvious in what are

variably called “fragile”, “failed”, “failing”, “collapsed”, “weak” or “crisis” states (see Crisis

States Programme, 2001; Fukuyama, 2004; Rotberg, 2004). The basic issue can be said to be one

of order. As O’Donnell’s (1999: 135) succinctly describes, a state is basically “a set of social

relations that establishes a certain order, and ultimately backs it with a centralized coercive

guarantee, over a given territory”. This is crucial for the coherent exercise of social agency in the

construction of livelihood options, both in terms of maximising the spread of assets as well as the

actual operationalisation of these assets, insofar as this “coercive guarantee” allows for

predictability in social exchanges. In “fragile” states, however, the central coercive guarantee of

4 Indeed, Bates (2001) argues that in a general manner violence and development are intimately intertwined, the former having historically provided the basis for the creation of the latter, because it is the most basic means through


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states tends to extend very irregularly across the territory and the functional relations that they

supposedly regulate. According to O’Donnell, alternative forms of social structuration that are

functionally equivalent to the state will emerge in its absence to lay down informal rules allowing

sustainable social life.

Another way of putting this is to say that “fragile” states are not characterised by the

“equal, socially impartial order” (O’Donnell, 1999: 135) associated with strong – in other words,

“developmental” – states, but rather by multiple co-existing and often limited forms of authority.

He proposes visualising this by means of a threefold colour-coded spatial representation of the

extent to which states are territorially and functionally present. Within his schema, “blue zones”

are areas that have a high degree of state presence at both levels, in the form of effective

bureaucracy, a functioning legal system, and a clear monopoly over the legitimate use of violence.

“Green zones” are characterised by a high degree of territorial penetration by the state –

particularly in the form of its symbolic trappings – but a lesser degree of functional presence,

meaning that state-based forms of “personalism, familism, prebendalism, clientelism, and the like”

(O’Donnell, 1999: 140) are likely to develop. Finally, “brown zones” are those areas where the

state is minimally or even negligibly present, and unable or unwilling – see Rodgers (2004c) on

this latter point – to enforce its control. In such circumstances, that “systems of local power which

tend to reach extremes of violent, personalistic rule …open to all sorts of violent and arbitrary

practices” will emerge (O’Donnell, 1999: 138).

Such an analysis is clearly applicable to much of Central America, and more particularly to

Nicaragua, which is arguably the paradigmatic “fragile” state in the region. The renowned leftist

Sandinista revolution of the 1980s can in many ways be said to have constituted a failed

modernization project, which never completely challenged the historically oligarchic

configuration of Nicaraguan society (Everingham, 2001; Vilas, 1992), but nevertheless affected it

sufficiently to genuinely produce what Mitchell (1999: 89) calls a “state effect”, or in other words

a sense of the existence of an autonomous social structure “that somehow stands apart from

individuals, precedes them, and contains and gives a framework to their lives”. The state expanded

in an unprecedented manner, providing services to the population and establishing itself as the

primary vector for the revolutionary transformation of the social, economic, and political bases of

life in Nicaragua. This state has however undergone a steady process of institutional erosion since

which to achieve political order and regulate economic prosperity.


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the electoral defeat of the Sandinista regime in 1990, partly as a result of the legacy of civil war

during the 1980s, but also a stringent structural adjustment programme in the early 1990s, high

levels of corruption and concomitant political disillusion, 5 declining levels of international aid,

and a profound economic crisis. As a result, very little of the emergent “state effect” of the 1980s

remains today (see Rodgers, 2006e), to the extent that Isbester (1996) argues that Nicaragua has

undergone a veritable process of “state disintegration”.

