Law Enforcement Manipulation as an Ambiguity-Generating Practice

In Javier Auyero and Katherine Sobering’s approach, the ambivalence of the state’s response lies in the relationship between state actors—specifically the police—and criminals, with an emphasis on clandestine, transactional, and often reciprocal interactions that extend far beyond the simple binary of “corrupt” versus “clean” officials. They argue that local drug markets and the violence they generate are fueled by the ties binding drug dealers and members of the state’s security apparatus. In this context, collusion refers to a subtype of corruption characterized by ongoing collaboration between state agents and non-state criminal actors, including the exchange of material and informational resources and selective law enforcement or non-enforcement. The Ambivalent State emphasizes that these relationships are not rare exceptions, but rather patterned, deeply ingrained arrangements that support criminal economies and expand police power. Both sides benefit in these situations: criminals gain protection and information, while police receive bribes or a share of illegal profits. In the authors’ description, it is difficult not to observe a type of relationship similar to that established by the mafia with its clientele, one that involves protection rackets in exchange for money and the creation of an asymmetrical relationship (Dewey Reference Dewey2012). Hence, it clearly becomes evident that we are not dealing with a “weak” or “absent” state: the book describes an “ambivalent” state—one that enforces law and order while simultaneously undermining legality through hidden partnerships with criminals. Police officers are seen as both enforcers and accomplices, oscillating between violence against the poor and providing direct support to criminal groups. Sometimes, they even facilitate criminal acts by providing weapons or targeting rivals. Ethnographic evidence and court records, including wiretapped conversations, courtroom proceedings, and interviews with officials and residents, expose these processes. The authors point to the “intreccio,” or gray area, where it is often impossible to tell where legitimate state institutions end and criminal networks begin.

Law Enforcement as Space for Negotiation and Violence Production

Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley also shed light on the dense space between the state and illegal actors. They develop a political theory of criminal violence, focusing on the interactions between state actors, especially at different levels of government, and criminal organizations. In the same fashion as Auyero and Sobering, they reject the idea that organized crime, and the state exist in oppositional, separate spheres. Instead, they argue for the centrality of what they call the “gray zone of criminality”—a space of continuous and mutual engagement between organized criminal groups (OCGs) and state agents. Cartels and other OCGs, the authors assert, can survive and thrive only through some degree of informal protection, complicity, or collusion with government officials and security forces. This is not limited to police or low-level officials but encompasses a wide range of actors from local bureaucrats to national security agencies. However, the type of government in which state agents and OCGs are embedded is crucial to their argument. Under authoritarian rule, this state-criminal nexus is marked by state specialists in violence (such as militarized police and secret service agencies) regulating and protecting the criminal underworld. This arrangement creates a “pax mafiosa,” a relatively stable environment with less open violence but deep corruption. Yet, during democratic transitions—especially those that focus only on elections and leave armed forces and security institutions unreformed—existing networks of state-criminal collusion often persist, but their stability is shaken by increased political competition and alternation in power. Removal of old protectors causes cartels to form private armies to defend turf, fueling large-scale criminal wars. Votes, Drugs, and Violence show empirically, especially in the case of Mexico, that changes in subnational party control (e.g., alternating governors) lead to breakdowns in criminal protection networks, directly triggering turf wars and cartel violence. Party alternation at the state, not municipal or national level, is identified as a decisive factor in the eruption of criminal conflict. As criminal groups become embroiled in conflicts resulting from uncertain or shifting political alliances, they not only fight the state but also each other, further drawing politicians into their networks.

Law Enforcement as Extortive Mechanism

In Sovereignty and Extortion, Claudio Lomnitz offers an anthropological interpretation of violence and state transformation in contemporary Mexico. Lomnitz’s central claim is that, since the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, “a new type of state has been developing in Mexico,” crystallizing during the Calderón government’s war on drugs (2006–2012). Similar to the works seen previously, the Mexican state is neither “failed” nor simply “captured,” but rather reorganized around a paradox: strong investment in sovereignty (especially at the executive level) paired with a withdrawal from the regulation of policing and justice. Thus, Lomnitz rejects dichotomous views that separate state actors and organized crime. Instead, he shows how they coexist in “hybrid systems of protection and coercion” that involve municipal, state, and federal police, the armed forces, private security, and criminal groups. These alliances are unstable, shaped by shifting negotiations marked by extortion, bribery, and selective enforcement. In a social terrain that Lomnitz conceptualizes as a “sea of extortion,” in contrast to the enclaves of legality established under NAFTA, “negotiations occur with the understanding that the rule of law does not extend to the economies in question, and therefore that recourse to public force and the justice system, too, must be negotiated” (p. 153). This framework complicates notions of “state capture.” Rather than criminals replacing the state, Lomnitz stresses the intertwining of political and illicit economies. Mining companies, for example, may rely simultaneously on private security, the army, and criminal syndicates to secure access to resources. All this remind us of Migdal’s (Reference Migdal2010) idea of the “state-in-society,” where fragmented state institutions coexist with alternative authorities, or O’Donnell’s (Reference O’Donnell1993) notion of “brown areas,” where formal state law coexists with informal or criminal regulation.

