Democracy Paradox Podcast
About the Episode:

In this episode of The Democracy Paradox, Kellogg faculty fellow Guillermo Trejo discusses his new book, Accountability Shock, coauthored with Lucía Tiscornia and Juan Albarracín. Trejo explains how authoritarian security forces can survive democratic transitions and fuel organized crime, and why truth commissions, prosecutions, and institutional reforms are essential tools for preventing violence and building more durable democracies.

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Show Notes:

In this episode of The Democracy Paradox, host Justin Kempf welcomes back Guillermo Trejo, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame and director of the Violence and Transitional Justice Lab at the Kellogg Institute. Trejo discusses his new book, Accountability Shock: Why Transitional Justice Prevents Criminal Wars in New Democracies, coauthored with Lucía Tiscornia and Juan Albarracín. Building on his earlier work on criminal politics in Mexico, Trejo argues that organized crime should not be understood simply as a private actor outside the state, but as a hybrid political force that often emerges from the gray zone where state agents, security forces, and criminal networks intersect.

Trejo explains how authoritarian security institutions can survive democratic transitions and shape the future of new democracies. Drawing on cases from Latin America, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, El Salvador, and Guatemala, he shows how military, police, intelligence, and paramilitary actors who committed abuses under authoritarian rule often remained powerful after democratization. When new democratic governments fail to reckon with these legacies, some of these “specialists in violence” can move into organized crime, while others remain inside the state and fight crime using counterinsurgency tactics. The result, Trejo argues, can be militarized public security, persistent impunity, and extraordinarily high levels of violence.

The conversation centers on Trejo’s argument that transitional justice is not only a moral obligation, but also a practical tool for building safer and more sustainable democracies. Truth commissions, criminal prosecutions, institutional reforms, reparations, and memory policies can expose past abuses, remove violent actors from positions of power, and help establish a human rights culture. Trejo describes this process as an “accountability shock” - a powerful intervention that can prevent criminal wars from taking root. He contrasts countries like Argentina and Chile, where truth and justice helped constrain the military’s role in public security, with cases like Mexico and Brazil, where persistent impunity has enabled violence and militarization to deepen.

Trejo also reflects on his own work with victims of enforced disappearance in Mexico and the broader challenge of adapting transitional justice to contexts of political-criminal violence. He argues that democracies cannot be built on elections alone when authoritarian security forces, corrupt officials, and criminal networks continue to operate with impunity. For Trejo, transitional justice is therefore central to democratization itself: it helps societies confront the violent institutions they inherit, strengthens the rule of law, and makes democracy more peaceful and durable. This episode asks whether justice after dictatorship is merely idealistic - or whether it is one of the essential conditions for democracy to survive.

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