Not surprisingly, perhaps, huge swathes of the country correspond to O’Donnell’s “brown

zones”. Without doubt the most dramatic reflection of this is the dramatic explosion in criminal

violence during the past decade and a half. Nicaraguan police statistics are clearly deficient, but

they do indicate a massive rise in crime levels every year since 1990, particularly in comparison

with the 1980s (Serbin and Ferreyra, 2000: 185). More qualitatively, a 1997 CID-Gallup survey

reported that one in six Nicaraguans claimed to have been the victim of a criminal attack at least

once in the previous four months, a proportion that rose to one in four in Managua (La Tribuna, 2

May 1997, page 4). A 1999 survey found that crime was considered to be the principal problem

affecting Nicaragua by a margin of over 30 percent (PNUD, 2000: 130). The same survey also

found that 43 percent of the respondents who admitted to having been victims of crime stated that

they had not reported the crime to the police because “it was no use” (Cajina, 2000: 178).

Certainly, the police have only limited patrolling capacities in urban areas, and are completely

absent in 21 percent of the country’s 146 municipalities (Cajina, 2000: 174). Regionally, the

Nicaraguan police have the lowest number of personnel per capita and per crime, the lowest

budget per crime, the lowest budget per police personnel, and the lowest average salaries in

Central America (Call, 2000: 24-5). This penury makes the police susceptible to corruption

(Grigsby, 2003) and limits their technical and material capabilities, as was underlined by the

Police Commissioner Franco Montealegre in a media interview in 2001, when he complained that

the police tended to be out-gunned by criminals (Nicaragua Network, 2001).

Most of this violence occurs in urban Nicaragua – it should be noted that the country is one

of the most highly urbanised in Latin America – which is overwhelmingly made up of slums and

poor neighbourhoods that constitute paradigmatic “brown zones”. What few “blue” and “green

5 The corruption of the now-imprisoned former Nicaraguan president Arnoldo Alemán is well established – he is estimated to have siphoned off upwards of US$100 million during his five years as president (Transparency International, 2004: 13) – but it is important to note that corruption also concerns the Sandinista Party. The latter’s


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zones” that exist in the country have been made safe for those living in them – the socio-economic

elite (those not living in Miami) – through a process that effectively amounts to their

“disembedding” from the rest of society (see Rodgers, 2004b). Those in the “brown zones” have

thus been left to fend for themselves, and attempt to build coherent livelihood strategies as best

they can in highly unregulated and difficult circumstances which Davis (2004: 28) has

characterised as corresponding to “ruthless Darwinian competition”, something that was

graphically reflected in an interview conducted in 2002 with an informant called Doña Yolanda in

the poor Managua neighbourhood barrio Luis Fanor Hernández:6

“There’s so much delinquency, it’s impossible to live… they’ll kill you for a watch… they’ll kill you for a pair of shoes… they’ll kill you for your shirt… they’re everywhere, you’ve got to watch out… they could be your neighbour, even your friend, you can never be sure… you can’t go out any more, you can’t wear rings, bracelets, nice shoes, anything that makes us look a little better than we really are… how can we live? It’s not possible…”

Gang violence in urban Nicaragua, 1996-2003

The emergence of youth gangs in contemporary urban Nicaragua has to be primarily

considered against this backdrop of insecurity, lack of order, and the concomitant difficulty of

coherently strategising sustainable livelihoods. At one level, there is no doubt that gangs are

among the most prominent contributors to this violence and insecurity of life. The 1999 survey on

crime mentioned above found that gangs were considered the most likely perpetrators of crime by

over 50 percent of respondents (Cajina, 2000: 177), while over half of those arrested in Nicaragua

in 1997 were young males between 13 and 25 years old (Rocha, 2000a: 20), which corresponds to

the typical gang member age and gender profile, although obviously not all those arrested were

gang members. In 1999, the Nicaraguan Police estimated that there were 110 gangs in Managua

alone, incorporating 8,500 youths (PNN, 2001), double the number in 1996, and five times that in

1990, although it should be noted that these statistics undoubtedly err on the low side (Sosa

Meléndez and Rocha, 2001).

reputation suffered considerably when it rather blatantly transferred large amounts of state property to the party leadership ranks after losing the elections in 1990 (Prevost, 1997: 162; Lancaster, 1992: 288-9). 6 A pseudonym, as are all the names of informants mentioned in this paper.


