Latin America's Growing Security Gap
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Authors
Pion-Berlin, David
Trinkunas, Harold
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Date of Issue
2011-01
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Abstract
The requisites of democracy and security are sometimes in conflict.
Upholding the rule of law and safeguarding fundamental rights and
freedoms are the hallmarks of a consolidated twenty-first-century democracy.
Yet the need to guard the nation against violent domestic or
transnational threats has often been used as a rationale for states to skirt
the law and limit the very rights that they claim to be protecting. Striking
the right balance between freedom and safety is hard, and Latin
America’s history of authoritarian rule and domestic political violence
makes that region especially sensitive to the difficulty of the challenge.
The problem is once again on the agenda as Latin American countries,
after having recently experienced a wave of democratization, now find
themselves awash in record levels of crime and disorder. The region is
one of the world’s most violent, with a murder rate of 32.6 per 100,000
people in 2008—a rate that has more than doubled since 2003 and is
three times the global average.
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Article
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National Security Affairs
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Citation
Journal of Democracy, Volume 22, Number 1, January 2011
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This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.