Breaking the Cycle: Interpersonal Violence, Retaliation, and Freedom from Fear
Freedom from Fear and Violence Dynamics in Latin America
By Camilo Mantilla
The Interpersonal Nature of Violence
Contemporary research reveals that much “serious” violence stems from nuanced interpersonal dynamics. Latin America hosts more than one-third of violent homicides around the globe, frequently emerging from personal motives, retaliation, and individual decisions to cause harm. Understanding these dynamics is essential to disrupting violence.
The United Nations human security framework’s emphasis on “freedom from fear” provides a crucial lens to understand the stakes at play. When people live under constant threat of violence, their fundamental security erodes. Latin America’s retaliatory cycles represent a failure to secure this fundamental freedom: the ability to live without fear of victimization, which shapes everyday decisions such as movement, work, and survival.
Fear, Retaliation, Lessons from Around the World
Research across diverse contexts reveals a striking pattern: violence concentrates among a small number of high-risk individuals, regardless of whether a location is labeled “dangerous.” Studies from the U.S. to Honduras have consistently shown that a small percentage of individuals and their networks drive a disproportionate share of serious violence. Early research from Boston in the U.S. found that fewer than 1 percent of people in high-crime communities were responsible for the majority of gun violence; a pattern repeated in settings as varied as Sweden’s gang areas and Mexico’s informal markets. Based on this research, it can be discerned that violence is concentrated and driven by a small number of high-risk individuals. This pattern is present in countries as diverse as Honduras, Mexico, Sweden, and the United States, as noted above, and elsewhere.
Understanding these dynamics requires examining what people in violent contexts fear, and why many approaches to protect or prevent fail to address those fears. By focusing on these key actors, communities, cities, police, and civic leaders can restore what violence has destroyed: the basic human security of freedom from fear. Evidence from Latin America reveals violence concentrating around specific networks and relationships, rather than random distribution or highly structured organizations. Research in Mexico City’s cartel-influenced communities, including Tepito, Iztapalapa, and Tacubaya, mapped how violence clusters around specific roles: bosses, sicarios (assassins), halcones (lookouts), and smugglers. These ethnographic studies demonstrate that violence follows social circles and relationships within groups. Understanding local network dynamics provides insights into strategies to disrupt cycles of violence.
Additionally, fear and retaliation consistently emerge across international contexts, just as they did in the original Boston research. Mexico City’s Alto al Fuego analysis found violence to be driven by “cycles of retaliation,” representing local dynamics perpetuating violence. Similar findings in Honduras documented patterns, where murders took place in public, with witnesses, in communities where victims and perpetrators resided, revealing how perpetrators rely on community intimidation. The findings from Mexico and Honduras shed light on violence’s retaliatory dynamics across the region. In Mexico, for example, messages that criminal groups leave in public spaces characterize targeted retaliation. These messages address specific individuals and are primarily repaid with death. In other instances, including Honduras, group members describe their groups as “families,” meaning violence against them can trigger retaliation.
In a remarkably similar pattern to those documented in Mexico and Honduras, the evaluation of a violence-reduction intervention in Örebro, Sweden, also confirmed concentration, despite vastly different social and institutional contexts. The systematic analysis in Sweden identified multiple high-risk groups with 150–180 total members who accounted for 45–82 percent of all homicides in the target area. Swedish authorities discovered that violence clustered around “clear patterns of conflict and alliance” between groups, with affiliation expanding through social networks in neighborhoods and schools. In many of these instances where individuals are entangled in cycles of violence, victimization, and perpetration, the lines are blurred. People caught in violence learn that failing to respond to aggression invites harm. Violence becomes perceived as a necessity rather than a choice.
These combined patterns extend beyond groups or organizations to encompass broader social networks and relationships. In these circumstances, violence risk is transmitted through relationships, social bonds, personal loyalties, and recruitment pathways that transcend any formal group membership. For example, a Mexican group member interviewed by researchers explained that “you have no private life. If one of them has a problem, you have a problem.” This “automatic transmission” of conflict through personal networks reinforces cycles of violence, beyond individual motivations. In this case requiring addressing those specific social systems of individuals.
This is cross-contextual evidence: from Boston to Örebro, to Honduras, narratives that reduce violence to “dangerous places,” “criminal or transnational organizations,” distract from the local relational dynamics driving violence. Understanding violence when it manifests as a socially embedded fear, concentrated among identifiable networks, provides a foundation for accurate responses to disrupt violence cycles. By focusing on key actors, coordinating services, and partnering with communities, interventions can address the specific social systems perpetuating insecurity, potentially restoring what retaliatory cycles have destroyed: the freedom to refuse violence without becoming a target.
Freedom from Fear: The Drivers
These dynamics reveal a tragic paradox: the violence people use to protect themselves from victimization feeds into the very insecurity they seek to escape. Fear becomes pervasive, shaping daily decisions, influencing movement, and driving survival that reinforces danger. Freedom from fear remains impossible when fear saturates every social interaction; it becomes an intrinsic response to existential threats in contexts without legitimate protection. Involvement in these cycles makes people targets, intensifying rather than alleviating insecurity. The search for freedom from fear through violence perpetuates the sense of fear, almost, into protracted states.
Traditional deterrence, focused on severe punishment, often fails to deter perpetrators and instead reinforces this cycle. Research confirms that the severity of punishment has a limited deterrent effect on violence dynamics compared with the certainty of consequences; this is precisely what Latin American governments struggle to provide. Where impunity exceeds 90 percent, distant state sanctions carry less weight than immediate consequences of inaction. As a result, unfortunately, many across Latin America are destined to live with fear and likely engage in a form of retaliation.
Rethinking Security: Evidence to Disrupt Violence Cycles
Seeking freedom from fear requires moving from blanket sanctions to targeted approaches that address the drivers of retaliation. Evidence from the U.S., Mexico, Honduras, and Sweden reveals shared patterns: violence concentrates among identifiable groups, whose behavior responds to specific fears of vulnerability, harm, and obligations to protect.
Disrupting cycles requires addressing drivers directly: clear communication about consequences, assistance to exit criminal life, and swift collective sanctions against the networks involved. By targeting networks rather than isolated individuals, interventions transform “peer pressure” from seeking retaliation into encouraging restraint. When groups face consequences for any member’s violence, peers shift from retaliation to discouraging actions that bring sanctions on everyone. Directly addressing high-risk members creates certainty that abstract laws cannot provide.
Breaking retaliatory cycles demands a fundamental shift: understanding violence as interpersonal and socially embedded, addressing the specific fears driving it, and creating conditions where people become targets. Violence persists, but evidence from around the world points toward avenues for solutions. Only by addressing actual drivers, fear of harm, obligations to protect, and pressure to retaliate can freedom from fear move from aspiration to lived reality. For communities trapped in cycles of retaliation, security will not come from severity of punishment alone, but from understanding what people fear and creating certainty where it matters.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Camilo Mantilla is an international legal and public safety expert with 15+ years of experience across Latin America, the U.S., and Europe, focused on violence reduction, migration, and evidence-based policing. He has worked in John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the United Nations, international firms, and multiple levels of government to design and implement strategies targeting high-impact crime and support public sector modernization and efficiency, among others.
At the intersection of law, security, and international affairs, Camilo advises police departments and city governments on field-tested, data-driven approaches to crime prevention, while contributing to practitioner-led research on public safety.
He holds a law degree and a master’s in international law from The Fletcher School and Cardozo School of Law, with additional training in behavioral research and justice sector management. He is based in Washington, DC.