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At its most basic, a “pandilla”, or youth gang, consists of a variably sized group of

generally male youths 7 ranging between 7 and 23 years old, who engage in illicit and violent

behaviour – although not all their activities are illicit or violent – and have a particular territorial

dynamic. Most notably, gangs are associated with a specific urban neighbourhood,8 although

larger neighbourhoods often have more than one gang and not all have one, as there needs to be a

critical mass of youth for a gang to emerge, and they tend not to develop in affluent

neighbourhoods.9 Gangs can be traced back to the 1940s in Nicaragua, but they seem to have been

relatively small-scale and innocuous youth aggregations until the early 1990s, when their numbers

increased massively and they became significantly violent (see Rodgers, 2006a; 2006b).

At the same time, there also exists a clear difference in the social experience of gang

violence depending on one’s sociological standpoint. When viewed from a city-wide perspective,

for example, gang anarchically transform parts of Managua into quasi-war zones, fighting each

other with weaponry ranging from sticks, stones, and knives to AK-47 automatic rifles,

fragmentation grenades, and mortars, with generally dramatic consequences both for gang

members and the general population. When considered from a more localised perspective, the

picture is much more nuanced, with the gang emerging as a much more socially constructive –

albeit variably so – social phenomenon, as the following two-part case study of the barrio Luis

Fanor Hernández gang demonstrates.10

7 Female gang members are not completely unknown in Nicaragua but are extremely rare. This gender bias clearly derives at least partly from the fact that being a gang member involves behaviour patterns that revolve around activities that are “very much the essence of machismo’s ideal of manhood” (Lancaster, 1992: 195), such as taking risks or displaying bravado in the face of danger, and therefore inherently challenge Nicaraguan machismo’s ideal of womanhood, associated with subordination and “domestic roles, especially mothering” (Montoya, 2003: 63). Indeed, to a certain extent it can be argued that being a gang member is in many ways a heightened expression of machismo. There did not seem to be equivalent female youth organisational forms. This absence can be linked to another facet of machismo , namely the gendered organisation of space along the lines of “street = public = male / home = private = female” (Ekern, 1987: 55). 8 Pandillas are overwhelmingly an urban phenomenon principally found in Managua, although media reports do signal their presence in other urban centres, including Chinandega, Estelí, Granada, León, and Matagalpa. 9 The local socio-economic opportunities available to the youth also affect gang formation. For example, despite being extremely poor and having a large youth population, there was no gang in the central Managua neighbourhood barrio La Luz. This was due to an institutionalised pattern of circular labour migration, whereby youths would travel back and forth to Toronto (Canada), where a community of barrio La Luz ex-inhabitants had settled during the 1970s and 1980s, and provided them with a welcoming environment and work opportunities. 10 The case study presented is limited to a single gang in a specific neighbourhood, so caution must be exercised in extrapolating about the general nature of Nicaraguan youth gangs. Anthropological studies have however amply shown the validity of drawing on small-scale cases to think about the dynamics of larger social processes. There are


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The barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang in 1996-97

In 1996-97, the gang in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández was made up of about 100 youths

aged between 7 and 22 years old,11 who on a par with other gangs in Managua, engaged in a

variety of violent activities ranging from petty delinquency to gang warfare. These all complied

with a cardinal “golden rule”, however, which was not to prey on local neighbourhood inhabitants.

The victims of the local gang were outsiders, and gang members in fact actively went out of their

way to protect local neighbourhood inhabitants from outside thieves, robbers, and gangs,

frequently “rescuing” local inhabitants, and often acting as bodyguards for neighbourhood

inhabitants as they went on errands in surrounding areas. Even what seemed to be the most

destructive and harmful form of gang violence, gang warfare, was arguably a socially constructive

process when viewed from the local level. Certainly, gang warfare was a constitutive form of

violence for the gang members, obeying certain behavioural rules that played fundamental roles in

the construction of the individual gang member self. At the same time, though, gang wars also

contributed to the constitution of the gang as a group, reaffirming the collective unit by

emphasizing the primordial human distinction between “us” and “them”.

