The will to security: Law,order,and the shifting terrain of popular struggles

Rightwing populism

This special issue on revanchist populism adds an important layer to our understanding of rightwing populism by extending Neil Smith’s (1996) observations about the vengeful reappropriation of urban space by entitled elites. Despite the growing corpus of work on rightwing populism, there have been only a handful of attempts to define the phenomenon. Douglas Holmes (2000) has characterized it as “integralist”; Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (2012) describe it as exclusionary; John Judis argues that its defining feature is a triadic structure (2016). Such descriptions have a reassuring simplicity, but they tend to obscure populism’s plasticity, the fact that populist movements glide across the political spectrum, amalgamating positions that might otherwise seem antithetical to one another. An alternative approach treats rightwing populism as a kind of “project” in much the way Chantal Mouffe has conceptualized left populism (2018). ³ This approach has at least two advantages. First, it allows us to see rightwing populist movements as they see themselves, as self-consciously political undertakings that bring together otherwise disparate groups through the power of shared grievances. More importantly, it directs attention towards the historical trajectory of rightwing populism and allows us to situate its specific instantiations within a broader socioeconomic panorama.

The discourse of law and order equates getting tough on crime with getting tough on minorities, immigrants, and the poor. These policies have proven ineffective in fighting crime (Harcourt and Ludwig 2006), but they have been uniquely successful at mobilizing large swaths of voters through appeals to racial, ethnic, economic, and religious animus (Antillano and Ávila 2017; Beckett 1999; Hall et al., 2013). The rhetoric of law and order depicts already vulnerable groups as existential threats to the body politic who must be stripped of their rights in the name of security. Criminalization of immigrants, racial or religious minorities, the poor, and LGBTQ communities is one of the most evident parallels between figures like Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte (the Philippines), Victor Orban (Hungary), Narendra Modi (India), and Donald Trump (the United States). None of these characters pioneered the tough-on-crime posture or what criminologists call punitive populism (Bonner 2019; Bottoms 1995; Garland 2002). To the contrary, they are reading from a well-worn script.

Rightwing populism’s obsession with crime is one facet of a broader political project that wed the iron fist of security to the invisible hand of the market. Law-and-order politics rose to prominence during the 1960s as part of the backlash against civil rights in the United States (Alexander 2010; Edsall and Edsall 1991; Kazin 1995; Taylor 2016; Wacquant 2001) and immigration in Europe (Hall et al., 2013; Mudde 2019). ⁴ A similar story can be told about the authoritarian policing of civilian populations in Latin America during the Cold War (Grandin 2004; Huggins 1998; Schrader 2019). ⁵ However, it was not until the mid-1970s and early-1980s that racialized or xenophobic appeals to law and order were articulated with the ideology of free markets (Hall 1979, 2011). Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used populist appeals to law and order as a force multiplier to sell massive cuts in public services by mobilizing racial, ethnic, religious, and socio-economic tensions. The rest is history. ⁶

The neoliberal revolution weaponized capitalism against democracy, and it represents the single most significant populist project of the last half century. ⁷ The first shoots of this rightwing project were identified by Stuart Hall in his writings on Thatcherism and “authoritarian populism” (1979, 1988; see also Mouffe 2018: 25–38). In the mid-1970s, Hall and his colleagues at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies began research on a series of moral panics about crime and demands for law and order in the United Kingdom. The resulting work, Policing the Crisis (2013 [1978]), showed how an overtly racialized discourse of law and order fused popular anxieties and resentments — concerning race, immigration, and the social welfare state — into a larger political project. In subsequent writings, Hall argued that populist appeals to law and order aligned large swaths of the working class with an economic project that funneled wealth upwards and also helped explain the drift towards a soft police state (1979, 1988). It shifted the politics of security away from the protections of the welfare state and towards punishment. ⁸

