This article focuses on demonstrating the direct relationship between governability and security in Latin America, based on the role of democratic institutions. A description of the region's socio-political framework is the basis for an accurate definition of these concepts understood as desired consequences, while it also reveals the structural sources of the difficulties in order to successfully achieve these goals. The fundamental premise is that the value of institutions must be recovered, because it is only through creating the opportunity for collective action that social interactions take form beyond private intention. Institutions are the nexus between effective governability and formal security perceived as authentic, because they embody three elements that lead to the achievement of these results: social containment, representation and confidence.
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Departing from a series of concepts referred to as "the bankruptcy of the States", a perspective taken from Frenchman Philippe Delmas (1992), the author confronts the concepts of lawless areas and empty spaces, stating that they obey two different models of States, that is, unsuccessful States and weak States. Examining the bibliography, Garay discusses the autonomy of the weak states/empty spaces relationship from the unsuccessful states/ lawless areas pair, then applies them to the analysis of Latin America. Under the author’s supposition, the austral zones of Chile and Argentina can be analyzed using the weak states/empty spaces concept rather than the concept of unsuccessful states/lawless areas. An empirical examination permits us to postulate that empty spaces are conflicted spaces for human presence, which weakens the presence of the state, and given that the resources of the aforementioned states are scarce, that which is produced is a presence that is weakened from the police system, but not by the absence of law, which is why it would not be pertinent to extend this typology to the Southern Cone, as is normally done when analyzing the Tri-Border area.
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