But gang warfare was arguably also about a broader form of social construction that went

beyond the gang group or individual and related to the local neighbourhood community. The gang

members qualified their violence as being primarily motivated by their “love” (“querer”) for the

neighbourhood, justifying their fighting other gangs as representing an “act of love” for their

neighbourhood. As one of them called Julio put it:

“You show the neighbourhood that you love it by putting yourself in danger for people, by protecting them from other gangs… You look after the neighbourhood; you help them, keep them safe…”

This is by no means implausible, as gang warfare was to a certain extent semi-ritualised,

following very set patterns. The first battle of a gang war typically involved fighting with stones

and bare hands, but each new battle involved an escalation of weaponry, first to sticks and staffs,

then to knives and broken bottles, then mortars, and eventually to guns, AK-47s, and

moreover many parallels between the findings presented here and those of other studies of gangs in Nicaragua such as Núñez (1996), Rocha (2000a; 2000b; 2003; 2005), and Sosa Meléndez and Rocha (2001). 11 This constituted about 15 percent of neighbourhood youths within this age bracket.


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fragmentation grenades. Although the rate of escalation could vary, its sequence never did – i.e.

pandillas did not begin their wars immediately with mortars, guns, or AK-47s.

In many ways, the ritualised nature of gang warfare can be said to have constituted a kind

of restraining mechanism; escalation is a positive constitutive process, in which each stage calls

for a greater but definite intensity of action, and is always therefore under the actors’ control. At

the same time, the escalation process also provided local neighbourhood inhabitants with a

framework through which to organise their lives, acting as an “early warning system”. As such,

gang wars can be conceived as having constituted “scripted performances” which offered the

wider neighbourhood community a means of circumscribing what Arendt (1969: 5) has aptly

termed the “all-pervading unpredictability” of violence.

Although gang wars clearly had negative effects for the local population, these were

arguably indirect insofar as gangs never directly victimised the inhabitants of their own

neighbourhood, protecting them instead during gang wars. The threat to the local neighbourhood

population stemmed from other gangs, whom the local gang would engage with in a prescribed

manner, thereby limiting the scope of violence in its own neighbourhood and creating something

of a predictable “safe haven” for local inhabitants. In a wider context of chronic violence and

insecurity, this function was clearly a positive one, and even if it was not always effective,

bystanders being frequently injured and even killed in the crossfire of gang wars. Local inhabitants

very much recognised it as such. As an informant called Don Sergio put it:

“The gang looks after the neighbourhood and screws others; it protects us and allows us to feel a little bit safer, to live our lives a little bit more easily... Gangs are not a good thing, and it’s their fault that we have to live with all this insecurity, but that’s a general problem about gangs, not of our gang here in the barrio. They protect us, help us – without them, things would be much worse for us.”

Members of the local community rarely called the Police during gang wars, and nor did

they ever denounce gang members.12 Although there existed some ambivalence towards the gang

12 At the same time, it has to be said that the Police rarely came unless the caller indicated that they were willing to “pay for the gasoline”, which few people were will to do. Generally, the Police was not a very visible presence in the neighbourhood in 1996-97, patrolling extremely infrequently, with the exception of a three week period in January 1997 following Arnoldo Alemán’s accession to the Nicaraguan presidency, when in typical populist fashion he assigned special temporary funds to the Police to buy supplies of gasoline and ammunition in order to conduct a


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phenomenon among local neighbourhood inhabitants, as Don Sergio makes clear most people

distinguished between the gang phenomenon in general and the local manifestation of the gang.