The Consequences for the Social Fabric

The discrepancy between the law on the books and the law in practice is a well-known topic in the social sciences—an academic concern that has inspired works such as Peter Waldmann’s El Estado Anómico (Reference Waldmann2006). In it, the German sociologist argues that the violence unleashed by Latin American dictatorial governments, as well as the state’s involvement in corruption and illegality, has a disorienting effect on society. A state that consistently violates its own laws can only provoke anomie in society, in the best Durkheimian sense. Christian Krohn-Hansen sees similar consequences. In Jobless Growth, he argues that the Dominican Republic’s state has historically produced disorganization rather than order. In his words, “the Dominican state-making project […] generated more socioeconomic ‘disorder’ than order” (p. 12). If we want to reject simplistic definitions, it cannot be asserted that the constellation described by Krohn-Hansen should be seen as state weakness, but that disorder is the result of an entrenched political logic where clientelism, corruption, and kinship networks structure access to jobs, resources, and contracts. Social roles are not clear and the perceived ambiguity referred to by Auyero and Sobering seems to play also a role here: public employment functions as political patronage and “merit—relevant education and competence—was seldom the decisive criterion for a job application. Instead, the state staffed its offices across the national territory politically, through patronage” (p. 18). Such practices perpetuate inefficiency and precarity, since resources are diverted to reward loyalty rather than build services. Moreover, corruption permeates state–market relations too. Contracts often go to politically connected firms: “the processes had enabled a small group of individuals or large enterprises to win most of the contracts with the aid of a set of companies acting as fronts” (p. 44). This creates a murky political economy in which “government officials and owners of import firms make money—and the two are not infrequently relatives or friends” (p. 43). Thus, the Dominican state is not absent but deeply present in shaping opportunities for accumulation. However, its presence is contradictory: it both enables and blocks small producers.

In Krohn-Hansen’s Jobless Growth, the blurred lines between state institutions and “society” create not only confusion, but also inequality and precariousness. The author foregrounds the concept of precarity, defined broadly as “the many forms of basic economic uncertainty that so many people in today’s Santo Domingo experience” (p. 22). Precarity includes unemployment, underpaid temporary work, or struggling family businesses that lack access to credit and political support. He details the lives of petty traders, especially women in food stalls, showing how “the business and the maintenance and strengthening of the family—were tightly interwoven” (p. 50). In a vicious circle, widespread corruption and impunity deepen insecurity and a sense of disorder: “The disturbing levels of corruption […] make the state, with its myriad institutions and agents, look chaotic and impenetrable, like a murky or lawless order” (p. 18). Citizens often conclude that “there is no state! The government itself pretends that it doesn’t see” (p. 20). As the argument follows, this ambiguity leads to two outcomes. On the one hand, it undermines trust in institutions and exposes small entrepreneurs to arbitrary inspections, fines, and theft without protection. Precarity here is not only economic but ontological—an ongoing uncertainty about security, legality, and belonging. On the other hand, in the face of disorganization, Dominicans turn to family and cooperatives. Kinship networks enable resource pooling and survival strategies, while cooperatives represent “a certain (limited) political—democratic—hope” (p. 142). Yet these responses highlight resilience rather than structural transformation.

As the previous authors, Krohn-Hansen challenges the notion of a weak or failed state. Instead, he shows how disorder is actively produced: “the Dominican state-system continues to mirror the many decades under Trujillo and Balaguer, and to be deeply shaped by kinship and friendship ties: forms of patronage and forms of corruption” (p. 44).

Of the works reviewed in this essay, Kate Maclean’s book is probably the one in which law enforcement appears the least as a problem in the argument. Cash, Clothes, and Construction does not analyze the relationship between organized crime and the state; rather, the focus is on economic relations in Bolivia’s plurinational economy. At the heart of the MAS project was the notion of “pluri-economy,” designed to recognize the diversity of economic forms and identities in Bolivia beyond the binaries of formal and informal, capitalist and communitarian. Yet, as Maclean contends, despite intentions to valorize indigenous, communal, and feminine economic strategies, the actual implementation of policies often reproduced many of the same exclusions and hierarchies of previous regimes and global neoliberal systems.

