By Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz*

A street in Pacuare, Costa Rica—one of the FLACSO project’s research sites
Photo credit: d.kele | Foter | CC BY-NC-SA

Ongoing research in Central America increasingly points to citizens’ exclusion from basic markets, especially the workforce that receives certain social guarantees, as the cause of societal violence in the region.  Their lack of access to the labor, capital, land and other markets, in which almost all income is generated, leads to an extreme disempowerment – a primary exclusion – that reverberates through citizens’ lives.  Analysts of Latin American societies often focus on poverty and income inequality as important elements in violence, but a study by FLACSO-Costa Rica and FLACSO-El Salvador indicates that social exclusion is the underlying cause of these problems and, therefore, is the more reliable indicator of a country’s vulnerability to societal violence.  The processes of social exclusion may be responsible for the epidemic of violence that plagues urban spaces across the isthmus and elsewhere in Latin America.

In Central America, labor markets are increasingly important drivers of primary exclusion.  These are societies riven by endemic unemployment and generalized job precariousness, and much of the population is relegated to the kinds of self-employment that offer no prospects of ever moving beyond satisfying the survival imperatives of households.  Numerous South American governments in recent years have helped neutralize citizens’ exclusion through carefully designed social programs, but when the state lacks the capacity or will to supply access to such “citizenship,” as has been the case in much of Central America, exclusion only deepens.  A least two basic narratives establish clear linkages between social exclusion and violence, especially among youth.

• First, when the state abandons marginal urban territories, these fall under the control of youth gangs that establish themselves as new authorities and obtain a monopoly on the instruments of violence.
• Second, precarious employment – the inability of citizens to generate incomes sufficient to satisfy minimal aspirations of consumption – leads to lifestyles in which the line between legal and illegal becomes murky.

FLACSO’s study of several urban communities in Costa Rica and El Salvador has identified a possible third link between social exclusion and violence – in the household.  The domestic sphere, typically glorified as the sole space of security amidst the external insecurity that these communities find in public spaces, can also become a source of exclusion-driven violence.  Male unemployment, especially that of heads of household, is expressed not only in violence among adults but also violence by adults against children.  That violence in turn is projected outward, toward other members of the community, as victims of violence within households become perpetrators of violence outside them.  The complex chain of different types of violence, beginning with the structural violence that society generates through social exclusion, passing through the household unit, and then rebounds outward toward the community.  If this is in fact what is occurring, it suggests that efforts to overcome primary exclusion are imperative to reduce all levels of violence.

*Juan Pablo Pérez Sáinz is a senior researcher for the Latin American Social Science Faculty in San José (FLACSO-Costa Rica) and lead researcher in this project supported by the IDRC.  For a description of the project please click here.