Gang confrontation: The case of Medellin (Colombia)

PLoS One. 2019 Dec 5;14(12):e0225689. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0225689. eCollection 2019.

Abstract

Protracted conflict is one of the largest human challenges that have persistently undermined economic and social progress. In recent years, there has been increased emphasis on using statistical and physical science models to better understand both the universal patterns and the underlying mechanics of conflict. Whilst macroscopic power-law fractal patterns have been shown for death-toll in wars and self-excitation models have been shown for roadside ambush attacks, very few works deal with the challenge of complex dynamics between gangs at the intra-city scale. Here, based on contributions to the historical memory of the conflict in Colombia, Medellin's gang-confrontation-network is presented. It is shown that socio-economic and violence indexes are moderate to highly correlated to the structure of the network. Specifically, the death-toll of conflict is strongly influenced by the leading eigenvalues of the gangs' conflict adjacency matrix, which serves a proxy for unstable self-excitation from revenge attacks. The distribution of links based on the geographic distance between gangs in confrontation leads to the confirmation that territorial control is a main catalyst of violence and retaliation among gangs. As a first attempt to explore the time evolution of the confrontation network, the Boltzmann-Lotka-Volterra (BLV) dynamic interaction network analysis is applied to quantify the spatial embeddedness of the dynamic relationship between conflicting gangs in Medellin. However, the non-stationary character of the violence in Medellin during the observation period restricts the application of the BLV model and results suggest that more involved and comprehensive models are needed to described the dynamics of Medellin's armed conflict.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Armed Conflicts*
  • Colombia
  • Humans
  • Peer Group
  • Violence*

Grants and funding

Guane Enterprises provided support for this study in the form of salaries for LAP, but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section. JDB and GAA-G thank COLCIENCIAS for their support through a doctoral scholarship from Programs No. 727 and Pasaporte a la Ciencia, respectively. WG acknowledges funding from The Alan Turing Institute through an EPSRC grant EP/N510129/1 and DSTL project ACC6005162. LAP acknowledges support from the Dean of Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales and by the Comite para el Desarrollo de la Investigacion –CODI– of Universidad de Antioquia, Colombia and under the Estrategia de Sostenibilidad.