Organized Crime, Disorganized Responses: New Research on Gangs and Organized Crime in Latin America

Beginning in the late 1990s, a new topic began to capture the attention of an array of social science researchers and journalists writing about urban Latin America.Youth street gangs, notably in El Salvador, but spreading and expanding across the region, made their way toward center stage, displacing a decades-long focus on political violence and civil war.Empirical research, much of it funded by nonprofits, the United Nations, or the Instituto de Opini ón Pública (IUDOP) at the Jesuit university in El Salvador, began charting the rise of these groups, often borrowing terms and definitions from a US-based gang literature that peaked in the mid-1990s.It took the North American research community only a few years to catch up to the work already being carried out largely by Salvadoran social scientists.