Hall’s observations about authoritarian populism were prescient and they deserve greater recognition, but the term itself can be misleading. ⁹ Its recent appropriation by conservative think tanks is a case in point (Hart 2019). These think tanks have stripped “authoritarian populism” from its original context in a way that obscures the roots of the phenomenon and allows for sweeping dismissals of populism itself. Perhaps a better term is “punitive populism,” which is preferred by criminologists and has been extended to discussions of Latin America (Bonner 2019). The literature on punitive populism picks up where Policing the Crisis left off, exposing the ideological scaffolding of tough-on-crime policies while demonstrating their political portability. This literature also picks up Hall’s treatment of law-and-order politics as a species of moral panic that overstates the gravity of crime. The moral panic hypothesis makes sense in countries like the United Kingdom or the United States where crime rates were either falling or mostly static and at a time when insecurity was not a significant political issue (the War on Drugs being a prime example). Trying to fit contemporary Caracas or São Paulo or other high crime areas into this story runs up against a problem. Violent predation is not a figment of the political imagination. It is all too real. ¹⁰ What is fictional is not crime but the law-and-order solution, which does nothing to curb violence and likely exacerbates it.

Focusing attention on the will to security is an attempt to get under the hood of punitive populism to observe how it mobilizes coercion and consent. Specifically, it provides a framework for understanding how the experience of suffering gets channeled in a direction that inflicts even greater suffering. ¹¹ It gives us a way of thinking critically about oppressive, openly discriminatory forms of security without abandoning a search for alternatives that are desperately needed in high-crime settings like Caracas.

The (popular) will to security

The will to security is what scholars refer to as a populist articulation (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017; Laclau 1977, 2005). Successful populist projects articulate or link (Hall and Grossberg 1986) otherwise disparate groups into seemingly coherent but nevertheless contingent political blocs. The best way to understand any populist movement is to approach it from the ground up by focusing on the specific demands and political linkages that constitute it. Such an approach allows us to observe both general patterns and their specific modulations. Seen in this light, the will to security is a point of conjuncture in which disparate grievances are transformed into a popular demand. The will to security identifies a threat to the body politic (e.g., crime, terrorism, immigration; alternatively, things like public health, economic inequality, and climate change) and ties it to a threatening group or entity (e.g., criminals, terrorists, or immigrants; alternatively, a pandemic, neoliberalism, or rogue police). Most crucially, however, it frames actions against this threat as an expression of the popular will.

Theories of revanchist or punitive populism should pay closer attention to the everyday practices through which the popular will is constructed and contested as well the material conditions that propel these practices in the first place. If “the people” is the revolutionary subject at the heart of populism, it is also a species of imagined community or political fiction the power of which is tied to its plasticity. Struggles over who or what genuinely represents the will of the people are struggles about who or what can claim the mantle of legitimate political authority. Ernesto Laclau (1977, 2005) has gone furthest in describing the practices through which populism brings this imagined community to life. According to Laclau, populist movements create a collective identity by linking together shared antagonism against some powerful group or entity (e.g., liberal elites, the government, corporations, organized crime, etc.). Its version of “we the people” is built on the assumption that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

For all of its agonistic plasticity, it is important to remember that populism’s affective force is rooted in the material conditions of life. Critics often attack populism for being destructive, irrational, or incoherent. These same critics usually downplay the conditions that give rise to shared resentment in the first place. As I have argued elsewhere (Samet 2019b), and as much of the literature on populism demonstrates, populist movements are propelled by a sense of injury or wrongdoing. Think of populism as a kind of grievance machine. What populism does is to transform injuries real and imagined into the grounds for collective demands. These demands, in turn, become the discursive scaffolding on which the popular will is erected.

Starting with grievances is an essential methodological move because it allows us to link the affective force of populism to the material conditions that give birth to it. This is not a purely academic matter. Populist movements emerge out of unanswered injuries, grievances, and demands. Ignoring demands voiced in the name of the people is the best way to spur them onward, yet much of the critical literature on security does just that. For much of the Chávez era, the Venezuelan government adopted a position that treated fears of crime as a media-driven moral panic. Rather than abating, demands for security piled up and formed an echo chamber that helped transform the Bolivarian Revolution from the inside out.

