The authoritarian governments of Nayib Bukele and Nicolás Maduro have taken punitive policies to a new level, suggests the researcher. In Venezuela, authoritarianism «allows the state to kill with impunity» while El Salvador remains mired in the previous phase, that of the dehumanization of prisoners. «This is just one step away,» Zubillaga believes, from there to slaughter. The interview reviews the main political and security milestones that have led Venezuela from being a stable democracy in the 1980s to being trapped in a spiral of violence.

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Aquí, la versión en español. Here, the Spanish version

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Translation: Emilia Guzmán / Proof redaing: Mark Briam.

The final version was reviewed by Verónica Zubillaga.

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Latin American admirers of Nayib Bukele’s iron fist policies who demand their own state apparatus to shed blood to control crime -as proposed by some right-wing columnists in Chile-, may be surprised to learn that one of the security policies that has created the biggest bloodbaths on the continent was the one implemented by Nicolás Maduro from 2015 to 2019. Faced with increases in criminal violence in Venezuela, looking to curb social protests, the government of Maduro deployed what Venezuelan sociologist Verónica Zubillaga calls a «necropolitics», which led the state to move from a strategy of mass incarceration to one of «systematic killing»[1].

Did that bloodshed make the country in any way more peaceful? Did it defeat crime on any level?

No.

It made organized crime stronger and more violent. Mass incarceration, in fact, is one of the causes of the emergence of several organized crime groups operating in Caracas, such as the “Tren de Aragua”[2]. Even worse, when the government realized it could neither win nor continue to shed blood, it made a pact with the gangs to reduce homicides and kidnappings in exchange for letting them rule over numerous areas in the south-central part of the Venezuelan capital. In this interview Zubillaga describes the complexities of everyday life for people in these crime-administered neighborhoods, a phenomenon that comparative politics calls «criminal governance».

Verónica Zubillaga holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Leuven, is a researcher at the Universidad Simón Bolívar in Venezuela and a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. Last year she published, together with David Smilde and Rebecca Hanson, the book The Paradox of Violence in Venezuela, a text that explains how a country that was a solid democracy in the 80s, descended into a spiral of criminal violence, despite the fact that during the governments of Hugo Chavez (2002-2013) there were extraordinary oil revenues together with massive redistributive policies.

The spiral of violence continues today. Although major criminal organizations no longer rule Caracas, citizens still face widespread police extortion. «We have returned to a more disorganized violence in those areas. Some neighbors tell you, ‘Before with the gangs they didn’t rob you, now the police rob you and charges you vacunas (bribes).’ This is one of the current mutations,» says the researcher.

The painful nature of the day-to-day Venezuelan experience conditions Zubillaga’s critical reaction to the wave of fans of Nayib Bukele’s policies in El Salvador. She argues that the actions of Maduro and Bukele, despite being ideological opposites, at least in theory, are related not only because of their extreme state sponsored violence but also because of the way in which the iron fist is deployed in an authoritarian context. That is what allowed the Venezuelan state to «kill with impunity», argues Zubillaga to TerceraDosis. Due to the dehumanization with which prisoners are treated in El Salvador, Zubillaga sees «a mutation from the current prison punitivism to a systematic slaughter” in the country “as a plausible horizon».

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“In an authoritarian context and under a State of Exception, one can kill with impunity. So, I see as a plausible horizon for El Salvador, a mutation from the current prison punitivism to a systematic slaughter”

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VIOLENCE AND THE TREN DE ARAGUA

The researcher identifies three milestones that led to the consolidation of organized crime in Venezuela and the transition to a modus operandi of violence as a dominant form of social relations. This account is particularly insightful for Latin Americans, as the Venezuelan experience challenges not only the idea that the iron fist is a silver bullet capable of controlling crime, but also the idea that redistributive policies will necessarily succeed.

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The first milestone highlighted by Zubillaga occurred in 1989 with the arrival in government of Carlos Andrés Peréz, who had already governed the country in the 70s, during the economic boom. By the end of the 80s, Venezuela was experiencing economic problems largely due to a fall in the price of oil, its main export, and many thought that, if they re-elected the president who had governed them during the bonanza, he would somehow be able to conjure another boom despite the unfavorable oil prices. Unsurprisingly, however, this did not happen. Perez designed a series of harsh neoliberal reforms which generated widespread social unrest with several days of looting and repression known as the Caracazo, in February 1989.

