Beyond Repression: Mapping ‘Varieties of Mano Dura’ Policies in Latin America

Across Latin America, Mano Dura policies have become a prominent governmental response to organized crime, gang violence, and (perceptions of) insecurity. Although often understood and referred to as a coherent and uniform strategy to control crime, characterized by repression, militarization, and punitive penal policies, in practice, Mano Dura encompasses a wide range of policy instruments, narratives, institutional arrangements, and degrees of coercion. This paper argues that Mano Dura constitutes a heterogeneous set of crime control practices that vary significantly in their tactics, institutional design, legal foundations, and implications for democratic governance. It further shows that existing research often tends to conflate these diverse approaches, thereby obscuring important qualitative differences in how states govern organized crime using Mano Dura policies. The paper develops a qualitative typology of Mano Dura policies in Latin America using a typology-building approach to gain an overview of similarities and differences, both within individual cases and across the entire set of cases. Thereby the study aims at revealing underlying variables and broader structural patterns. Such grouping, clustering and empirically grounded formation of subcategories provide an essential basis for constructing multidimensional types. Rather than treating Mano Dura as a monolithic phenomenon, the study conceptualizes it as a diverse, multidimensional configuration of hardline and coercive state practices aimed at governing organized crime and insecurity. It asks three interrelated questions: Can analytically distinct types of Mano Dura be identified? Which forms of organized crime control cluster together across cases? Where do different types of Mano Dura overlap, and where do they diverge? The analysis empirically draws on a comparative set of Latin American cases in which Mano Dura strategies have become increasingly popular in state responses to organized crime, particularly in the wake of the regional diffusion and emulation of El Salvador’s Bukele model since 2019. The typology is structured along key dimensions of punitive crime and insecurity governance. These include, among others, the involvement and role of the military in internal security, the legal authorization (and normalization) of police and military violence, the expansion and harshening of penalties, and policies of mass incarceration accompanied by the expansion of large-scale and maximum-security prisons. By systematically mapping combinations of these dimensions, the paper identifies distinct types of Mano Dura that clarifies the logics of how states deploy them. The paper contributes to comparative politics in two ways: First, it advances conceptual clarity in the study of Mano Dura by moving beyond dichotomous classifications and providing an analytical framework for studying punitive security governance by using typology-building. Second, it speaks to debates on autocratization, democratic erosion, state violence and security governance in Latin America.