Demands for security are one avenue through which the will of the people is made flesh. Rightwing populism pioneered a strategy in which anxieties about crime, terrorism, immigration, and corruption are used to channel multiple grievances against minorities, the poor, and the social welfare state. The first step towards neutralizing this vengeful version of the will to security is to decouple the long chain of grievances from the objects onto which they are projected. That means recognizing the legitimacy of some (not all) of these demands so that they can be rearticulated differently in a way that addresses the underlying material conditions. Seen from this perspective, the will to security is fundamentally unstable. Revanchist appeals to law and order—like those we observe in Bolsonaro’s Brazil or Trump’s America—do not exhaust its full range of possibilities, a point that has been demonstrated by Austin Zeiderman’s work on the politics of security in Bogotá (2016a, 2016b). More often than not, the will to security has been an instrument of domination, but it can also be put to work towards progressive ends like climate change, housing security, public health, and criminal justice reform.

Approaching the will to security as a populist articulation combines the kind of place-based analysis called for by Centner and Noguiera (this issue) with an understanding of the mechanisms through which alliances are formed and spatial inequalities are temporarily erased. This allows us to observe how different experiences of insecurity—differences reflected in geography and tied to race, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, sexuality, and age—can be linked together through shared grievances. Law-and-order politics channels this posture of aggrieved victimhood against the impoverished neighborhoods of the urban periphery, neighborhoods that in Venezuela are known as barrios.

The moral geography of crime in Caracas

Venezuela’s barrios are synonymous with overlapping forms of insecurity. Beginning in the 1920s, successive oil booms fueled massive waves of rural-urban migration that rapidly expanded the informal settlements of Caracas. By the 1980s, the barrios housed approximately 40% of Caracas’s population (Brillembourge et al., 2005). Most were auto-constructed on the hillsides that intersperse the city, making them a prominent feature of the urban topography. During the early Cold-War era, the barrios of Caracas became the focus of elite fears about leftist insurgencies (Ciccariello-Maher 2013; Velasco 2015). By the 1970s, these explicitly political anxieties melded into the ostensibly apolitical threats of crime and disorder (Gómez Grillo 1982; Jarman 2023). Elites spoke fearfully of a day that “the hills” would come down and swallow “the city.” These fears seemed to come true during events of the 1989 Caracazo, a popular uprising against neoliberal austerity measures (Coronil and Skurski 1991; Kingsbury 2019). In response to the uprising, the police and the army killed hundreds, likely thousands, mostly from the urban popular sectors.

The Caracazo marks a turning point in Venezuelan and Latin American history. As the hemisphere’s first major salvo against the Washington Consensus and neoliberal austerity measures, the Caracazo was an important precursor to the Pink Tide. Brutal state violence in the name of law and order helped discredit Venezuela’s political elites and provided a platform for the political actors and grassroots social movements that coalesced behind the Bolivarian Revolution (Toro 2016). For Chávez and his supporters, the old regime’s gravest sin was turning the guns of the police and the army on the Venezuelan people. The Caracazo and its aftermath put the state’s naked brutality on display. It made visible the deep histories of police repression. It also allowed activists to challenge the criminal image of the barrios. During the Chávez era, the barrios were reimagined as laboratories of participatory democracy and placed at the vanguard of efforts to reshape Venezuela. Chávez and the popular movement of which he was a product effectively made them a stand-in for the nation writ large.

The memory of the Caracazo and the heroization of the barrios is one reason why Chávez consistently rejected the politics of law and order or mano dura as it is known in Latin America. ¹² Mano dura (literally “hard,” “tough” or perhaps “heavy hand”) is in many respects a mirror image of its North American or European counterparts, with one important difference. One can reasonably argue that rightwing populists have exaggerated the threat of crime in the United States or Europe. The same cannot be said for much of Latin America, which has some of the highest homicide rates on the planet. Venezuela’s problem is extraordinary even by Latin American standards. By conservative estimates, Venezuela’s yearly homicide rate hovered around 50 per 100,000 inhabitants during much of the Chávez era. In the first year of Nicolás Maduro’s presidency (2014), that figure shot up to 63 per 100,000. These official numbers — which some believe underreport violent deaths in Venezuela — outstrip almost every other country on the planet (UNODC 2019).

When I began fieldwork in Caracas, I was acutely aware that everything in Venezuela was refracted through a polarized lens. The opposition blamed rampant insecurity on President Hugo Chávez, while the president and his supporters blamed the opposition. In this whirlpool of accusations, it was hard to separate fact from fiction. The task was made doubly difficult because the private press sided strongly with the opposition. Government officials often claimed that crime reporting was little more than propaganda or fake news. When I started participant observation alongside journalists on the Caracas crime beat, I was uncertain as to the extent of the problem. My first few weeks convinced me it was as bad as advertised.