Zubillaga explains that in the 1990s «while neoliberal measures were advancing and drug micro-trafficking and weapons were proliferating, we began to experience violence similar to that of Brazil. But we did not have large, organized crime groups like them. What we had were gangs of young people with a lot of territorial roots, what literature calls ‘street gangs,’ who exercised a very expressive violence, inextricably linked to masculinity and to drug trafficking, but with very few internal organization mechanisms.»

These groups triggered disturbing homicide rates in cities such as Caracas, Valencia and Maracaibo. «In the mid-1990s we had around 22 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants,» explains the researcher.

A second milestone was the arrival of Hugo Chávez to power, whose initial strategy to tackle crime was to use the oil boom to deploy an intense program of redistributive policies, known as the «social missions». However, homicide rates skyrocketed. This conundrum is particularly interesting in the Latin American context. The researcher argues that there were three factors which contributed to the failure of redistribution in impacting upon the crime rates. The first was the loss of the state’s ability to enforce law and order.

-The Bolivarian revolution conducted by Chávez, was an eminently disruptive process within the State. Between 1999 and 2018 there were 15 Ministers of Interior and Justice and that meant that public security policies did not have any sense of continuity and/or were truncated by internal disputes, mainly between civilian and military sectors of Chavismo. This, for example, truncated Chavez’s police reforms, which respected human rights and enjoyed widespread legitimacy, since they had been created by a commission of the representatives of Chavismo and the opposition, experts from universities and representatives of the church. On the other hand, political polarization hindered the coordination of state actors, for example, between municipal majors from the opposition and Chavista state governor. All of this prevented the application of effective security policies.

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Another factor inherently limiting the effect of redistribution was the practice of handing out weapons to civilians. This policy was implemented after the coup attempt against Chávez in 2002.

-After the coup and perceiving a continuous threat, an idea that Chávez insistently repeated began to materialize: ‘the Bolivarian revolution is peaceful, but armed’. Thus, the so-called «colectivos» were formed, armed groups activated in ‘the defense of the revolution’. This category is very diffuse. It includes organizations that existed before Chavez, groups formed during his government, colectivos that had community work, and others more involved in illicit trafficking. As shown in the works of José Luis Fernández-Shaw, the importation of light weapons increased substantially. Inevitably, weapons are stolen, lost and get into the hands of gangs or illegal circuits. Simply put: more weapons, more deaths.

A final reason that limited the effects of redistribution was the weakness in the design of these policies.

-Redistribution was very intense with specific nuances: mothers, children and peasants were attended to, but young men from low-income sectors, the demographic the gangs recruited, were permanently excluded. On the other hand, income redistribution failed to address the structural inequalities, which were enormous. The populations continued to have very precarious urban services, very poor-quality education, etc. So, when the price of oil rose, money was distributed and consumption increased; but when the price fell again, Venezuela fell right back into poverty. And since we are an importing country with production deficits, if there is no money to import, a significant crisis is generated. The price drop in 2013 and the collapse of the oil industry due to bad management, loss of qualified personnel and corruption, generated what we call the humanitarian emergency period: there were food shortages and hunger. Venezuelans from low-income sectors lost eight kilos and migration accelerated to a level that became visible elsewhere on the continent.

In 2013 Chávez died and Nicolás Maduro assumed power in a context of great economic instability and an increase in both political protest and crime. This is part of the third milestone highlighted by the researcher in the Venezuelan descent into violence.

-With Maduro we entered a tragic phase, as there was a turn towards the militarization of security in order to fight crime and also to repress protests. In 2015, a delicate year for the government because there were parliamentary elections, the «Operativo de Liberación del Pueblo» (OLP) was launched. It was a terrible security policy. Between 2016 and 2018 the security forces were responsible for more than 4,000 deaths each year. In the research we did with Rebecca Hanson we observed the state’s turn from carceral punitivism to systematic killing. We also discussed the concept of ‘necropolitics’, because in the neighborhoods where we were working, being a young, dark-skinned man meant that you could be killed with impunity. The police who participated in the operations wore masks in the shape of skulls, which seemed to us a representation of the power of necropolitics. At this time there were the highest homicide rates in our history: 70 homicides per hundred thousand inhabitants in 2016 [3]. The carnage was so scandalous that, in 2019 Michelle Bachelet, the former president of Chile and at that time High Commissioner of the United Nations Human Rights Office, made her first report on the thousands of declarations that were coming in and highlighted, in addition to the criminalization of protests, the deaths perpetrated by the Special Police Forces in anti-crime operations. This was crucial to making the violence internationally visible. Then, in 2020, there was another report, from the United Nations Independent Fact-Finding Mission, exposing once again the magnitude of police violence. The criticism led to the OLP being replaced by the Police Special Action Forces, (FAES); and then police violence began to become more rational and directed, and we began to see a decrease in violent deaths. Today, we still have these lethal police violence, but much more oriented towards specific targets. Finally, it is important to note that Maduro’s government is currently under review by the International Criminal Court.

