Concluding Remarks

This chapter summarizes the central arguments developed in this book and sets the agenda for future research. By undertaking an ambitious comparative analysis, this book has shed light on understudied topics that underlie the crime problem in Latin America: the enduring stability of criminality in the region, the ineffectiveness of government actions to fight crime, and the mechanism of contagion and spillover. It explains how domestic and international actors driven by profits have turned crime into a “business,” contributing to vibrant illegal markets. This concluding chapter summarizes eleven central findings, identifies four major implications of these findings, and it offers fourteen broad policy guidelines to face the growing crime and violence challenges in the region.

Criminology · Economics · Epistemology · Face (sociological concept) · Government (linguistics) · Latin Americans · Mechanism (biology) · Organised crime · Political science · Social science · Sociology · Spillover effect · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Law