Encounters with Violence in Latin America

Urban Poor Perceptions from Colombia and Guatemala

Cathy McIlwaine, Caroline Moser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9780415258654
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134575640
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Latin America is both the world's most urbanized fastest developing regions, where the links between social exclusion, inequality and violence are clearly visible. The banal, ubiquitous nature of drug crime, robbery, gang and intra-family violence destabilizes countries' economies and harms their people and social structures.
Encounters with Violence & Crime in Latin America explores the meaning of violence and insecurity in nine towns and cities in Columbia and Guatemala to create a framework of how and why daily violence takes place at the community level. It uses pioneering new methods of participatory urban appraisal to ask local people about their own perceptions of violence as mediated by family, gender, ethnicity and age. It develops a typology which distinguishes between the political, social, and economic violence that afflicts communities, and which assesses the costs of consequences of violence in terms of community cohesion and social capital. This gives voice to those whose daily lives and dominated by widespread aggression, and provides important new insights for researchers and policy-makers.

1
URBAN VIOLENCE AS A CONTESTED DOMAIN

Background to the book

How do local women, men and children, living in the slums of Latin American cities, cope with the daily violence that pervades their lives? What do they think about it? Does their attitude vary in terms of their age, gender or ethnic group? What is their response? Are the causes of violence grounded in the local reality or is it the wider structural context – be it at country or city level – that is the critical determinant? Above all, why are such questions of current significance?

It is the growing scale and enormity of violence that provide the basis for its importance. While violence increasingly dominates the daily lives of citizens in cities globally, it is particularly problematic in Latin America. The region is usually categorized as the most violent in the world, with rates of crime and violence increasing every year, especially in its towns and cities (Kruijt and Koonings 1999). Consequently, violence is now recognized as a complex, multidimensional phenomenon. Not only does it permeate the very core of many Latin American societies, it is also interlinked with an extremely high incidence of insecurity and fear.

This book provides a comparative analysis of daily violence in eighteen urban communities in two Latin American countries, which reflect different political, economic and social contexts. While Colombia is in the middle of civil conflict, Guatemala is currently experiencing a post-conflict ‘transition’ to democratic governance. The book’s objective, first and foremost, is to contribute empirically to this increasingly important work on violence, by documenting the multiple complexities and positioning of socalled ‘everyday’ violence, fear and insecurity. Members of poor communities, whether victims or perpetrators, experience violence in different ways. This depends on socially constructed identities that are crosscut by a series of axes that include gender, ethnicity and generation. In turn, a comparative study such as this also provides the opportunity to examine the influence of differences in context and place on experiences of violence.

Linked to the growing recognition of the importance of violence has been a dramatic increase in research on the phenomenon. Although such investigation is by no means new, it is the range of academic disciplines and associated methodological approaches that focus on different aspects of violence, fear and (in)security that have grown exponentially in the past decade. These vary from quantitative approaches such as those of economists and political scientists, to the more qualitative perspectives presented by sociologists and anthropologists. However, among different research disciplines there is a tendency to compartmentalize knowledge, with an associated lack of consensus about the way in which violence is constructed, negotiated, shaped and resolved. Violence, in general, and urban violence, in particular, remains a highly contested domain with diverse definitions, measurements and categorizations. Equally contested are interpretations of the causes, costs and consequences of the phenomenon. A second objective of the book, therefore, is to contribute to these conceptual debates from a specific methodological perspective, that of participatory appraisal. This gives agency and identity to local people’s perceptions of the violence they experience in their daily lives. Do their interpretations of reality concur or differ from those of political scientists, economists or sociologists? Can this research methodology, whose contribution to the study of poverty is already formally established (Brock and McGee 2002), also contribute to the study of violence?

The research on which this book is based was conceived within a development policy environment, with the intention of influencing violence reduction policy initiatives. For many development policymakers this is an entirely new agenda. Until very recently violence was regarded largely as an issue of criminal pathology. Increasingly, however, it is recognized as a fundamental development problem in itself, particularly in urban areas (Ayres 1998). As with research disciplines, the focus of policymakers also varies. Here the tendency towards sector-specific approaches means that there are few integrative frameworks providing ‘holistic’ integrated policy solutions. Those concerned with economic development, for example, most commonly focus on crime and violence as economic problems because of the ways they can weaken business confidence and affect private sector security expenditure. In contrast, practitioners preoccupied with ‘societal violence’ such as gangs, youth, or gender-based abuse have sought to prevent, punish or alleviate violence through sector-specific interventions ranging from criminal justice, citizen security, public health, social welfare or community development approaches.