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“One of the successes of the Tren de Aragua organization is its broad business portfolio and the services that it provides to other criminal organizations”

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– In Chile, in Peru and in many places in Latin America, much of what is heard about Venezuela is related to the Tren de Aragua. What is your vision regarding its origins and its expansion?

-The Tren de Aragua is the result of iron fist policies. It is an organized crime group that originated in the Tocorón prison when incarceration policies brought together many young men with professional experience with arms. Mass incarceration produced processes of mutation and internal organization in the gangs. The government lost control of those precincts and the prisoners established the governance of the prisons and crucially extended their dominance into the low-income sectors. In this respect, the Tren de Aragua follows an itinerary similar to that of the PCC in Brazil or the Maras in El Salvador. Now, their expansion across the continent is also related to dynamics of the Venezuelan migratory process. Around twenty percent of the population has left Venezuela in search of better living conditions: as many as 7 million people, according to United Nations data. So, it is not only the Tren de Aragua that has left: also, university professors, many of my colleagues, the middle classes, workers, low-income sectors. The works of Andrés Antillano and the investigative journalist Ronna Rísquez, evidence the presence of the Tren de Aragua on the border with Colombia and also in Chile, Peru and on the border with Brazil. But I think that there is also an over exaggeration of the size of this organization, a touch of sensationalism. I think that a young Venezuelan who emigrates and who is devoid of social networks and who cannot insert himself into the legal economy of the country he arrives in, can say that he is from the Tren de Aragua as a way of presenting himself and having a certain identity in the illicit networks in which he has to advance. From the other side, the police agencies of the receiving countries may have a vested interest in strengthening this image of the extension of this criminal gang. And the media also contribute actively to this sense of moral panic, as the classic Anglo-Saxon critical criminology points out. But I also think that something that may be very disconcerting for you is that Venezuelan criminal gangs have had a socialization in armed violence as a response to state violence, which differentiates them from the criminal traditions to which you were accustomed in Chile.

– Does the Tren de Aragua still exist, or is it neutralized, as President Maduro suggested in his response to the Chilean President?

-In that statement Maduro referred to the takeover of the Tocorón prison in September 2023, a militarized operation which involved at least 11,000 officers. At the time he wrote on his social media account X that Venezuela would be «free from criminal gangs”. The evidence points in the opposite direction. The gang leader was not apprehended. And we know that criminal networks adapt very easily because the contexts in which they operate are always very volatile. One of the successes of the Tren de Aragua organization is its broad business portfolio and the services that it provides to other criminal organizations. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that one of its most important businesses is human trafficking, and Venezuelan migrants themselves are its victims par excellence.

– For some analysts, Venezuela has become almost a narco-state in terms of making pacts with organized crime, what do you think of that?

-What we have observed is that there are periods where what we call «criminal governance» occurs: this is to say associations and collusions between gangs and government officials or sectors. In Venezuela this collusion was particularly explicit in 2017 when the Maduro government realized that the OLPs were not bringing down the homicide rates, and thus they made a pact with the gangs in terms of suspending police entry into the areas where they operated. In exchange, the gangs agreed to take responsibility for reducing homicides and kidnappings and controlling the population. So, what we see is «classic criminal governance» that implies territorial sovereignty of the gangs. Of course, as the Venezuelan state is very fragmented, although this pact existed, the police continued to enter intermittently, and armed confrontations continued to occur.

– What you are saying implies a questioning of the distinction we have between democracies and authoritarian regimes. One of the characteristics of classic authoritarianism is territorial control. And what you show is that the same thing we see in democracies like Brazil, where there is criminal governance of the peripheries, we see in an authoritarian context. So, is this more a problem of the state than a problem of the regime?

-It depends on the period. In Venezuela these types of pacts are clearly linked to a moment of widespread questioning of the legitimacy of the government. In 2017 there were a lot of street protests, and these agreements were generated both to control the protests and to lower the crimes that caused social panic, such as kidnappings. So, these deals had to do with the effort and willingness of an authoritarian state to guarantee territorial control and above all hegemony and consolidation. Thus, the paradoxical situation arose in which the opposition was confronted with very heavy repression, while these criminal gangs, since they did not intend to take over the government, were allowed to operate and control territories. The logic is that these agreements guaranteed territorial control and the consolidation of the authoritarian government. Therefore, I tend to see this phenomenon within the mutation of Maduro’s government towards a more authoritarian neo-patrimonialism.

