Governmentality and the Political Use of Fear in the Government’s Policies and Programs on Preventing Violence in Costa Rica

This article suggests an analysis about the State elite’s use of fear as a political
tool to influence people to vote and to reach hegemony and about police’s
violence as a strategy to prevent violence and to achieve citizen security in
Costa Rica. The deepening of the neoliberal model tends to increase inequality
and poverty. The social basis of resistance to neoliberal model and social
basis of the struggle against violence have been unstructured in that process.
The author suggests that we have to question the role of social networks
created to struggle against crime. The Government’s policies and programs
on preventing violence are showing a contradictory strategy as the National
Plan to Prevent Violence is based on social networks while, at the same time,
the implementation of security policies reveals criminalizing social protest
and movement.