Anthony Fontes, 鈥淭he kidnappers are the police鈥: Criminal governance and forced migration in Central America
For decades, citizens of Northern Central America have fled their homes and their countries to escape violence and insecurity. The pervasive fear driving such displacement is rooted in profound suspicions that the state itself may be a primary accomplice in criminal schemes. While scholars and Central 麻豆传媒 publics alike agree that such 鈥渃riminal governance鈥 is very real, no one can nail down its precise contours, much less identify how deeply embedded in the state any particular illicit network may be.
A new article in Political Geography by SIS Professor Anthony Fontes homes in on the play of perception and il/licit power to map how collective doubt about where the state ends and its underworld begins structures criminal predation and forced migration. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Guatemala, Fontes maps victims' struggles to distinguish between their assailants鈥 鈥渞eal鈥 and 鈥渋magined鈥 powers, showing how illicit networks strategically colonize and leverage this ample space of doubt.
Ultimately, he argues that widespread but murky state-criminal fusion and territorial control can make a powerful feedback loop with the threat and reality of violence at criminal hands. This feedback loop in turn acts as a form of disciplinary power, molding targeted subjects and conditioning their agency in everyday life, even haunting them through time and space long after they have 鈥渆scaped.鈥 Such dynamics are a provocation for scholars to rethink misleading distinctions between the state and illicit networks in places like Guatemala to comprehend the lived consequences of contemporary criminal governance.
Anthony W. Fontes (2024), 鈥淭he kidnappers are the police鈥: Criminal governance and forced migration in Central America, Political Geography,
Volume 108, DOI:聽