Latin America is notorious for its persistently high levels of urban crime. Homicide rates in most of the region’s major metropolises are extremely high, despite constant efforts to counter the phenomenon (Rico and Chinchilla 2002: 30). A major socio-spatial consequence of this widespread violence has been the ghettoization of Latin American cities, which has triggered a spiral whereby exclusion buttresses violence, which in turn produces more exclusion and more violence (Auyero 2007; Briceno-Leon and Zubillaga 2002). At the same time, this violence is constantly evolving, making it ever more difficult to engage with. In Central America, for example, the ubiquitous youth gang phenomenon of the 1990s has been widely reported to have made the proverbial leap to more organized forms of criminality in the 2000s (Rodgers 2009).