Finally, there are important differences in interpretations of violence between academic researchers, who often seek to show the complexity of the phenomenon, and policymakers, who simplify reality in order to provide concrete ‘hands-on’ solutions. As they struggle to make sense of the world from a policy or project-oriented perspective, pragmatic practitioners often classify and categorize complicated realities in ways that researchers reject as unacceptably simplistic. Can participatory research contribute to bridging the divide between academics and policymakers? The third, and final, objective of the book is to address this issue. While participatory methodologies foreground the realities of the poor themselves, allowing people’s individual experiences to be heard, they can easily be dismissed as anecdotal evidence or ‘apt’ illustration (Moser 2001). Quantifying and categorizing this information simplifies it so as to make it accessible to more policymakers not only within the research countries but also in a broader context. Does this make the findings less academically relevant? Ultimately this is the challenge the book addresses. In so doing, it highlights the contribution that participatory methodologies can make to the development of a holistic conceptual approach, or framework, that seeks to identify the categories, causal factors, costs and consequences of violence within poor urban communities.

The rest of this chapter and Chapter 2 elaborate in further detail the substantive issues summarized in this brief introductory section. While this chapter provides a discussion of urban violence in Latin America, Chapter 2 focuses on the policy debates and the contribution of participatory methodologies. Together, these two chapters provide the background introduction for the research findings discussed in the subsequent chapters.

Violence in urban Latin America

The multiple complexities of everyday violence

In poor urban communities in Latin America everyday violence is neither simple nor straightforward. In this ‘seamless fabric’ of lived experience (Latour 1993: 7), different manifestations of violence contrast, overlap and interlink with each other to form a highly complex layering of multiple, and at times contradictory practices. The overall totality is a context of endemic fear and insecurity. The fact that it permeates the daily realities of living in cities, especially for the poor, is reflected in such terms as ‘everyday’ (Scheper-Hughes 1995), ‘common’ or ‘endemic’ violence (Koonings 1999; Poppovic and Pinheiro 1995) or even ‘unbound violence’ (Romanucci-Ross 1973).

In Latin American countries this so-called ‘ubiquity of violence’ (Torres-Rivas 1999: 287) or ‘peace-time crimes’ (Scheper-Hughes 1997) often interrelates with, or follows on from, national-level political conflicts. For countries still experiencing such turmoil, it is often difficult for the political aspects of everyday violence to be separated from other types. In Colombia, for instance, Pecaut (1999: 142) identifies the interconnections between different types of violence. These include armed confrontation between guerrillas and state troops, or between paramilitary and drug traffickers, protection rackets by urban militia, ‘social cleansing’ operations,¹ political assassinations, organized and petty crime, as well as youth inter-gang warfare, brawls and vendettas. To these should be added social violence within households and between individuals, primarily sexual abuse both inside and outside the home. Another example of the interrelationship between different types of violence comes from Peru. González-Cueva (2000: 100) discusses how soldiers, and especially those conscripted forcibly to fight against Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrillas, end up committing different types of violence in the name of legitimate political aims, such as sexual violence against women, racist violence against indigenous groups and class violence against the poor.

Countries emerging from political conflict, such as Guatemala, often experience similar processes, with increasingly diverse expressions of everyday violence flourishing (Koonings 2001). This often manifests itself in a proliferation of street gangs made up of former guerrilla or military members, a growing drugs industry with networks established during times of conflict, as well as an increase in domestic violence (Kincaid 2000; Pearce 1998). In this way the boundaries between political and nonpolitical violence are becoming more porous and permeable, particularly in urban areas where endemic violence is more visible (Guerrero Barón 2001; Meertens 2001).

Not only are there multiple forms of violence, but as the types proliferate, violence becomes ‘routinized’ or ‘normalized’ as an essential part of the functioning of society (Bourgois 2001; Foucault 1977; Pecaut 1999). For certain sectors of society, violence may be seen as the most logical way of dealing with conflicts or pursuing interests, the only option in order to survive, or the only way certain groups feel they can get their voices heard (Tedesco 2000). While in the past, civil society or social movements provided avenues for representation, today, violence may be viewed as more expedient (Call 2000). As Pinheiro (1993: 3) has commented in the case of Brazil: ‘[r]ebellion against injustice now often takes the form of endemic violence, rather than of an organized movement to demand civil rights.’ In turn, Pecaut (1999: 142) argues that the very ‘banality and ordinariness’ of violence begin to hide the terror associated with it. Indeed, generalized violence often serves to make the ‘unreal’ real, thus allowing people to survive. While it is difficult to disentangle the motives for everyday violence, part of this process of banalization or normalization is a shift towards identity-based rather than ideologically based forms of violence (Colletta and Nezam 1999).