LIVING RULED BY CRIMINALS

– What was it like for citizens to live in those areas where the State allows organized crime to have control?

-During the pact there were precise borders, and the gangs were in charge of maintaining order in their territory. For example, if a woman was beaten by her husband, she would report him to the gang and there was a very clear scale of punishments: the first was a verbal warning, the second, a shot in the hand, and the third time could lead to lethal punishment. When we did the interviews, people referred to these organizations using state metaphors. They would say ‘here the gang is like the court’. And for certain holidays, like Mother’s Day or Children’s Day, the gangs would distribute gifts, throw public parties. So, people would say, ‘well, here they are like the ministers.

«In my research I talked to a lot with women, and they lived in the territories within these «pacts» as if they were subjected to a despotic but giver power. It was shocking. One woman said, ‘here we live like little animals, like the little monkey that can’t see, can’t hear and can’t speak’. This situation had a lot of resonance with what Giorgio Agamben calls «la nuda vida», that is, life without rights, without political capacity, reduced almost to being merely a biological organism. It was lived under a deep sense of fear. Some neighbors, however, commented that they had the peace of mind that they would not be robbed. In other words, the rules were clear. But people lived mired in a deep-rooted sense of fear in the face of this armed despotism».

– Why do you say that this power was also «giving»?

-Because since the criminal group needs the silence of its neighbors, they also sought to maintain a good relationship with them. So, they gave gifts, organized huge parties and sometimes they could even coordinate some kind of service such as water distribution. During the Pandemic, for example, they distributed masks and were vigilant about quarantine. But at the same time, it is a somewhat despotic force, exercising power in very arbitrary ways. A woman who they thought had given them away was killed and burned in plain daylight. It was a spectacle-punishment that sought to be sobering: this happens to the betrayers. The story of the burned woman always appeared in the women’s stories, expressing the fear with which they lived.

– In an investigation you showed a group of women who managed to negotiate with the gangs and reduce violence. How did they achieve that?

-That’s a very significant piece of research we did with Manuel Llorens and John Souto, and later with Rebecca Hanson. We called it «Shoutings, Scoldings, Gossip, and Whispers: Mothers’ Responses to Armed Actors and Militarization in Two Caracas Barrios.»  And in it we compared the experience of women in two distinct Caracas neighborhoods: one that had an organizational tradition derived from the presence of religious groups, Christian-based communities, universities; and another that was a community with a precarious presence of organizations and where the Operativos de Liberación del Pueblo (People’s Liberation Operations) took place. The women of the organized neighborhood reached a cease-fire pact with the gangs and formed «peace commissions» to stop further armed confrontations. The experience was also very striking for the discursive expressions, that is, for how the women referred to what they had achieved and the discursive tools they used. They would say ‘in this community one speaks to them as if one were their mother, one scolds them and rebukes them: ‘look, you are breaking the pacts'». This strategic use of the mother’s role and how the young people in the gangs responded to it was very striking. And of course, this was related to the fact that the gang leader’s own mother was there and was a very respected figure in the neighborhood. But it also worked because, from an instrumental point of view, it was absolutely convenient for the gang, because business always flourishes when there is peace.

«This was in stark contrast to the experiences of the women in the other neighborhood where there was an organized criminal gang confronting militarized operations. In this neighborhood they lived in a situation of permanent alert. That was the neighborhood where they had burned a woman and, in the interviews, they murmured; they did not even dare to pronounce the names of the gang leaders. It was the experience of abandonment, of a total deprivation of rights. What struck us most about this comparison was, first, that iron fist policies had hijacked women’s cultural and micro-political resources to deal with and manage violence in the neighborhood.  Secondly, that the strengthening of the social fabric, of local solidarity networks, allowed women to rebuke the armed actors.»

– How did this criminal governance evolve and is it still operating today?

-No. Those rules were in operation between 2017 and 2021. But when the gangs sought to expand their territorial control to other neighborhoods and began to deploy spectacular violence again, the Maduro government, which was already consolidated after the pandemic, reacted with an equally impressive militarized operation in July 2021. Thus the period of criminal governance ended there. Many of the leaders fled the country and Koki, who was one of the most visible leaders, was assassinated. Today that territory is no longer subject to the gangs, but rather to the extortion by police. We have returned to a much more disorganized kind of violence. Sometimes neighbors say, ‘before, with the gang they didn’t rob you, now the police robs you and charges you vacunas (bribes).’ That is the current mutation.