Crime journalists saw it as their duty to expose the problem of insecurity. To help underscore the urgency of the situation, their reporting relied heavily on firsthand testimonies and denunciations (denuncias) made by crime victims. Reporters framed these accounts as demands from the Venezuelan people. However, in the process of translating these popular demands, crime journalists reproduced a racial and economic hierarchy of victimhood that was structured by the binary sano/malandro. “Sano” means clean, wholesome, innocent, pure. “Malandro” is a bit more complicated. The root “mal” translates as evil. If malandros are not exactly evildoers, they are nonetheless shady or suspicious characters. While the death of an innocent sano was a tragedy that deserved attention, the death of someone who resembled a malandro was rarely reported. Journalistic judgements about where victims fit within this binary relied heavily on cues that were tied to race and class, cues that in turn mapped onto urban space (Samet 2019a).

The moral geography of crime in Caracas reflects a broader pattern in Latin America and it bears especially close affinities to Brazil. As far back as (1976), Janice Perlman described how the divide between the formal and the informal city structured life in Rio de Janiero. What Perlman called “the myth of marginality” is a pattern that imagines the favelas or the barrios as parasitic cities within the city and breeding grounds for all manner of disorders. In response to this myth, Perlman showed that Rio’s favelas were central to its functioning and that its inhabitants were upstanding citizens. The Bolivarian Revolution took a position not unlike Perlman’s in its reclamation of the barrios. For that reason, crime presented an existential problem. If chavismo celebrated the barrios as the driving force behind Venezuela’s economic and political transformation, then rising crime rates threatened to reverse this narrative. The politics of security in Venezuela revolved around a struggle to define the barrios and where they fit into the body politic. Were they laboratories of the revolution and “spaces of insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2009)? Or were they hotbeds of criminality?

Venezuela’s punitive turn

Crime has been one of the main platforms of rightwing populist mobilization in Pink Tide countries like Brazil and Venezuela. Jair Bolsonaro used tough-on-crime talk to eat away popular support for the Workers' Party (PT) (Lasusa 2018; Winter 2017) in much the same way the Venezuelan opposition seized on crime to bridge the gap with Chávez’s base (Samet 2019b). As a political strategy it makes a great deal of sense. By 2006, insecurity passed unemployment as the primary concern of Venezuelan voters (PROVEA 2010). The country’s petroeconomy was booming and the Chávez government looked to solidify its hard-won political gains. Social and economic justice were at the top of the list as were initiatives to deepen democracy and prevent future coup attempts. Crime was not. President Chávez viewed crime as a product of economic inequality and assumed that the two would decline in tandem. Instead, they went in opposite directions. The opposition seized on insecurity and made it a central focus of anti-government mobilization. Although Chávez publicly accused them of manufacturing a crisis, his administration was forced to recognize that it had a problem.

When I began fieldwork, a general consensus had emerged among both opponents and supporters of the Chávez government. All of the politicians, journalists, and activists that I interviewed agreed that the government had been insufficiently attentive to crime. More importantly, they believed that the crime problem was fundamentally a police problem. A combination of factors, including low wages, poor training, endemic corruption, militarization, and lack of accountability, meant that the police were exacerbating violence rather than reducing it. To address the problem, the Chávez administration convened a National Commission on Police Reform (CONAREPOL). The commission brought together an impressive group of scholars, human rights activists, and practitioners who advanced a progressive plan for reform. Implementation, however, was delayed for several years. When the program finally got underway, it did not receive the kind of sustained economic or political support necessary to effect change (Antillano 2016). Worse still, the new police model failed to win popular approval and its agents developed a reputation for being weak on crime (Hanson 2017) in a way that echoed the challenge of police reform in Brazil (Denyer Willis 2015; González 2020).

