Security has never been absent from the public agenda in the Americas. What has been missing is a broad, plural, and genuinely contested conversation about what we understand security to be and how it should be guaranteed.

For decades, security has been conceived from a narrow and rigid perspective, possibly because it has been the almost exclusive banner of a single political sector. A perspective where security forces sit at the center, concentrating power—and, in some cases, broad margins of autonomy—while defining the sector's dominant logics. It is, moreover, a historically masculinized field, where the main visible interlocutors have been predominantly men, and where dominant responses and practices are sustained by narratives that reinforce a specific idea of authority and masculine strength. A collective imaginary where harshness is confused with effectiveness and violence with leadership.

This way of understanding security has had profound consequences. The favored responses have been reactive and "iron fist": states of exception, increases in incarceration, military patrols, hardening of policing frameworks, and practices of stigmatization and criminalization of certain social groups. Far from reducing violence, these strategies have perpetuated dynamics of exclusion. Moreover, certain phenomena are privileged—such as the fight against drug trafficking or violence associated with criminal groups—while others equally central are relegated: femicides, youth violence, interpersonal violence, human trafficking.

Security has also become a profoundly exclusionary conversation: few actors concentrate the design, implementation, and definition of what counts as legitimate policy. Innovation is exceptional. Change is perceived as a threat, not an opportunity. And in many cases, this concentration of power has allowed security to justify authoritarian agendas and weaken democratic checks and balances.

This perspective has left a void of contestation, partly because many progressive leaders, organizations, and movements have opted for two equally problematic paths: either reproducing—with more or less discomfort—the traditional approaches they claim to challenge, or avoiding the conversation altogether. The latter could be related to the fact that security never became progressive movements' own terrain, unlike other agendas such as equality, inclusion, health, or education. That void has evident political costs and represents a missed opportunity to rethink something as basic to people's wellbeing as their security.

Transforming security doesn't mean denying it or minimizing crime, but rather expanding our understanding of what it is, who deserves it, and how it should be guaranteed. It means understanding it beyond security forces and recognizing it as a basic pillar of collective life, which shapes how we relate to each other as citizens, how we interact with institutions, and how they, in turn, connect with people. Also as something intimate and everyday: the way we exercise our rights and live our daily lives.

Opening this conversation requires making everyone uncomfortable: those who have monopolized the issue and those who have avoided it. Challenging how security is defined and practiced means opening conversations that have remained pending and incorporating voices and experiences that have been systematically excluded. Only then can security effectively fulfill its basic function of protecting people and contributing to the strengthening of more just, free, democratic, and livable societies.