Interwoven Forms of Violence in Latin America

This article proposes a new conceptual framework for examining how extreme forms of violence in the region have unfolded simultaneously and/or in accumulated, sequential ways from the late twentieth century to the present. Its central aim is to conceptualize interwoven violences as an analytical tool capable of integrating gendered, economic, structural, and environmental violences—moving beyond the fragmentation that characterizes traditional studies and foregrounding how these violences take shape materially and symbolically on bodies and territories. The methodology is documentary in nature and consists of a critical bibliographic review informed by the authors’ experience as specialists in the field, reinforced by an exhaustive search for recent research (2015–2025) on enforced disappearances, feminicides, and massacres in Latin America. The analysis prioritizes empirically grounded studies—ethnographies, interviews, and content analyses—that make it possible to grasp the complexity and multiplicity of these forms of violence. The article concludes that, although there is a robust body of empirical and theoretical work on extreme and mass violence, most of it remains specialized and compartmentalized, making it difficult to identify the interconnections among different forms of harm. What the article argues, therefore, is that understanding violence in Latin America requires a relational and interdisciplinary approach that reveals the intersections among structural inequality, gendered violence, forced displacement, and environmental devastation, placing victims and collective forms of resistance at the center of the analysis. The originality of the article lies in explicitly conceptualizing the phenomenon of interwoven violences—a gap in the existing literature—and in positioning both the article and the dossier as theoretical and methodological contributions that bring empirical and conceptual perspectives into dialogue.