Although the reforms initiated by CONAREPOL responded to grassroots demands for security, they failed to appease critics within the government’s political coalition. The gradual turn away from a progressive model of security and towards the politics of law and order was driven, at least in part, by internal pressures. Both the military and most of the police preferred a heavy-handed approach, and there was also strong support from the newly ascendant middle sectors of chavismo as well as large swaths of the popular classes (Smilde and Hanson 2017). To Chávez’s credit, he steadfastly rejected the philosophy of mano dura up until his death in 2013. That is not to say that policing became less brutal during his tenure. The Chávez government oversaw a slate of laws reforming the criminal justice system, ¹³ but there was also an uptick in police killings. There was not, however, anything resembling a national program that glorified the use of violent force against the popular sectors or sanctioned extralegal killings. That changed when Nicolás Maduro assumed office. ¹⁴

President Maduro quickly adopted both the rhetoric and the practices of mano dura. Rather than tying crime to inequality, he adopted the same racialized narrative that I observed on the Caracas crime beat. The barrios went from being the vanguard of the Bolivarian Revolution to the locus of criminality (Antillano and Marquina 2019; Ávila 2019). What started off as a discursive shift became a programmatic reality when the Maduro Government launched the Operations for the People’s Liberation (OLP) in 2015. In a move that echoed urban pacification in Rio de Janeiro, OLP flooded the barrios with heavily armed security forces who were responsible for a massive rise in extrajudicial killings. In 2017, these police death squads were institutionalized through the creation of a new Special Actions Force (FAES). During this 4-year period (2015–2019) there was a precipitous rise in killings by police and security forces. Between 2016 and the middle of 2019, more than 18,000 people died “resisting arrest” (Human Rights Council 2020, Human Rights Watch 2019), which is approximately 5000 deaths or 18 per 100,000 inhabitants per year (Provea 2020). To put those figures in perspective, in 2018 Venezuela witnessed almost as many police killings (5287) as Brazil (6220) despite having one-eighth of Brazil’s total population. ¹⁵ Instead of provoking condemnation, these atrocities have proven quite popular, especially with Venezuela’s middle and upper sectors (Cabrices 2020).

Mobilizing the will to security

Why did the security policies of the Bolivarian Revolution shift so dramatically under President Maduro? There were a number of contributing factors. First, Maduro inherited a petroeconomy that was spiraling towards crisis. A severe lack of funds made it hard to paper over fissures between the radical and the conservative elements of the Bolivarian Revolution. Second, and not unrelatedly, although the Bolivarian Revolution was nominally socialist, from a political economic perspective the entire project was tied to extractive capitalism. The violent securitization of the barrios went hand-in-hand with the emergence of a new “Bolivarian bourgeoisie” or “bolibourgeoisie.” Third, unlike Chávez, Maduro lacked a direct connection to the military. This made it more difficult for him to oppose demands voiced from within this powerfully conservative wing of his own coalition. Fourth, Maduro faced waning political support within the barrios and among the popular sectors. Instead of being an unswerving base of support, the barrios increasingly threatened to defect from the Bolivarian Revolution. Fifth, there was the actual fact of violence. For an administration facing crises on multiple fronts, the punitive spectacle of mano dura helped shore up its fading legitimacy at the expense of already vulnerable communities.

The decisive factor, however, was likely the atmosphere of extreme polarization in which two competing populist movements — the opposition and chavismo — mobilized two competing versions of the will to security. Whereas the opposition made crime central to its political platform, the Chávez government’s main concern was an intransigent opposition bent on overthrow. The most spectacular example was the failed 2002 coup attempt that briefly deposed Chávez, but there were others including an oil strike that ground the economy to a halt (2002-03) and an unsuccessful presidential recall referendum (2004). This series of failed ouster attempts actually cemented the Chávez government’s legitimacy and paved the way for landslide victories in 2006. Defending the revolution against enemies foreign and domestic was a rallying cry that reverberated throughout the Bolivarian Revolution and united disparate constituencies under a common banner. Security meant preserving the right to collective self-determination and doing it by force if necessary. This version of the will to security mobilized grievances of the popular sectors against neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and the elite usurpation of democracy itself. It was a powerful platform that appealed to audiences beyond the borders of Venezuela, but there was a drawback.

