Chapter 5 shows how the aftosa outbreak shaped the Mexican state’s efforts to modernize and regulate livestock from the 1950s to the 1980s. By disrupting existing methods of production and consumption, creating new technical capacities, and offering an example of effective state action, the crisis prompted officials to contemplate more ambitious state intervention. At the same time, the aftosa crisis offered painful lessons about the kind of political compromises and alliances – international and domestic – upon which government action rested. Along with the wane of Cardenismo, the Second World War, and the so-called Green Revolution, the aftosa campaign helps explain why Mexico’s developmental state took the shape it did, and illuminates its strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions.

Since its creation in 1991, the Constitutional Court has played an important role in the Colombian context because of the broad political, economic, cultural, and social impact of its decisions. Several rulings, however, have triggered fierce criticism, putting into question the very legitimacy of the court. This chapter seeks to identify some of the factors that contribute to improve the legitimacy of high courts in the eyes of the country’s citizens, especially when they hand down controversial rulings. The chapter reports a vignette survey experiment on college students aimed at determining under what conditions citizens are more likely to provide diffuse support to the court or to what extent the court’s legitimacy depends on its performance (specific support). It hypothesizes that the legitimacy of the court is affected by the way in which its decisions are framed and justified, and finds that by wording and framing judicial rulings so that they convey a sense of principled reasoning and neutrality, the court helps translate specific support into diffuse support. Specifically, decisions based on scientific reasoning are more suitable to achieve that goal than other types of argument, including those based on legal norms and precedent.

Lava Jato (Car Wash) was one of the largest corruption trials in the world. The Lava Jato taskforce launched a battle against powerful political actors using legal tools creatively and sought to garner public support by resorting to the media. The chapter examines three examples that illustrate these two strategies and unpacks their legal dimensions. It focuses on three decisions by Sergio Moro, Lava Jato’s most prominent judge: ordering the police to bring former president and 2018 presidential candidate Lula Da Silva in for questioning without a previous request, disclosing a recorded conversation obtained during an investigation against Lula, and making public a plea bargain agreement that incriminated Lula. The chapter outlines the political impact of Moro’s actions and examines them in light of current Brazilian legislation on transparency and accountability for judges’ behaviour. It finds that while transparency is a principle that informs criminal trials in Brazil, Moro pushed the existing rules to their limits to gain public support. At the same time, he attempted to influence public opinion by taking advantage of the discretion the Brazilian inquisitorial criminal system provides judges. The chapter also analyses the limitations of Brazilian legislation to prevent this kind of behaviour and points to the challenges of reforming it. It concludes that while courts’ mobilization of the media and creative use of legal tools may increase anti-corruption accountability, the costs of this strategy outweigh its benefits.

To what extent are employees in the Mexican judiciary – both judges and lower level officials – connected by family ties? Are these family connections used inappropriately to hire or to favor relatives in ways that would not have been possible absent the family connection? This chapter takes advantage of a unique dataset to answer these questions. It documents a departure from the promise made in the judicial reform of 1994, that by removing the administration of the judiciary from the Supreme Court and transferring it to a judicial council, a professional and meritocratic judicial career would be established for all federal judges, making merit and not connections the main determinants of becoming a judge. The sheer magnitude and pervasiveness of family relationships within the Mexican federal judiciary conspicuously show the limitationsof this reform and highlight the challenges Mexico faces to consolidate judicial careers.

This chapter explains why Rio de Janeiro endured a nearly uninterrupted confrontation between drug gangs and the state’s Military Police since redemocratization in the 1980s. High fragmentation withered multiple initiatives to professionalize the police while recurrent political turnover generated successive police reform cycles. The dispersal of political power also decentralized rents from police corruption. Police thus regulated drug trafficking through splintered corruption deals and rampant violence, reinforcing criminal retaliation, gang invasions and successional struggles. The Pacification program that began in 2008 briefly disrupted this pattern, ushering a temporary coexistence arrangement that significantly decreased both police and criminal violence. However, the state’s fiscal and political crises and the end of the international events that promoted Pacification not only sparked a return to grim normalcy but increased police violence to unprecedented heights in the ensuing decade.