While unequivocally critical of the former, they were usually positive about the latter. This is not

to say that they never had anything negative to say about the gang – certainly the parents of gang

members frequently worried about their offspring, for example, and would often publicly berate

their gang member sons – but there was definitely no fear of the local gang in the neighbourhood,

and it was seen to be the principal source of security in the neighbourhood.

At the same time, however, the gang was not just the purveyor of a certain sense of

security. The positive view of the gang clearly also stemmed from the fact that it was effectively

the only form of local collective organisation that displayed some sort of “encompassing interest”

for the neighbourhood, with its violent “care” for the barrio standing in sharp contrast with the

wider atomisation and social breakdown that characterised the neighbourhood, in which there

were no pan-barrio collective organisations, and even families were in the process of being eroded

(see Rodgers, 2006c). This arguably went further than simply having an “encompassing interest”

for the neighbourhood, as the gang arguably not only acted to protect the barrio and its inhabitants,

thereby enabling them to live reasonably predictable lives, but also provided the neighbourhood

with a concrete medium for the enacting of an otherwise absent form of community.

There clearly existed a strong sense of identification with the local gang and its violent

exploits among neighbourhood inhabitants, which in practice provided the principal anchor point

for a notion of community in a context of extreme social fragmentation. This was actualised

through a “communal aesthetic pleasure” (Bloch, 1996: 216) that developed as a result of the

gang’s violent activities, as neighbourhood inhabitants avidly swapped stories about the gang,

exchanged eye-witness accounts, spread rumours, and re-told various incidents over and over

again, effectively converting the gang and its violence into a symbolic index of community in

barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, and a primary source of what Giddens (1991) has termed

“ontological security”. As such, the gang can be said to have provided an “enabling environment”

for the constitution of livelihood strategies by neighbourhood inhabitants. It was the institutional

medium through which a localised form of sustained social order was established, laying down

repressive anti-gang campaign. This operation came to an abrupt end when supplies ran out and no more funding was forthcoming.


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practical and symbolic rules and norms that went beyond the gang and affected the wider

neighbourhood community, allowing them to coherently build and manage their asset portfolios.

Admittedly, this was a rather limited form of social construction. As Taylor (2002) has

underlined, however, the primary ontological measure of any form of collective social

organisation is not so much its magnitude, but rather the degree to which it is imbued with “social

imaginary”. This notion refers to the self-understandings that are constitutive of a collective unit,

and therefore relates to deep institutional structure: “the social imaginary is not a set of ideas;

rather it is what enables, through making sense of, the practices of a society” (Taylor, 2002: 91). In

other words, it is “the ways in which people imagine their social existence, how they fit together

with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally

met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations” (Taylor, 2002:

106).

The traditional purveyor of “social imaginary” in the modern era is obviously the

nation-state (see Anderson, 1983), but its Nicaraguan expression is clearly something of a “lame

leviathan” (see Callaghy, 1987), as its incapacity to routinely ensure order within its boundaries

starkly attests. Gangs in Nicaragua arguably emerge as local level functional substitutes in the

country’s “brown zones”, and correspond to instances of what Latham (2000: 2-3) has called

“social sovereignty”, or in other words “non-state forms of social organisation” that possess “final

political authority” over a given socio-territorial space, and that operate “within and across

national boundaries”. The gang can certainly be said to have possessed “final political authority” at

the level of the neighbourhood insofar as its routinised violence and “golden rule” of not harming

local inhabitants provided the neighbourhood community with the regulatory framework for social

lives and the construction of livelihood strategies, in stark contrast to a wider context of chaos,

flux, and social breakdown. Indeed, it was arguably a form of political authority that is extremely

close to that generally imagined to be the state’s, as perhaps best encapsulated by Hobbes (1996

[1651]) when he described it as derivative of a compact between individuals living in a state of

chronic insecurity and a “Leviathan” guaranteeing universal security and therefore predictability

through the control over violence within the community.

