Diminishing socio-economic inequality is a necessary but not sufficient condition for eliminating other forms of insecurity in Latin American societies. In recent years, the trajectories of Brazil and Mexico can be distinguished in terms of the way public policies have worked to reduce or increase social inequality, although both remain societies with high levels of inequality and deep deficits in the public provision of healthcare and education as well as high levels of crime and violence. There are also significant differences between their public security policies, and in both countries, significant differences between the security situations of different regions, which requite further critical analysis from a multi-dimensional perspective on what security and insecurity mean for ordinary people. This paper focuses on impediments to the production of public security policies that work for all citizens irrespective of their race and social class that are common to both countries. They include the role of legitimated and deniable violence in political life and pursuit of economic interests, and the extension of criminal opportunities through continuing diversification of national and transnational illegal economies that are part of a global development model in which criminal practices have become ever more entangled with the practices of apparently respectable states and private corporations. They also include the “capture” of police and military by non-state actors, and the continuing prevalence of rights-violating forms of state intervention that all too often lead disadvantaged citizens to accept the rule of crime as the lesser of two evils.