WEAPONS AND FUTURE

-Some researchers believe that it is necessary to move from fighting drug trafficking to fighting arms trafficking. You were on a presidential commission for arms control and disarmament during Chavez’s term. Why do so many weapons end up in the hands of the young population?

-Weapons are a central theme in our history of violence. I am thinking, for example, of phrases such as «the revolution is peaceful but armed» and the impact that the introduction of arms had on the political and contemporary life of Venezuela. Carrying out biographical accounts of young men, I have seen how they definitely shape their trajectories. They are used, of course, to carrying out robberies, or to seeking revenge, but they are also part of the group’s solidarity: that is, a proof of friendship between young men is that each one knows where the other hides his weapon. And not only are they used to seeking revenge or to obtaining money, but they would tell you ‘When you have the gun, you want to go out and experiment, to try it out, to taste the adrenaline’. So, it is as if the gun opens up «playful» horizons, even for going out and looking for adventures. That is why it is important that the population does not have any access to them.

«When I was on the presidential commission we focused on small arms, because they were the ones that ended up among the common population. The work of Jose Luis Fernandez-Shaw, who also participated in the commission, shows an increase in the legal importation of pistols. In my work I began to notice that the weapons that were distributed among the population for political reasons began to be circulated without any control of the illegal networks. And there the police are very important because their task is to seize the weapons, but they are also distributing them on the illegal circuits. And the young people, who repeatedly say that they get their ammunition from the police. Venezuela does not produce weapons, but it does produce ammunition. I remember that, in the discussions within the framework of the Arms Control Commission, one of the representatives of the National Police told the military representative “We have to start by controlling ammunition». The idea was to bring the technology used in Brazil to mark the ammunition and thus know the origin of the leaks. But the military sector was never interested in controlling the flow of ammunition, and in the face of this resistance, there was no way to implement this program. Thus, in a context of profound political conflict, legal weapons were seeped into the illicit networks and found their way to the population. That is why it will always be bad news for the population when there is a liberalization of the carrying of weapons, as proposed by Bolsonaro or Milei.

-After your research, on which policy do you pin your hopes? Do you think, for example, that the solution of a local organization such as the women challenging the gang members is viable?

-If it were a question of building a utopia, I like the idea you were talking about leaving the war on drugs and moving towards the war on weapons. Our countries, characterized by deep-rooted inequalities, and yet they have dedicated so much money to military industries and prisons? I have been interviewing young men from low-income sectors for 30 years and I know that the networks of inclusion that they have are those of illicit economies. So, after decades of failure in the war on drugs and persistent structural inequality, why do we insist on that and not have massive youth inclusion policies? For me, this is one of the fundamental questions for our continent. Those resources should go to better education, better justice, better inclusion programs for young people, better health care for drug users.

«When I see the million-dollar investments in prisons in El Salvador, a country with so much inequality, and I see the images of the women and families of the prisoners, waiting without news, outside the prisons, I find it horrifying. All of that has so much resonance with the images of the mothers and women in Venezuela outside the prisons. I think it is only a matter of time before El Salvador sees the harmful and unintended ripple-effects from the iron fist policy.

«I think that what we are seeing in El Salvador is an important shift that needs to be highlighted. In the continent we are familiar with traditional iron fist policies, but it seems to me that in El Salvador we are facing a new phase of this, because the iron fist is taking place under a deeply authoritarian context. That is what we have already experienced in Venezuela: the iron fist in an authoritarian context. This implies going a step further. Because in an authoritarian context and under a State of Exception, one can kill with impunity. So, I see as a plausible horizon for El Salvador, a mutation from the current prison punitivism to a systematic slaughter. In fact, if you pay close attention to how gendarmes and police officers talk about incarcerated gang members, you can perceive the total dehumanization that accompanies it. The images that Bukele himself transmitted on his Twitter feed reveal the radical dehumanization: hundreds of men, in their underwear, with their heads shaved, crouched down, being publicly humiliated. It seems to me that, from there to having a massacre, there is just one step – it is an ever-present danger. In Venezuela this discourse of dehumanization and the justification of the massacre was so institutionalized that even among some sectors of the population it is still legitimized that the malandros (criminals) deserve to die.

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