Merging legality with illegality in Paraguay: the cluster of order in Pedro Juan Caballero

The city of Pedro Juan Caballero in Paraguay has been labeled as ‘Paraguay’s most violent region’ and ‘Latin America’s drug trafficker town’, but the academic debate has neglected this case as an archetype of Latin America’s paradox of the delicate balance between violence, drugs, and corruption on one hand, and relatively stable democracies and even economic growth on the other hand.

CEI-IUL researcher Marcelo Moriconi, an expert in corruption and violence in Latin America, has just published a scientific article in co-authoship with Carlos Aníbal Peris entitled “Merging legality with illegality in Paraguay: the cluster of order in Pedro Juan Caballero” on the international peer-reviewed scientific journal Third World Quarterly.

In this paper they analyse the case of Pedro Juan Caballero, thus bridging a gap in the academic literature. The analysis was based on a series of interviews with key informants (including local and national politicians, journalists, academics and law enforcement agents), ethnography visits, and analyses of aggregated data (including criminal rates, volumes of illegal markets, and social and economic indicators).

Read the article here.

Pedro Juan Caballero (border between Paraguay and Brazil) / Photo by A.Aguilera / BY-SA 3.0

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