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Women social leaders in Colombia say that the biggest danger posed by the global pandemic comes not from contracting the virus, but rather from non-state armed groups taking advantage of the quarantine to violently pursue social and territorial control This article details three phenomena that highlight how existing vulnerabilities for women social leaders have been sharpened by the global pandemic: (a) women's community work increases while state and institutional support decrease;(b) armed groups' ability to target violence increases while women's ability to self-protect decreased;and (c) armed groups' ability to act with impunity is increasing as access to justice is limited © 2020 The Authors Bulletin of Latin American Research published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Society for Latin American Studies

The 1979 amnesty marked the beginning of the end of military dictatorship in Brazil. It has since been both a help and a hindrance to the transition to democracy and the implementation of mechanisms of transitional justice. Two sections of the first Article of the proposed amnesty were especially controversial. One section explicitly excluded individuals convicted of specified national security crimes and the other implicitly included state agents complicit in torture. This article looks at the efforts by legislators to alter the amnesty bill on either or both of these points. Although unsuccessful, the strategies behind and the reactions to their efforts add to our historical understanding of accountability work and the persistent problem of impunity in Brazil.

This article explores the apparent contradictions of the FSLN's commitment to both ‘restoring’ women's rights regarding violence against women and promoting Christian family values and reconciliation. It proposes an explanation based on the state's use of moral regulation to make a personified patriarchal social order seem normal by encouraging consent and, when necessary, applying coercion. Improved formal recognition of rights is belied by the continued inappropriate use of mediation and other practices that blame women, naturalise violence, and contribute to aggressors' impunity. Furthermore, the government has sanctioned aggressive tactics against feminists and women's organisations, who counter this social order with active citizenship.

Departing from a conceptualisation of corruption as a form of symbolic violence, this article analyses the character and impact of the discourses about corruption which were produced in Yucatan in the beginning of the 1990s. The discourses produced by official and oppositional forces are scrutinised against the background of the federal government’s neoliberal policies and the sociopolitical situation in the region during 1992 and 1993. The analysis gives some insights into the character of Mexican’s and Yucatecan’s experiences with corruption in their own setting. It explores some of the conflictual processes involved when social forces turn this form of symbolic violence into the object of moral critique in public discourses, drawing in this way also attention to how the state is imagined by those who exercise state power and those who are subject to it.