The obvious question that this analysis raises is to what extent such a form of “social

sovereignty” is developmentally sustainable, particularly considering the well-established line of

thinking that suggests that they can eventually become forms of state sovereignty. This is perhaps


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most famously claimed by Tilly (2002 [1985]) – and later echoed by Olson (1993) – who argued

that the rise of European states in the Middle Ages was the result of the gradual development of

encompassing interests by warring warlord groups over the areas they dominated. These warlords

become increasingly tied to their domains through forms of systematic economic extraction as

opposed to one-off plunder, and incidentally established the institutional trappings of statehood by

providing their subjects with autonomous rights in order to maximise their own economic interests

(because large-scale systematic economic exploitation requires collective coordination, and

decentralisation is the most effective means to achieve this). Such an analytical framework is

intuitively attractive, because it provides clear policy leads insofar as attempts could be made to

potentially nurture forms of “social sovereignty” and integrate them into deficient state-based

social structures (in many ways a form of reverse privatisation, one could say). As the following

section demonstrates, however, the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang’s evolutionary trajectory

suggests that Nicaraguan gangs are following an almost precisely opposite path to Tilly’s idealised

movement from warlordism to statehood.

The barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang in 2002-03

By early 2002 the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang had mutated radically, such that it

could no longer be construed as providing a sense of “ontological security” in the same way as in

the past. The gang was now made up of just 18 youths aged 17 to 23 years old. Although all had

belonged to the gang in 1996-97, the gang’s practices and attitudes had changed profoundly,

including in particular the nature of the group’s violent and illicit activities. Gang warfare had

disappeared, levels of intra-neighbourhood gang-related violence had increased, local inhabitants

now bore the brunt of it, and the gang was now intimately connected to a thriving local crack

cocaine-based drug economy (on the latter see Rodgers, 2004d; 2006a; 2006b). The gang members

were an intimidating and threatening presence in the neighbourhood, no longer imbued with an

ethos of “loving” the barrio, as one called Roger made clear:

“We couldn’t give a fuck about the barrio inhabitants anymore… If they get attacked, if they’re robbed, if they have problems, who cares? We don’t lift a finger to help them anymore, we just laugh instead, hell, we even applaud those who are robbing them… Why should we do anything for them? Now we just hang out in the streets, smoke crack, and rob, and nothing else!”


15

The changed behaviour patterns can clearly be linked to gang members’ crack

consumption, insofar as crack is a drug that makes users extremely violent and unpredictable, as an

informant called Adilia explained:

“The problem is that now, anybody could be a potential danger, if they’ve smoked some crack, any time… you can’t know what they’re going to do, with this drug people become more violent, more aggressive, they don’t care about anything, they don’t recognise you... you don’t know what they’re thinking or even if they’re thinking at all, they could just kill you like that, without a thought…”

Although they were by no means the only crack users in the neighbourhood, the gang

constituted a privileged site of crack consumption and gang members were involved in the

overwhelming majority of the drug-related violence affecting the neighbourhood. At the same

time, however, their changed behaviour patterns and the consequent rise in insecurity can to a

larger extent be related to the gang’s intimate association with the local drugs trade, as the lower

tier of threefold pyramidal economy (see Rodgers, 2004d for more details).

Although gang members conducted their drug dealing transactions on an individual basis,

the gang as a group acted to ensure the proper functioning and protection of the barrio drug

economy. They generally made sure that all drug-related transactions in the neighbourhood

proceeded smoothly, enforcing contracts, roughing up recalcitrant clients, maiming or killing

rivals from other neighbourhoods, and guarding drug shipments as they were moved both within

and outside the neighbourhood. They also made sure that potential clients could enter the

neighbourhood unmolested by either the local population or outsiders, which was clearly one of

the reasons why the ritualised gang wars of the past, with their set escalation process and symbolic

targets, had disappeared, as they would have discouraged or made it difficult for clients to come

into the neighbourhood, and were therefore detrimental to the gang’s changed preoccupations as a

key feature of the local drug economy.