In Cash, Clothes, and Construction, MAS’s approach to the informal economy is shown as deeply ambivalent and marred by contradiction. Maclean argues that “the expansion of the used-clothes trade and la moda de la chola paceña are the results in part of the favoring and minimal regulation of popular markets due to their political power and their importance to the MAS. These markets are based on the popular, community dynamics that constitute modernity’s other, and the fact that they were empowered and enriched led to notions of progress, contemporaneity, nation, and production being dismantled and recast” (p. 151). In this fashion, despite the official bans on used clothes—implemented by MAS and previous governments—the informal sector continued to thrive, often outpacing government efforts: “it was an open secret that the size and strength of the informal economy rendered the government comparatively powerless to regulate it” (p. 159). Furthermore, the MAS’s targeted efforts—such as promoting national production of textiles and clothing, supporting worker-led cooperatives, and attempting to ban contraband—frequently ran into the intractable strength of informal networks and community logics. Maclean illustrates, through portraits and interviews, the diverse ways indigenous women leveraged informal markets and re-shaped economic meanings, rejecting imposed binaries and forging new forms of agency. “Informal workers, contrary to their construction in the MAS vision of pluri-economy, are fully aware of the structural discrimination they face, but they foreground their agency as they describe a portfolio of activities that have their roots in the Andean use of markets to maintain autonomy from a colonial state” (p. 116). The MAS government’s oscillations between empowering social movements and consolidating state power produced numerous tensions. The book underscores that “the relationship between the MAS government and formal private enterprise was embittered from the outset and would be further complicated by the growing strength of those working in the informal economy who were important politically for the MAS” (p. 76).

Final Remarks

The five books reviewed are similar in that their analyses focus on what we might call dyadic relationships. These analyses concentrate on the connections formed by state actors with groups in society, which are often criminal organizations, corrupt officials, or social groups in the informal economy. On the one hand, these works attribute to the state the capacity to organize society through laws and their enforcement. On the other hand, when it comes to understanding criminal dynamics, the books reviewed adopt “organized crime,” “corruption networks,” or similar conceptual constructs as their unit of analysis. Against this background, one might ask to what extent other social actors contribute to or participate in dynamics that establish boundaries between society and the state. Here, in addition to state and groups acting outside the confines of the law, I am interested in discussing the role of private companies and citizens as consumers and sources of political legitimacy here. Basically, I would like to highlight two shifts. First, there is a shift from the state to private companies, such as technology companies, in terms of their capacity to organize society and create dynamics that compete with the state. The notion of the state as an organization that establishes a rational-legal order, competing with other groups seeking to establish different types of order, comes from Max Weber. However, when analyzing the boundaries between the state and organized crime, the focus is often on the state-organized crime dyad, overlooking the extent to which other entities, such as legal companies, can organize interests and function as interfaces with illegal economies. Second, relatedly, I would like to highlight the need for a shift from criminal organizations to arenas of exchange, which we usually call “markets” or “economies,” where criminal organizations are just one actor among others. Although underdeveloped, the concept of a hybrid social order (Dewey et al. Reference Dewey, Míguez and Fabián Saín2017), proposed years ago, aimed to emphasize the necessity of considering alternative organizing principles that govern some Latin American societies. These principles are not limited to the legal system represented by the state or the interests of criminal groups. Today, commerce in outlawed economies is becoming more “platformized,” digital payment methods are becoming more prevalent, and technologies such as cryptocurrencies are effectively replacing old ways of moving money in outlawed economies. Perfectly legal infrastructures such as cryptocurrencies and digital payments are expanding—to paraphrase Max Weber—an illegal market order, whose regulation is extremely complex. On top of that, there are serious doubts that the current regulatory regime is obsolete, especially in some regions of the world. These developments show us companies that provide ubiquitous services and are extremely difficult to regulate. This is not only because of their transnational nature, but also because of the power they derive from their alliances with consumers as explained by Culpepper and Thelen (Reference Culpepper and Thelen2020). In this context, the question of the boundaries between society and crime must extend beyond organized crime to address the interfaces with legal mechanisms that facilitate crime’s expansion. Here, it is worth highlighting valuable recent proposals, such as analyzing “functional arenas” (e.g., financial institutions, customs, and transportation sites), which are fundamental in facilitating resources, inputs, legitimacy, etc. (Feldmann and Luna Reference Feldmann and Pablo Luna2023). Functional arenas may not only connect criminal groups with state agencies, but also actively help to solve problems typical of illegal activities, such as providing virtual wallets for instant, hard-to-trace payments and credit, or exploiting gaps in the regulation of legal chemicals used for illegal drug production. Such proposals highlight the need to focus less on the organized crime-state nexus and more on the embeddedness of illegal economies.