The associated fear and insecurity

Inextricably interlinked with the uncertainty generated by everyday violence is fear and insecurity. Defined as ‘the institutional, cultural and psychological repercussion of violence’ (Kruijt and Koonings 1999: 15), fear has also been identified as an outcome of destabilization, exclusion and uncertainty (ibid.; see also Garretón 1992). The notion of a ‘culture of fear’ or ‘terror’ in Latin America has its origins in such brutal violence as that noted by Taussig on the frontier lands in the twentieth century (Taussig 1984, 1987, on rubber extraction in Colombia).² Nevertheless, in many countries, the contemporary construction of fear is more closely linked to state-sponsored political violence, such as that associated with the military and civil-military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s in Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. Such violence manifested itself in repression, torture, ‘disappearances’ or deaths and numerous other abuses of freedoms of civilian populations usually perpetrated by the military, state or organizations linked with them (Corradi et al. 1992; Kruijt 2001). This generated fear of both the ‘known’ and the ‘unknown.’ While the former included actual physical repression, death threats and propaganda, the latter resulted from omission through disinformation, the absence of places for people to meet and the arbitrariness of violent state actions (Garretón 1992: 23). Although different ‘phases of fear’ were associated with evolving military regimes (ibid.),³ overall, the reproduction of fear was aimed at securing order (Lechner 1992), leaving societies more disorganized, with a lack of confidence permeating to the interpersonal level (Torres-Rivas 1999).

Since the dismantling of military and state violence has not always accompanied democratization processes, the legacies of fear remain firmly rooted in contemporary Latin America (Rotker 2002). In many countries security forces continue to perpetrate considerable violence despite attempts to reform the police and military. Equally, once victimized by past state-sponsored violence many people remain traumatized and in a state of constant fear. Commenting on Guatemala, Lira (1998: 56) notes: ‘[f]ear becomes a chronic response to a situation that is constantly threatening and where there seem to be no boundaries. Arbitrariness is “normal,” even in a context that is supposedly democratic.’ Often, silence remains the only way that people can survive, forming a veil of protection (Torres-Rivas 1999). Past suffering from politically motivated atrocities can also undermine any attempts to reconstruct society after the brutality has officially ended.⁴ In countries such as Guatemala and El Salvador, truth commissions have been established in order to build collective memories to facilitate healing and reconciliation (Chirwa 1998).⁵ The Recovery of Historical Memory Project (Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica, REHMI) in Guatemala is one such example. Its aim was to recognize the lives of those who were murdered as well as give voice to the victims and perpetrators who lived through testimonies. In some places, exhumation of mass graves was conducted to allow relatives to bury the victims with respect (ODHAG 1999).

While political violence continues to engender fear in local populations, the upsurge in endemic ‘banal’ everyday urban violence compounds this. Fear of such violence produces a sense of ‘insecurity’ and vulnerability (Arriagada and Godoy 2000). Although perceptions of insecurity are not always borne out by statistical evidence, they are often more important than the incidence of violence itself and fundamentally affect well-being (Kaplinsky 2001). In the current context this refers not only to personal security but also another important legacy of armed conflict in the form of economic fear and insecurity (Kaldor and Luckham 2001; Kaplinsky 2001). Indeed, ‘livelihood security,’ denoting the ability to access resources to ensure survival, is closely interrelated with a series of structural factors underpinning urban violence (McIlwaine and Moser 2003).

Frequently, citizen insecurity is also associated with the failure of public security on the part of the state.⁶ As this increases, efforts to maintain public security systems, such as the police force, become more fragmented. Kincaid (2000) notes that this leads to the emergence of three key actions: (1) militarization, signifying the use of the military to maintain order in addition to the police; (2) informalization of public security involving the emergence of neighborhood vigilance committees or the use of criminal gangs to protect neighborhoods, death squads or paramilitary activity, or lynching suspected criminals; and finally (3) the privatization of public security and the growth of private security firms, armed guards and house protection systems. Informalization and privatization vary according to socio-economic status, with the poor usually opting for the former, while higher-income groups pay for private security services (Arriagada and Godoy 2000; UNCHS 2001). Both processes of informalization and privatization assist in continuing the perpetration of violence. In totality, the memory of previous, politically motivated violence, coupled with contemporary everyday violence, means that fear continues to permeate urban societies. While in the past, it was the police or military that was most feared, now it is local criminal organizations, neighborhood gangs, and drug dealers.

The dramatic growth in multiple forms of violence

Violence is by no means a new phenomenon, with coercion and force historically as much a part of everyday life as are markets and economic exchange (Bates 2001). Nevertheless, in Latin America the current complexity is closely linked to the fundamental growth of multiple forms of violence in general and urban violence in particular. As mentioned above, Latin America is now the most violent region in the world. Regional and country statistics tell a grim story. In the late 1980s and early 1990s regional level murder rates stood at around 20 per 100,000 (Ayres 1998: 3), but by 1995 they had risen to an estimated 30 per 100,000 (Arriagada and Godoy 2000: 116). The rate of intentional murders had increased by 50 percent from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s (Fajnzylber et al. 2000: 220). Between the 1980s and mid-1990s the highest murder rates were in the Andean region, while the lowest were in the Southern Cone countries. Overall, murder rates increased in nine out of twelve countries in the region, with three increasing by a factor of between four and six (in Panama, Peru and Colombia) (ibid.; see also Ayres 1998). Other forms of crime and violence have also increased in the region, particularly kidnapping (in Colombia, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras) and violent crimes against property (Arriagada and Godoy 2000). Finally, riots and violent social protest have also increased, especially in Central America (Call 2000).

