"The kidnappers are the police": Criminal governance and forced migration in Central America

For decades, citizens of Northern Central America have fled their homes and their countries to escape violence and insecurity. The pervasive fear driving such displacement is rooted in profound suspicions that the state itself may be a primary accomplice in criminal schemes. While scholars and Central American publics alike agree that such "criminal governance" is very real, no one can nail down its precise contours, much less identify how deeply embedded in the state any particular illicit network may be. This article homes in on the play of perception and il/licit power to map how collective doubt about where the state ends and its underworld begins structures criminal predation and forced migration. Drawing on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Guatemala, I map victims' struggles to distinguish between their assailants' "real" and "imagined" powers, showing how illicit networks strategically colonize and leverage this ample space of doubt. Ultimately, I argue that widespread but murky state-criminal fusion and territorial control can make a powerful feedback loop with the threat and reality of violence at criminal hands. This feedback loop in turn acts as a form of disciplinary power, molding targeted subjects and conditioning their agency in everyday life, even haunting them through time and space long after they have "escaped." Such dynamics are a provocation for scholars to rethink misleading distinctions between the state and illicit networks in places like Guatemala to comprehend the lived consequences of contemporary criminal governance.