This chapter summarizes the book’s findings and discusses extensions of the argument. I outline the within-case and cross-case comparisons apparent in the four metropolitan areas covered in the previous chapters. I then briefly analyze to what extent the argument can apply to the regulation of drug markets in other Latin American metropolitan areas. I end the book with a series of theoretical and policy implications as well as potential research questions on the relationship between the state and illicit markets.

The Introduction outlines the trajectory of the literature on judicialization in Latin America, and presents the core argument of the book. The book argues that the institutional and cultural changes that empowered courts and put them at the center of policy disputes, what the editors call the “judicialization superstructure,” often fall short of the promise of greater accountability and rights protection. First, courts sometimes fail to account for persistent state weakness, pushing policies ahead of the state and societal infrastructure needed to support them. Second, judicial corruption, nepotism, and other intra-institutional pathologies occasionally diminish the transformative potential of courts and prosecutors. Third, courts’ and activists’ inability to root change in robust structures of support leads to political and societal backlash that frustrates reform efforts. As a result, and in spite of some notable successes, judicialization in certain areas produces limited impact and is met with aggressive responses from conservative forces. Finally, there are instances when the expectations of the architects of judicialization have been met all too well, especially in terms of strengthening mechanisms of horizontal accountability, but due to the broader context in which these mechanisms operate, effective judicialization can do more harm than good.

This chapter deploys the book’s theoretical framework, which connects political competition, police autonomy and informal regulation of illicit markets. While the electoral costs of police corruption and violence can motivate politicians to reduce police autonomy, political fragmentation and turnover condition whether and how they can achieve this objective. Fragmentation may obstruct policy implementation but also inhibit politicians from centralizing police rent extraction, while turnover impedes sustaining policies that reduce police autonomy over time. Police autonomy will shape how the police regulate drug markets. With greater autonomy police broker particularistic negotiations with, or engage in unbridled violence, or particularistic confrontation, against dealers and traffickers. When politicians reduce police autonomy through politicization, they capture rents from criminal activities and produce coordinated protection rackets, defined by high corruption but also lower violence on both sides. Finally, professionalized police forces regulate drug trafficking through coordinated coexistence regimes, brokering informal agreements that limit violence by both police and criminals.

The Commission against Impunity in Guatemala was an unprecedented international partnership to build the rule of law in a weak state. Between 2007 and 2019, the CICIG contributed to important legal reforms, the creation of a specialized prosecutor’s office and “high-risk” courts, and investigations of more than sixty criminal networks before being shut down by a president whom it was investigating. The CICIG’s sponsorship by the United Nations and funding from international donors helped it to survive resistance from successive Guatemalan presidents. As the CICIG’s investigations and a stronger Guatemalan state threatened a broader array of previously untouchable powerful domestic actors – including in business, the military, and politics – domestic opposition became more obstructionist. The backlash against the CICIG was ultimately successful when an under-resourced and fragile pro-reform domestic coalition could not replace the international support that had lessened as a result of independent but simultaneous global political trends in the late 2010s. The CICIG experience suggests that rule of law reformers will struggle with backlash from those actors who would lose power and face punishment in a strengthened state and that backlash may be insurmountable as international allies move on.

Chapter 3 explores Mexican opposition to the aftosa campaign, drawing on hundreds of complaints, local studies, and an original database of over 450 incidents of civil disobedience, riots, and rebellions. Rather than portraying resistance as rooted in the Mexican peasantry or rural tradition, this chapter emphasizes the geographical breadth, cross-class character, and the self-consciously modern public discourse of many opponents, and the vigorous but localized focus of most action.

Peru is often cited as an example of the internationalization of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) norms through supra-national litigation. Yet the impact to petitioners and other similarly situated women in Peruvian society has fallen far short of expectations. This chapter analyzes the actors behind progressive litigation in Peru, as well as their strategies and those of anti-abortion advocates. It shows that the professionalization, specialization, and detachment from grassroots movements of Peruvian feminist NGOs limit their capacity to build a broader network of political support and thus leverage the opportunities presented by successful litigation. By contrast, anti-abortion organizations are closely connected to grassroots organizations and have developed links to political organizations that allow them to deploy different strategies to stall efforts at expanding the right to abortion.