Criminal insurgencies and urban warfare in Latin America

An approach to the process of regional urbanization and its impact on the tactical and operational evolution of transnational criminal organizations

Abstract

Latin American cities and megacities had become spaces for the proliferation of licit and illicit business, which, outside the law, have allowed the development of pockets of insecurity within cities. It is intended to demonstrate that urban environments have become a kind of Petri dish, where changes of a legal and illegal nature converge in to the extensive urban infrastructure which facilitates the flow of goods and logistics capacities for exchange of goods and services. The growth of urban spaces in Latin America has evidenced, on the one hand, the dynamics of concentration of wealth in cities and megacities, which have exceeded their ability to meet citizen demands, causing an accelerated process of erosion of the faculties of the State, which has been used by criminal groups to create parallel governments within the cities.

This article seeks to explain the link between the nature of cities and the proliferation of a new typology of urban warfare, which emerges in a complex process of transformation of the patterns of transnational criminal organizations, which have evolved into criminal insurgencies that take advantage of the complex and multifaceted dynamics of large cities to expand their illicit businesses through the development of disruptive tactics and territorial control such as guerrilla warfare.