Conquered Bodies and Territories: Territorial Control and Criminal Violence Against Women

Sammanfattning

Criminal violence against women (CVAW) in contexts of organized crime remains understudied, with existing literature prioritizing sexual violence and overlooking the relationship between territorial control and the broader range of forms this violence takes. This study asks: how do the dynamics of territorial control shape the levels and forms of CVAW? I argue that the function violence serves — competitive, coercive, or exploitative — and their purposes have gendered dimensions that mediate the relationship between territorial dynamics and specific forms of CVAW, further shaped by pre-existing patriarchal and colonial structures that criminal organizations instrumentalize and amplify.To assess this argument, I conduct a structured focused comparison of two Latin American border regions: the Mexico-Guatemala border in Chiapas, characterized by a competitive oligopoly between the Sinaloa Cartel and the CJNG, and the Colombia-Panama border in the Low Atrato, Urabá, and Darién region, where the Gaitanista Army of Colombia has consolidated a monopoly of violence. The analysis shows that competitive oligopoly produces more visible, lethal, and overt forms of CVAW, while consolidated monopoly produces more disciplinary, institutionalized, and deliberately invisible forms. This study introduces the concept of gendered criminal governance and argues that CVAW is strategically produced within a gendered framework of power relations and territorial-economic logics, and its patterns, forms, and visibility vary according to the territorial strategy of the criminal organization.