At the level of the neighbourhood, however, the gang had instituted a veritable regime of

terror. Gang members strutted about the streets, menacingly displaying guns and machetes, and

verbally warning barrio inhabitants of the potential retribution if they denounced them or others


16

involved in the local drugs trade, and frequently backed these threats up with multiple random acts

of terrorising violence.13 As a gang member called Chucki explained succinctly, the gang’s new

ethos was essentially: “we give the orders here” (“nosotros mandamos aquí”). The changed

relationship with the wider neighbourhood community was described as Doña Yolanda as follows:

“Five years ago, you could trust the gang, but not anymore… They’ve become corrupted due to this drug crack… They threaten, attack people from the barrio now, rob them of whatever they have, whoever they are… They never did that before… They used to protect us, look out for us, but now they don’t care, they only look out for themselves, for their illegal business (bisnes)… People are scared, you’ve got to be careful what you say or what you do, because otherwise they’ll attack you… Even if you say nothing, they might still come and rob you, come into your home, steal a chair, food, some clothes, whatever they can find… They often do, you know it’s them, but you can’t blame them, otherwise they’ll come and burn your house down… It's their way of telling you to be careful... If you say anything to them, if you do anything, if you denounce them, then they’ll come at night and wreak their vengeance... We live in terror here in the barrio, you have to be scared or else you’re sure to be sorry... It’s not like it used to be when you were here last time, Dennis, when the gang was kids we could be proud of because of what they did for us and for the barrio… They’re like strangers to us now, they just do things for themselves and never for the good of the community like before…”

Although the gang now clearly upheld a much more exclusive form of social order focused

largely on the regulation of the local drugs trade, it did so in a way that affected the whole

neighbourhood population and not just those involved in the drug economy. The regime of terror

imposed on the neighbourhood in many ways constituted the overarching reference point for its

inhabitants, constraining the ways in which they articulated their livelihood strategies and

managed their assets. As such, it can be contended that the gang and its violent social practices

constituted a form of collective social order, albeit very different to that promulgated by its prior

13 Although there were more Police patrols in the neighbourhood in 2002-03 than in 1996-97 – part of a Nicaraguan “soft” version of the “mano dura” – the Police continued not to be a significant presence as these patrols were rather token in nature. When the Police did – occasionally – carry out drug raids, these only seemed to affect reputedly ambitious middle-level drug dealers who were seen within the neighbourhood as potential rivals to the local “narco”, or top-level drug baron. This arguably supported the widespread notion that the Police was in the narco’s pocket and that he used them to do his “dirty work”. Certainly, the narco would likely have been reluctant to use the gang for this


17

incarnation. In particular, the means through which it articulated its authority were very different

to those of the gang in 1996-97, and stemmed very much from its ability to carry out arbitrary acts

of violence that displayed little regularity or consistency rather than through the imposition of

universal norms and rules as in the past.

A parallel can perhaps be made here with Schmitt’s (1985 [1933]: 5) notion of “sovereign

power”, which he saw as being “not about the monopoly to coerce or to rule, but …the monopoly

to decide”. This, he argued, was the “purest” form of authority, in the sense that it was an

expression of “raw” power that originated in the ability to decide what Schmitt called the “state of

exception”, a condition during which the regular rules and norms by which social agents organise

their lives are suspended and those with power can impose their will in an unconstrained and

therefore arbitrary manner. This is arguably just what the gang did in 2002-03, through its

unpredictable and random terrorising of the neighbourhood, effectively maintaining the

neighbourhood in a permanent state of exception.14 In doing so, however, the gang arguably

reached what Agamben (1998: 32) has called “the point of indistinction between violence and law,

crossing the threshold on which violence passes over into law and law passes into violence”,

thereby differentiating itself critically from its past incarnation.

Conclusion: Perverse livelihoods or perverse contexts?

