Domination, Subordination, and Resistance as Political Dynamics of Criminal Victimization

Whether criminal rulers, elected politicians, or self-appointed dictators, dominant actors use a range of practices to subordinate populations, as shown in table 1.

Table 1 Strategies and practices of domination

Material domination is the use or threat of coercive force to extract material rents from subordinates. Coercive force is necessary, but not sufficient, to tax populations. As Margaret Levi notes, “without a fairly high degree of quasi-voluntary compliance, revenue production policies are not even feasible” (Levi Reference Levi1989, 13). To obtain this compliance actors combine material with social and political strategies of domination.

Social domination seeks to undercut efforts by subordinates to raise issues that can threaten the power of dominant actors. Bachrach and Baratz (Reference Bachrach and Baratz1962) called this the “second face of power.”^{Footnote 16} A classic example is political actors using the status quo biases embedded within policymaking institutions to set agendas in ways that constrict debate (Bratton and Haynie Reference Bratton and Haynie1999; Hall and Wayman Reference Hall and Wayman1990). Dominant actors in contexts of criminal victimization can similarly invoke predominant social norms to affirm the social hierarchy between themselves and their victims. These “symbolic taxes” (Scott Reference Scott1990, 188) include using “humiliation, disprivilege, insults, [and] assaults on dignity” to elicit “deference, demeanor, posture, verbal formulas and acts of humility” (Ibid, 198). Such practices can prevent challenges to the status quo distribution of power. As a researcher of domestic abuse notes: “Victimization works best when the perpetrator produces a sense of immobilization and helplessness and a loss of self-respect” (Boss Reference Boss2002, 161). We thus need to analyze social control as an important dimension of criminal victimization.^{Footnote 17}

Dominant actors also sustain victimization through a “third face of power” that prompts victims to question the legitimacy of their grievances and so “accept their role in the existing order of things” (Lukes Reference Lukes1974, 11). Lisa Wedeen (Reference Wedeen1999) argues that authoritarian rulers saturate society with conservative political rhetoric and symbols to shape the acceptable boundaries of state-society relations. John Gaventa (Reference Gaventa1982) identifies how economic elites structure political norms to dissuade the poor from seeing their concerns as legitimate. Parallels can be drawn with aspects of criminal victimization. Psychological studies of sexual violence examine “rape myths,” defined as “attitudes and beliefs that are generally false but are widely and persistently held, and that serve to deny and justify male sexual aggression against women” (Lonsway and Fitzgerald Reference Lonsway and Fitzgerald.1994).^{Footnote 18} An example is the notion that women invite sexual violence by dressing or acting in “suggestive” ways. Such myths deny victims of sexual violence their rights and legitimize continued victimization (Burt Reference Burt1980). Thus whereas my focus is on the interactions between victims and criminals, these are not detached from how both states and society view victims based on their socioeconomic, racial, or gender identities.^{Footnote 19} Greater attention to when and why criminal actors invoke broader social norms to shape their victims’ understandings of their political subjectivity can deepen our understanding of victimization.

Analyzing victimization as a process also challenges us to consider how victims exercise agency vis-à-vis criminal actors. Building on James Scott (Reference Scott1985, Reference Scott1989; Reference Scott1990), I operationalize agency as publicly observable acts of resistance by victims to negotiate the terms of their victimization directly with their criminal victimizers. Researchers have drawn on Scott’s work to study “everyday” resistance in diverse contexts, including by black laborers against white business owners during the Jim Crow era (Kelley Reference Kelley1993), civilians against rebel groups (Arjona Reference Arjona2016), and ordinary citizens against authoritarian regimes (O’Brien Reference O’Brien1996). We should expect that victims of crime too will negotiate the material, social, and political dimensions of subordination. It bears emphasis that contestation along everyday lines will not end victimization (Rubin Reference Rubin1996).^{Footnote 20} But everyday resistance can help victims to obtain what they understand to be practical, emotional, and political dividends amid victimization.

Two factors define the scope conditions for this theoretical framework. First, because it emphasizes the interactions between victims and criminal actors, the framework is applicable to cases where victimization is ongoing and not a one-time act. The framework helps to analytically parse the criminal act from the process of victimization and assess the links between the two. The framework can also be applied to cases where criminal organizations govern aspects of everyday life while simultaneously committing criminal offenses against the populations in the territories under their control.^{Footnote 21} Second, the theoretical framework is most useful for analyzing cases where the state is unable or unwilling to advance the rule of law. Because victims in such settings may face greater incentives to contest their victimization directly vis-à-vis their victimizers, the framework can help to make sense of the multi-dimensional nature of the interactions between the two. Contexts where these conditions are likely to be found include violent “urban peripheries” in both the Global South (Arias Reference Arias2017; Denyer-Willis Reference Denyer-Willis2015, 7-8; Holston Reference Holston2008; Moncada Reference Moncada2013) and North (Wacquant Reference Wacquant2008), as well as settings marked by the uneven state provision of formal rights along demographic lines. The latter includes gender-based violence in patriarchal contexts (Heise Reference Heise1998), criminal victimization within minority racial and ethnic enclaves (Alves Reference Alves2018),^{Footnote 22} and settings where the criminal justice system systematically discriminates against particular social classes or racial groups (Van Cleve 2016).

Conceptualizing Rackets

Criminal protection rackets are ongoing arrangements under which one actor pays tribute to a coercive actor in exchange for the promise of protection from external threats and the coercive actor itself. How is this different from extortion? Varese (2014, 350) defines extortion as taxation for “services that are promised but not provided,” whereas rackets are ongoing arrangements where payment of tribute offers security from some dangers (Volkov Reference Volkov2002, 35). Studies of European criminal rackets indicate that they provide seemingly effective protection to business firms from everyday crime and the violation of contracts (Frye Reference Frye2002; Gambetta Reference Gambetta1993; Volkov Reference Volkov2002; Varese Reference Varese2001). This may reflect the fact that rackets in these settings emerged in response to demand for protection amid the shift from statist to market economies (Gambetta Reference Gambetta1993, 17).^{Footnote 23} But this does not rule out potential variation in the quality and efficacy of the type of protection that rackets can provide.^{Footnote 24} In Latin America, including in the case that I analyze here, the protection that rackets provide varies in quality and efficacy, though their criminal coordinators still use the promise and occasional provision of protection to justify the “security tax.” As I discuss in the conclusion, this variability provides an opportunity for comparative research on criminal protection rackets.

Criminal Protection Rackets in Colombia

Criminal protection rackets in downtown Medellin, which is called the Comuna 10,^{Footnote 25} are run by groups called Convivir, a term that paradoxically translates as “living in harmony.” In 1994 the Colombian national government authorized the creation of the Convivir as civilian self-defense groups trained and armed by the military to combat insurgent forces in the country’s decades-old civil war.^{Footnote 26} Politicians and economic leaders, however, established Convivir to safeguard their particular interests given the state’s limited territorial reach.^{Footnote 27} The Convivir found an ardent advocate in Álvaro Uribe Vélez, then governor (1995–1997) of the department of Antioquia—of which Medellin is the capital—and subsequently president (2002–2010) and then a senator (2014–) long alleged to have links with right-wing paramilitary groups. Uribe encouraged the establishment of Convivir in nearly all of Antioquia’s municipalities (El Tiempo 1996; Razón Publica 2011), many led by paramilitaries that used them to target civil society leaders and political leftists (Semana 1996). In 1997 the Colombian Constitutional Court limited the activities that the Convivir could undertake, their use of weapons, and the ability of their members to remain legally anonymous. But the Convivir in Antioquia, and particularly in Medellin, had by then begun forcibly collecting security taxes from businesses and residents in the territories where they operated in order to sustain themselves. The protection services were initially welcomed given the context of intense drug-related violence (Moncada Reference Moncada2016, chap. 3). But as violence declined over time, so too did the quality and level of protection, despite the collection of security taxes remaining constant.

Today the Convivir in the Comuna 10 are run by street gangs that work for larger criminal organizations based in the city’s peripheral neighborhoods, known as bandas or oficinas (offices), that coordinate the sale of illicit drugs, weapons, and assassinations for hire. City officials estimate that approximately twenty Convivir operate in the Comuna 10, though local civil society leaders place the figure closer to forty, with anywhere between 750 to 1,200 members (Bargent Reference Bargent2015). The concentration of businesses in the city center makes it a prime target for establishing criminal rackets that generate an estimated one-third of a million dollars every month (El Tiempo 2014).

Case Selection

Between 2016 and 2017 I carried out nearly five months of fieldwork in one informal market in the Comuna 10. The market stretches several city blocks and has about 400 informal vendors that work seven days a week, twelve hours a day. It emerged in 2011 when the vendors were displaced from their previous locale by local authorities that alleged criminals were using the site to sell drugs.^{Footnote 28} Shortly after the vendors relocated, a local gang that was part of a larger criminal organization known as the Office of the Valle de Aburrá informed the vendors that the market was now under their protection as a Convivir.^{Footnote 29} Each vendor is expected to pay a weekly “security tax” of two thousand Colombian pesos.^{Footnote 30} As vendors note: “O paga o paga” [either you pay or you pay], meaning that if the racket’s enforcers cannot collect the tax from a vendor, they violently tax the vendor’s body.

There are several reasons why this analysis should have implications relevant beyond my field-site. The unit of analysis is the dyadic relationship between the vendors and the criminal gang within the market. I zoom down to the micro-level space most relevant for analyzing the choices and behaviors of the key actors in my theoretical framework—what Arjona (Reference Arjona, Giraudy, Moncada and Snyder2019) calls the “locus of choice.” This strategy isolates theoretically-relevant characteristics to identify analytically comparable units of analysis across distinct empirical settings—what Przeworski and Teune (1970, chap. 5 and 6) termed “cross-system equivalence.” A limitation of the research design is that the politically contested nature of the urban informal economy may limit the type of resistance that the informal vendors can pursue relative to victims located in the formal economy.^{Footnote 31} Yet this is precisely why informal vendors represent a “least-likely case” (Gerring Reference Gerring2007, 232) for resisting criminal victimization, making the evidence that they do so all the more theoretically intriguing.

Domination under the Criminal Protection Racket

The criminal coordinators of the Convivir harness negative social perceptions of the informal vendors to engage in social domination. As in other parts of the world, informal vending in Medellin is derided as a source of reduced tax revenue and urban physical disorder.^{Footnote 33} But local authorities also publicly link the informal vendors to the micro-trafficking of drugs carried out by the gangs that run the rackets. The vendors do not contest this reality:

This association fuels negative social perceptions of the vendors. One female vendor that sold used clothing lamented:

The racket’s coordinators tap into these and other negative social perceptions to publicly humiliate the vendors. Racket collectors regularly step on the vendors’ merchandise and shove them at will—both during and apart from the collection of tribute. But the most commonly used form of humiliation is verbal insults that affirm a social hierarchy where vendors are considered desechable (disposable). Racket coordinators commonly insult the vendors’ dirty clothes, how they smell, and the fact that the vendors earn their livelihoods selling checheres (slang word for assorted trash items). As one vendor noted: “Some Saturdays they just stick out their hands. Other Saturdays they wake up on the wrong side of the bed, because they come with their foul words to make one feel insignificant. As if taking our money wasn’t enough!”^{Footnote 36} Another reflected on how these insults reaffirm broader social norms: “They just say what everyone in society already thinks about us.”^{Footnote 37}

The racket’s collectors intertwine social and material domination by forcing vendors to witness the physical humiliation of their own. For example, three participants in a focus group discussed one racket collector’s favorite punishment for failure to pay the security tax:

Members of the gang also regularly use vendors’ piles of merchandise on the ground to hide the individual doses of cocaine that they sell within the market, as shown in figure 2.

Figure 2 Focus group participant drawing #1

Note: This vendor, an approximately thirty-five-year-old female, explained her drawing to the focus group in the following way: “This is me [yo] and my business [negocio]. What generates insecurity [inseguridad] for me? Lots of things. The police [polícia], the cars and motorcycles [moto] that speed by so fast. But the worst is when they [Convivir] make me hide their drugs [esconder droga]. And when they do it they insult [insulta] me, say ugly things to me [puta] (Spanish slang for “whore”). Focus group participant (MDE_FG3_550), Medellin, March 2017.

Vendors understood this as further insult to their efforts to make an honest living:

Verbal insults, humiliation woven into physical punishments, and forced complicity in drug trafficking are the social taxes incurred as part of victimization and which the conventional focus on physical offenses alone overlooks. But the criminals also impose political domination by flaunting their co-optation of the state’s local coercive apparatus: the police that patrol the market. Vendors view police as co-opted by receiving regular payments from the gang in exchange for warning them if anyone reports its illicit activities.^{Footnote 43}Figure 3 depicts this dynamic.

Figure 3 Focus group participant drawing #2

Note: This vendor, an approximately forty-year-old woman who sold used clothing, explained her drawing to the focus group in the following way: “If I see a thief [delincuente] and tell the police [polícia], then the police should take him away [se debe llevar] to jail [or CAI, referring to decentralized police stations called Immediate Attention Commands]. But instead they will go around the corner and make a deal [se arreglan] where the police take off the handcuffs [esposas] in exchange for some money. And if the thief offers enough money, the police will tell him who reported him [sapo], and they will come to where I am working [trabajando] and kill me [me matan].” Focus group participant (MDE_FG2_01), Medellin, March 2017.

The racket’s coordinators leverage their co-optation of the police to make evident to the vendors how this power comes at the expense of the vendors’ rights and citizenship. An older male vendor recounted during an interview how one day he had not sold enough to even “pay for my bus ride home.”^{Footnote 44} Instead of threatening or using coercive force, the racket collector simply reminded him that he could not turn to the state for help:

When physically assaulting vendors who fall behind on their weekly tribute, racket members will tauntingly tell them to “Call the police! Call the police!”—a reminder that this basic institutional resource to which the vendors are theoretically entitled to as citizens is, in practice, denied to them as part of the process of victimization.^{Footnote 46}

Everyday Resistance to Criminal Victimization

Vendors resist their victimization. To resist material domination vendors appeal to the very asymmetry in power between themselves and their victimizers. When the racket’s agents collect their weekly tribute, vendors deliver discourses that affirm the racket’s authority but encourage benevolence.^{Footnote 47} As one vendor noted: “When it comes time to pay them the vacuna (vaccination, slang for the security tax) we have to become movie actors because it is better to have them as friends than as enemies.”^{Footnote 48} Through “acting” as resistance vendors confirm and challenge the authority of the racket’s collectors. During the focus groups several vendors recited some of the “lines” they use to this end:

Vendors admit that these scripts only mitigate material domination:

These performances reduce material taxation at the margins when the racket collectors allow the vendors to pay half or less of the tribute. Several vendors indicated that given their precarious economic circumstances, these reductions still represented a gain: “algo es algo” (it’s better than nothing).^{Footnote 53} But it is the ability to sometimes deny the criminal actors exactly what they demand that vendors see as more powerful than the marginal financial gain—a way to preserve their dignity in the face of victimization: “When you don’t give [the racket collectors] everything they want, you show them, you make them see that you are not some little dog following them and obeying them when they say ‘sit’.”^{Footnote 54}

Vendors use rhetorical tools to resist verbal insults by framing themselves and the racket as businesses. They in turn equalize their social status in the face of their victimizers’ efforts to denigrate their position in the social hierarchy:

Vendors resist offenses against their dignity as workers when the racket’s members attempt to hide illicit drugs in the vendors’ merchandise. The vendors indirectly remind the racket’s members that they too are business owners to be treated with respect:

Finally, though police complicity with the racket’s criminal coordinators prevents vendors from enlisting it to support their resistance, vendors invoke their theoretical relationship with other parts of the state to resist political domination. They do not report their victimization because they fear retribution by the criminal group and further enabling political authorities to depict the vendors as a source of criminality.^{Footnote 58} As one vendor indicated: “The state is always looking for reasons to paint us as criminals, even though we are not—we are only surrounded by them.^{Footnote 59}

But the vendors do resist political domination by invoking the frames and rhetoric of the ideal-type citizenship found in the Colombian Constitution. This exemplifies what Scheingold (1974, chap. 2) calls the “myth of rights,” wherein the belief in the rights that the state formally grants, but denies in practice, can still provide a powerful catalyst for political mobilization.^{Footnote 60} Vendors invoke this belief in carefully worded discourses and orchestrated actions to make clear to the racket’s coordinators that the vendors reject the notion that they are second-class citizens. As one vendor noted:

I regularly observed resistance to political domination enacted through strategic, everyday discussions among handfuls of vendors about their constitutionally guaranteed right to work. One morning three neighboring vendors at the market were discussing whether the city’s Public Space office would take away their merchandise to what they sarcastically refer to as the “North Pole”—a far-off warehouse where vendors must pay large fines to retrieve their wares. The vendors complained that the legal code that gave Public Space agents this power was essentially a “law that allows the state to steal.”^{Footnote 62} The three vendors then noticed one of the racket’s coordinators crossing the street and approaching. “Aquí viene el duro” (Here comes the tough one), one of the vendors whispered. At that point I expected the conversation to end, but instead the vendors began talking more loudly about how the confiscation of their merchandise was a violation of their “Constitutional rights as citizens of this county.” A second stated loudly: “We all have rights, no matter how we earn [money] for our pansito (bread), carajo (fuck)!” The third vendor replied: “Even though we may not look like it, we are also citizens!”^{Footnote 63} I later asked one of these vendors why they carried on this way in front of a racket coordinator. He answered: “So that they remember that they are not the only authorities here.”^{Footnote 64} Far from an organic extension of a conversation, the dialogue had been a strategic declaration to remind the victimizer that the vendors rejected political domination as part of their victimization.

Other forms of resistance to political domination include rallies that small sub-sets of the vendors organize within the market to highlight their vulnerability to displacement by local authorities. Vendors cover light posts and cement walls with politically-infused images that reaffirm their citizenship, from tattered Colombian flags to laminated news clippings discussing previous rallies. What is analytically notable is that these regularly take place on Saturdays—the very day the racket’s coordinators tax the vendors. When I asked one of the rally’s organizers why they would do so, she replied: “We don’t have guns. We don’t have politicians. But we do have dignity and rights and this (pointing to her head), and so you need to use it to make them (the racket’s collectors) realize that they haven’t cornered us—that we are citizens.”^{Footnote 65}