Themenheft "Transnationale Dynamiken lateinamerikansicher Sicherheit und Justiz" - Special Issue "Transnational Dynamics of Security and Justice in Latin America"

Content

The impact of Edward Snowden's revelations and the trends of military securitization of the internet in Brazil (English)

Jonathan Razen & Gabriela Randon

This article aims to offer a perspective from the Global South on the online mass surveillance programs of the NSA, revealed to be spying on political and economic institutions in Brazil, among other countries. Initially, it seeks to explore official statements from the Presidency and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on said surveillance programs from June 2013 to April 2014, when the Brazilian "Marco Civil da Internet" became law. In this article we aim to draw the overall picture of the impacts of the scandal on Brazilian State institutional discourses and its impact on the national cybersecurity and intelligence sectors. We work on the hypothesis that while the official discourse in reaction to Snowden´s revelations is grounded on the need to seek for security solutions that would not sacrifice fundamental rights nor States´ sovereignty, the cybersecurity practices put in place by the State itself use the same idea to legitimize exceptional measures, which tend to violate fundamental rights.

Transnational Corporations, Human Rights Violations and Structural Violence in Latin America: A Criminological Approach (English)

María Laura Böhm

In Latin America, business activities by transnational corporations are often closely related to human rights violations. These serious human rights violations may vary in nature; furthermore, they are often a direct or indirect result of legal and economic international policies and a direct or indirect cause of violence and insecurity at the national level. This paper explores the contexts in which human rights violations by transnational corporations occur. Three hypotheses guide the analysis of the impact of transnational economic policies and businesses as a cause for structural and visible violence. These hypotheses will be illustrated through three model cases from Chile, Ecuador and Brazil. Furthermore, the potential of criminological concepts to explain transnational criminogenic conditions will be discussed.

Punitivism with a human face: criminal justice reformers' international and regional strategies and penal-state making in Argentina, Chile and beyond. (English)

Paul Hathazy

In this paper I study the regional import-export strategies of Latin American criminal justice reformers and the emergence of a regional hub of reform expertise. Analyzing these regional processes - sidelined by most studies, focusing on central-country to periphery-country north-south circulations - I account for the contents and implementation-designs of the criminal procedure reforms in the last two decades in many Latin American states, increasing their punitive capacities and legitimacy. I dissect the Argentine and Chilean reform processes in the 1980s and 1990s, situated at the core of these regional dynamics. Locating these regional processes within historical transatlantic and continental circuits of penal expertise I show that these strategies and institutions result from struggles within national criminal justice fields and from reformers exporting their fights regionally to regain power at home or to dispute it to core-countries´ agents.

German-Mexican Security Cooperation. A Fight against Transnational Organized Crime (German)

Die Zusammenarbeit in Sicherheitsfragen zwischen Mexiko und der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Ein Kampf gegen das transnationale organisierte Verbrechen?

Carlos A. Pérez Ricart

This article analyses the negotiations to reach a security agreement between Mexico and Germany (2010-2015). The hypothesis is that the objective of neither of the two governments was "the improvement in the collaboration mechanisms" in the face of the "transnationalisation of organised crime". Instead, these objectives were put forward to legitimise bureaucratic and commercial interests. For the Mexican part the interest of legitimising its security policies while facing accusations of human rights violations; for the German part the interest of creating an institutional framework so broad as to allow the largest possible quantity of security materials and technologies to be exported from Germany to Mexico.

Book reviews:

Anne Huffschmidt/Wolf-Dieter Vogel/Nana Heidhues/Michael Krämer (Hg.): TerrorZones. Gewalt und Gegenwehr in Lateinamerika (Dorsch/Klaus)

Jonathan D. Rosen und Marten W. Brienen (Hg.): Prisons in the Americas in the Twenty-First Century. A Human Dumping Ground (Feest)

Graham Denyer Willis: The Killing Consensus. Police, Organized Crime and the Regulation of Life and Death in Urban Brazil (Müller)

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