Fears of an opposition-led insurgency silenced dissent within the Bolivarian Revolution and shifted authority away from the popular sectors towards the government that claimed to defend them. Activists and officials worried that airing internal differences could jeopardize the entire project. This tended to transform debates about the relative success or failure of any program or official position — be it health care (Cooper 2019), oil extraction (Strønen 2017), infrastructure (Kappeler 2017), housing (Martinez et al. 2010), higher education (Ivancheva 2017), prison reform (Antillano 2017; Fischer-Hoffman 2020), or participatory democracy (Schiller 2018; Wilde 2017) — into existential debates about the survival of the movement itself. Crime was particularly dangerous because the issue crossed class and party lines. From 2006 to 2012, violent crime was the most significant grievance that the opposition mobilized against the Chávez government. These mobilizations took the form of protests, speeches, opinion articles, and exposés. Leopoldo López, the opposition’s most formidable candidate, made it the primary plank of his party platform, as did a number of other politicians and activists.

The political challenge of violent crime carried over into the early years of the Maduro administration. President Maduro’s first attempt to address the problem, the ill-fated peace zones (zonas de paz), was also his administration’s last attempt at progressive police reform. The idea of the peace zones was to disarm violent actors in high-crime areas and provide them with the social and economic resources to reform themselves. Removing police presence in these zones was the program’s most radical innovation (Pardo 2015). If police were part of the problem, then in theory removing them could be part of the solution, but in practice this withdrawal amounted to the abandonment of already vulnerable communities. Within months, stories began to circulate about how the peace zones had become centers of organized crime (Cabrices 2020). The opposition seized on this and other failures — including the roadside murder of former beauty queen and telenovela star, Monica Spear — in a series of protests that began in January 2014. The objective of these protests was to force Maduro from office, but grievances against crime widened their appeal and gave them a patina of legitimacy. By March 2014, escalating violence on the part of many protesters slowly discredited the movement. More ominously, it helped legitimize a heavy-handed response on the part of the government.

Within the span of a year, the Maduro administration’s security discourse morphed so that the two competing versions of the will to security that existed during the Chávez era were effectively fused into a zero-tolerance stance against all forms of disorder. Rather than dealing with crime as an outgrowth of inequality, the administration began to treat it as a form of violent insurrection on par with attempts to overthrow the government. Political dissent and crime were suddenly made coequal. This growing indistinction between two qualitatively different security problems was apparent in the Maduro government’s official security initiatives from 2014 onward. Programs like Plan Zamora (April 2014), the Protection System for Peace or SP3 (November 2014), and the Operations for the People’s Liberation or OLP (July 2015) effectively blurred the line between political dissent and criminal predation (Human Rights Council 2020). Many of the same security forces that cracked down on protests in 2014 were later mobilized in all-out assaults on the barrios. These initiatives authorized the use of overwhelming force against civilian populations and they militarized law enforcement. Within a few short years, the previous administration’s attempts to rein in police violence were a distant memory (Human Rights Council 2020). By 2016, the brutal security tactics that the Bolivarian Revolution once opposed — the flagrant resort to executions, torture, and unlawful detentions — had become the movement’s calling card.

If we think of the will to security as a collection of demands voiced in the name of the Venezuelan people, then the object of these demands slowly shifted from the police to the barrios. That, in turn, reflected a subtle but nonetheless profound shift in the imagined subject of those demands. During the Chávez era, the Bolivarian Revolution defined itself as a popular movement directly aligned with the barrios. Chavismo championed the urban popular sector as the living image of “el pueblo” and the national government was careful not to adopt security policies that criminalized them. Under Maduro, in contrast, the barrios were increasingly associated with crime and targeted for repression. The transformation indexed a gradual weakening of the political, economic, and symbolic commitment to the urban popular sectors. In order to outflank the opposition and neutralize threats from within, the Maduro administration targeted the barrios with an openly oppressive version of the will to security. Substantive reforms to policing and the justice system had proven expensive and time consuming. In contrast, doubling down on already established patterns of policing the poor was politically expedient. This slide away from police reform and towards law-and-order politics in Venezuela replicated a familiar pattern. Rather than pushing back against punitive populism and its predatory forms of security, Nicolás Maduro climbed aboard the law-and-order train.