At the city level, UNICRI data for eighteen cities in developing countries shows that Latin America and Africa share first place for all types of crime (UNICRI 1998).⁷ When the ‘contact crime’ rate (denoting robbery, assault with force and sexual assault) is analyzed separately, Latin American cities outstrip African and Asian cities. Using murder rates as a proxy indicator of levels of violence, Latin American cities such as Medellín in Colombia, Diadema in Brazil and Guatemala City, have especially high rates (248 per 100,000, 146.1 and 101.5 respectively) (Moser and Grant 2000: 14).

Within Latin America, cities rather than rural areas have experienced dramatic increases in violence, especially in Brazil, Colombia and Mexico and more recently in Argentina (Vanderschueren 1996). For instance, in Buenos Aires the urban crime rate increased by 65 percent between 1995 and 2000 (Tedesco 2000: 536). In Mexico, urban violence increased as a whole, but most significantly in Mexico City with violent crime peaking during some of the worst economic recession years in 1992 and 1994 (Mexican Health Foundation 1999; Pansters 1999). In Rio de Janeiro, increased urban violence is largely associated with the growth of organized crime and arbitrary police violence (Koonings 1999), with children and youth often being the main targets as well as perpetrators (Scheper- Hughes 1996). Within countries, some cities are more violent than others. In Jamaica, in 1994, more than half of all violent crimes occurred in Kingston and St. Andrew, with almost three-quarters of murders and more than 80 percent of shootings taking place in Kingston, St. Andrew or Spanish Town (Moser and Holland 1997: 1).

Urban violence has particular characteristics in that it tends to be linked to crime against property, theft, burglary and mugging (Vanderschueren 1996; see Tedesco 2000).⁸ In addition, it is frequently associated with alcohol and drug misuse, illicit drug dealing, and prostitution (Ross 2001). Gang violence, particularly among young men predominates, possibly because a critical mass of youth is necessary for a gang to emerge (Rodgers 1999). These gangs often draw their inspiration or experience from gangs in the United States (see Márquez 1999, on Caracas; Moser and Winton 2002, on Central America). Other organized crime linked with drugs or political activities, for example, also tends to proliferate in cities. A critical mass can precipitate violence as resistance through riots. In the 1990s the most common form was the so-called ‘austerity protests’ or ‘IMF riots’ against public expenditure cutbacks or the rising costs of basis commodities associated with Structural Adjustment Programs (Green 1995: 165–174).

Other types of violence such as murder, assaults and rape, many of which are gender-based, while not exclusive to urban areas, are often more common there. Gender-based distinctions often differentiate between violence in private arenas (violence in the home, violencia en la casa) from violence in public arenas (violence in the street, violencia en la calle) (Jimeno and Roldán 1996, on Colombia). Women in urban areas may be more at risk from domestic violence than those residing in rural areas. In Nicaragua, a study on domestic violence found that rural women had a significantly lower level of risk of violence than those residing in cities (Ellsberg et al. 1999, 2000).

Within cities themselves, violence levels vary according to socioeconomic group and across space. Violence is often geographically concentrated in poor, marginal, informal settlements, located on the peripheries of cities in areas lacking the resources to control it (Soares et al. 1998). In contrast, upper-income areas tend to be well maintained, often in walled compounds with comprehensive security measures. Violence-risk maps undertaken in four Brazilian cities identified high and low risk areas across the cities. In São Paulo, levels of intra-urban violence closely reflect socioeconomic differentials with violence concentrated in the poorest areas (CEDEC 1996; see also Barata et al. 1998; Landmann et al. 1999).

Contested definitions, measurements and categories of violence

Definitions of violence

Despite this extensive descr...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1: Urban Violence as a Contested Domain
• 2: Toward a Policyrelevant Positioning of Violence
• 3: The Multiple Complexity of Daily Violence in Urban Colombian and Guatemalan Communities
• 4: Community Perceptions of the Structural Factors Underlying Political and Economic Violence
• 5: The Family as a Violent Institution and the Primary Site of Social Violence
• 6: Substance Abuse-Linked Violence Relating to Drug and Alcohol Consumption
• 7: Organized Violence at the Community Level
• 8: Violence, Social Institutions and Social Capital in Communities
• 9: Avoiding or Confronting Violence?
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography