Violence, authoritarianism and mafia state

Abstract

Violence is understood as the physical intervention of an individual or group for themselves or among themselves in a certain social order. In a descriptive sense, the term can be considered synonymous with “strength”, and is different from the notion of power. Power is the modification of the behavior of individuals or groups endowed with at least a minimum of voluntariness. Violence is the harmful alteration of the physical state of individuals or groups with or without the presence of homicides.

 The central idea of this essay is the following: authoritarianism as a government practice can cause the emergence of groups that use power for their own benefit, reaching penetrating levels of violence until gradually structuring a mafia state. It constitutes a non-formal economic business carried out by criminal groups of several people who organize and function in a structured manner for a certain time, acting in concert with the purpose of committing one or more crimes.

 Authoritarian states co-opted by closed groups which could establish links with organized crime in a predatory, parasitic and symbiotic way. A social structure is formed where the regression of individual rights establishes an exclusive society where there seems to be a change in the character and structuring of organized violence, thus generalizing the use of violence with manifest public insecurity implying common crime, organized crime and even the use of biopower.