Cálamo, Journal of Legal Studies

This dossier stems from a concern that has been with us for years—though we sometimes hide it behind technical language: state violence is not an anomaly or an institutional miscalculation. It is not something that happens when “things go wrong.” Rather, it is a form of power management that has become normalized in the daily life of Ecuador. And that is what is truly unsettling: accepting that the State, in addition to protecting, can also inflict harm; that legality does not always curb violence, but sometimes protects, manages, and reorganizes it.

In Ecuador, we tend to talk about these issues with a mixture of resignation and shame. We become accustomed to the harm because it comes wrapped in procedures, signatures, resolutions, and administrative silences. But when one observes carefully (and with some intellectual honesty), patterns emerge that can no longer be concealed: bodies punished by systems that claim to protect them, territories that bear the burden of policies that never considered them as subjects of rights, institutions that distribute precariousness as if it were an inevitable part of public life.

The four articles and the interview gathered here do not seek to resolve this entanglement; it would be naive to expect that. What they do is expose the problem. They show that state violence is alive, systematic, historical, and—worse still—adaptable. That is to say, it changes its form and vocabulary, but it does not disappear.

In this issue, two ideas serve as a framework from which to view the whole, without confining or impoverishing it. The first is easy to understand, but difficult to accept: punitive power does not operate neutrally. It never has, and it never will. Punishment is distributed along the lines of inequality in the country, and it is applied more forcefully where poverty, gender, or racialization mark vulnerability. The law says one thing, but the penal system does another: it selects, classifies, disciplines. The second idea is more subtle, but equally compelling: legal colonialism persists precisely where the state boasts of modernity, pluralism, or recognition. It persists in the way Indigenous justice is limited, in the way development policies are conceived, and in the interpretation of rights that are proclaimed universal but applied unequally.

With these ideas as a backdrop, each text in this dossier opens a different window. None replaces the other. Rather, they contradict, overlap, and complement each other. And in doing so, they reveal a complex panorama, which is precisely what we need to see in order to stop pretending that state violence is a minor problem.