중남미

Ideas of state co-optation and corruption feature heavily in Latin American debates as scholars examine how elite factions and organized crime networks capture institutional operations. Based on the case of Guatemala I signal shortcomings in this actor-focused literature and propose alternative ways to theorize elite formations and state trajectories. I draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of social field, habitus and capital to illustrate how Guatemalan elites have subsumed the state into an exclusive field of elite interactions that mediates the competition to control institutional processes. By tracing the evolution of electoral politics and the judicial apparatus, I maintain that state co-optation must be understood in line with a historically constituted habitus and the structure of this social field, as elites attempt to preserve dominance following the transition to formal democracy. The ensuing patterns of elite interactions have allowed for emerging illicit groups to decisively influence and ‘criminalize’ the state trajectory.