Implications

In this article I have argued that rightwing populism harnesses the will to security through racialized appeals to law and order but also that popular demands for security are not, in and of themselves, reactionary. It is tempting to read Venezuela’s punitive turn as proof that the will to security is synonymous with a vengeful expression of law and order that targets minorities and the poor. This is the stance that Hugo Chávez assumed at the outset of his administration; as a result, Venezuela’s president could not disentangle legitimate demands for protection from revanchist calls for mano dura or insurrectionist attempts to topple his government. That is why he pushed these demands aside, yet his failure to address crime only made them more powerful. It is worth asking what advances could have been made if far-reaching security reforms to the police, the prisons, and the courts had been a priority of the Bolivarian Revolution instead of an afterthought. Which brings me back to Stuart Hall’s point about the plasticity of any populist articulation. Rather than imagining the will to security as the exclusive domain of law-and-order politics, it is important to recognize it as a popular demand open to multiple articulations (e.g., Zeiderman 2016a, 2016b).

Two brief examples illustrate strategies for bending the moral arc of security in the direction of justice. These were openings that already may have closed, but they nonetheless offer a glimpse of alternative futures in which the will to security is not synonymous with the criminalization of minorities and the poor. The first strategy is to rearticulate the will to security through projects for economic security, climate security, public health, and so forth. Grassroots demands for government protection from the COVID-19 pandemic are a good example of the will to security emerging from conditions that had little to do with crime. At the outset of the global pandemic, it was not hard to see how security could be redefined as the domain of healthcare providers and essential workers, or how unequal access to health care could be a matter of public safety. Perhaps this is why some rightwing populists like Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, and Donald Trump were desperate to deny the urgency of the pandemic.

The second strategy is exemplified by demands being forwarded by movements allied with Black Lives Matter. Statements like “I can’t breathe” denounce a long history of state sanctioned terror in a way that confronts police violence as the root of insecurity. At the same time, these movements have renewed demands for legal equality and protection against anti-black racism. The backlash is ever the same. In the United States, Trump attempted to criminalize peaceful protesters and to use tough-on-crime tactics to bolster his sagging popularity. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro and his supporters deployed a similar strategy. ¹⁶ This playbook has proved effective for nearly half a century. What may give us hope, however, is the way organizers are beginning to reframe the relationship between crime, policing, and public safety to spotlight structures of domination, while at the same time insisting that inequality is the heart of the problem. Rather than more police, security begins with access to things like health care, education, dignified housing, and economic opportunities.

If these two examples, COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter, illustrate strategies for rearticulating the will to security, then the Venezuelan case offers a cautionary tale. The Chávez administration attempted to redefine security and to rein in police violence against the popular sectors, but it never effectively tackled crime. A similar story can be told of Brazil under the PT (Denyer Willis 2015; Feltran 2020; González 2020). In Venezuela, like Brazil, the state was unable to fulfill demands for criminal justice, especially within the barrios of the urban periphery. As the country’s economic boom began to subside, these demands became more insistent and linked up with other forms of discontent. For years the opposition attempted to use insecurity to create a bridge between the popular sectors and the middle classes. Just as this tactic was beginning to bear fruit, Maduro turned to mano dura to help maintain his grip on power. This helps explain why, when it comes to policing, Venezuela under Maduro looks a lot like Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro.

Given what we know about mano dura in Latin America, the death squads are not likely to solve the problem of crime in Venezuela or Brazil or anywhere else in the region (e.g., Antillano and Ávila 2017). They are more likely to intensify the spiral of violence in order to feed a revanchist will to security. But given what we know about the origins of populist movements, we cannot expect denunciations of mano dura to turn the tide on their own. It is not irrational fear of crime that drives punitive populism in high-crime areas; it is the weight of unmet demands for protection. Can we imagine a left art of security? I would like to think we can. Substantive security begins with justice. It begins with law-abiding police, ethical judges, reasonable statutes, proportionate sentencing, accountable institutions, and equal treatment of all persons regardless of status. More than revenge, the people that I encountered during my fieldwork in Caracas wanted a functioning justice system. This is a legitimate demand but one that is all too easily hijacked. The challenge facing the forces of democracy in Latin America and much of the rest of the world is how to provide law without re-establishing the bad old order. That, to me, seems like a properly revolutionary demand and one worth pursuing the next the time the tide turns.