Neoliberal Mystification: Crime and Estrangement in El Salvador

Abstract

How do Salvadorans' varying responses to nationwide neoliberal restructuring affect their experiences and perceptions of crime? Official rhetoric regarding crime in El Salvador privileges highly individualized understandings over ones that would interrogate the relationship between crime and changing socioeconomic and political conditions. Nonetheless, several scholars have begun to examine the relationship between neoliberalism in war-torn Central America and the region's high crime rates. Building on this work, the authors find that while neoliberalism's structural and ideological components both reflect and further contribute to the conditions and growing sense of estrangement that influence how Salvadorans perceive and experience crime, these perceptions and experiences vary across local contexts. Drawing on 102 in-depth interviews and months of field research in two towns with similar population sizes, amenities, and patterns of migration to the United States, but differing local responses to national neoliberal restructuring, the authors examine the bases for such variation.