This paper has described the dynamics of youth gangs and their violence in contemporary

urban Nicaragua through a longitudinal ethnographic case study conducted in the poor Managua

neighbourhood barrio Luis Fanor Hernández in 1996-97 and 2002-03. It has highlighted the way

in which gangs can under certain conditions be conceived as principally socially constructive

rather than destructive social forms, showing how they constituted localised forms of “social

sovereignty” that have emerged in the so-called “brown zones” of contemporary Nicaragua in

order to provide micro- level systems of order permitting the articulation of livelihood strategies

and asset-building within a wider structural context of failing state sovereignty. The case study

presented also underscored that gangs achieved this function in very different ways at different

points in time. In 1996-97, the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang and its routinised practices of

violence clearly offered something of a positive “enabling environment” to local neighbourhood

particular purpose due to the close links that existed between them and many middle-level drugs dealers insofar as these were all ex-gang members (as was the narco).


18

inhabitants, to the extent that it can almost be characterised as having constituted an instance of

informal “social policy” that imperfectly attempted to mitigate the wider circumstances of state

disintegration, exclusion, and socio-economic hardship affecting much of urban Nicaragua. In

2002-03, the gang had mutated into a very different social form that promoted and protected an

exclusive socio-economic order through a veritable regime of terror that was detrimental for the

vast majority of those living under its sway.

From a theoretical perspective, however, both manifestations of the gang can be said to

have been imbued with political authority.15 The term “political” is used here not so much in the

classic political economy sense relating to “the distribution and struggle for power in society”

(Mair, 1962: 11), but rather at more of a basic epistemological level connected to “the imposition

of a sense of order in the chaos of many people doing many things with many meanings”

(Nicholas, 1966: 49). This is a conception of the political that can in many ways perhaps more

accurately be termed as the “meta-political”, insofar as it relates less to notions of right and wrong,

or Left and Right, but rather to the way “things fit together” in order to permit notions of right and

wrong, or Left and Right. Another way of putting this is that “every general rule demands a

regular, everyday frame of life to which it can be applied and which is submitted to its regulations”

(Schmitt, 1985 [1933]: 19), and this context of regularity, which is fundamental for social agents to

be able to exercise their agency and therefore manage their asset portfolios and strategise their

livelihoods, is precisely what gangs provided in the “brown zones” of Nicaragua.

At the same time, however, the fact that the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang mutated

from a communitarian and solidaristic to a more individualistic and predatory form of political

authority is critically important to consider. It can be argued that this evolutionary trajectory points

to gangs tending towards a developmentally “negative” outcome; indeed, it is tempting to interpret

this as an inevitable corollary of the gang’s inherently violent nature. In many ways, though, this

path is arguably largely the reflection of a broader structural process whereby the possibilities for

collective social life within the “fragile” state of contemporary Nicaragua are shrinking (see

Rodgers, 2000; 2006d). It can be contended that the basis of collective social life has undergone a

process of “scaling down” during the past decade and a half, along a trajectory that has seen the

principal locus of social organisation move “downwards”, initially from the nation-state to the

14 Parallels can be made here with Taussig’s (1992; 2003) work on the terror of paramilitaries in Colombia.


19

barrio (see Núñez, 1996), then from the barrio to the gang, and finally – if the logical sequence is

continued – to the atomised individual. Seen from this perspective, youth gangs have to be

considered desperate – and failing – social responses attempting to mitigate this tragic process, and

as such highlight the crucial importance of taking into consideration wider contextual factors in the

evaluation of such seemingly inherently deleterious social phenomenon. In other words, instead of

thinking about gangs as “perverse livelihood strategies”, perhaps it is more important – and more

accurate – that we think about the fact that they tend to emerge in “perverse contexts”, and that it is

these that constitute the principal problem from a developmental perspective.

15 Even terror is clearly a source of authority, although as Moore (2002 [1954]) famously remarked about the Soviet Union, it is a rather poor one.


20

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