Fear and Crime in Latin America

Redefining State-Society Relations

Lucía Dammert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136298271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Corrupción política y mala conducta

The feeling of insecurity is a little known phenomenon that has been only partially explored by social sciences. However, it has a deep social, cultural and economic impact and may even contribute to define the very structures of the state. In Latin America, fear of crime has become an important stumbling block in the region's process of democratization. After long spells of dictatorships and civil wars, violence in the region was supposed to be under control yet crime rates have continued to skyrocket and citizens remain fearful. This analytical puzzle has troubled researchers and to date there is no publication which explores this problem.

Based on a wealth of cutting edge qualitative and quantitative research, Lucía Dammert proposes a unique theoretical perspective which includes a sociological, criminological and political analysis to understand fear of crime. She describes its linkages to issues such as urban segregation, social attitudes, institutional trust, public policies and authoritarian discourses in Chile's recent past. Looking beyond Chile, Dammert also includes a regional comparative perspective allowing readers to understand the complex elements underpinning this situation.

Fear and Crime in Latin America challenges many assumptions and opens an opportunity to discuss an issue that affects everyone with key societal and personal costs. As crime rates increase and states become even more fragile, fear of crime as a social problem will continue to have an important impact in Latin America.

1 Democracy, Modernity, and Fear in Contemporary Chile

Chile has been through a sea of changes in the last three decades. After the military dictatorship, the country went through a transition process based on a series of agreements that encouraged economic and political stability. This was accompanied by profound shifts in economic policy that were necessary to guarantee a liberal economy in which the State played a smaller or even subsidiary role.

In order to understand the Chilean modernization process, the social, political, economic, and cultural changes that have taken place in Chilean society in recent decades must be analyzed. The return to democracy brought multiple challenges and a still pending agenda on inclusion, protection, and equality in a society marked by deep cleavages that persist to this day.

Fear appears to be a characteristic of this modernity in which doubt and uncertainty seem to prevail over feelings of safety and security that are necessary for people to live peacefully on the individual and collective levels. In this chapter I examine the history of individual and collective transformations that have taken place in Chile in recent years. A brief description that depicts a process were political stability was considered key to redemocratization and many important reforms were not included in the agenda to allow democracy to fully developed.

MALAISE IN DEMOCRACY: FEAR AND POLITICS IN CHILE

In the mid-1990s several analysts pointed out that modernity and the modernization processes in Chile bore no relation with the subjectivity of the people. A different form of social malaise developed in Chile, characterized by the fact that “the people do not perceive themselves either as the subject of modernization, which appears to gather strength behind their backs, or as the beneficiaries of the new opportunities” (Lechner 2002). This scenario can be observed in the swift, top-down approach that the dictatorship imposed on the modernization process. There is no doubt that the restructuring was profound and rapid, and that it generated expectations that have yet to be met in most areas. Social movements developed during the year 2011 showed that issues such as quality of education are still long-terms goals. In fact, at these social movements took the streets of Santiago by a storm and gained public support since issues of justice, public education and equality for all have been at the center of the agenda.

Furthermore, this malaise embodies the typical expression of modernity in Chile, which does not differ substantially from other national processes in the rest of Latin America (Brunner 1992). This is not to suggest a “situation of exceptionality” in the case of Chile, but rather a certain degree of specificity within a global process that has had an impact on the region as a whole.

The Relevance of Social Capital

The social capital approach suggests that the problem lies in the re-composition of a collective capable of affecting the operation of the different functional systems. Thus, it appraises the social opportunities and constraints in two main spheres: the dreams and ambitions of Chileans and the transformation of their sociability by means of social capital. This observation can be understood through the difficulty that people have expressing their dreams individually or voicing common aspirations as opposed to the effortless manner in which they complain. Therefore, what one group ultimately shares is not hope, but rather hopelessness (Lechner 2002). What is more, the content of the aspirations refers mainly to the personal sphere. People no longer seek to “change the world,” but rather to “change their lives,” which does away with the possibility of a future, let alone a collective future. This individualization of goals also applies to what people expect and desire from politics, understood as a space restricted to a select few who are responsible for ensuring the livelihood of others.¹

This approach assigns a special role to social capital and coincides with the thoughts of Putnam (1993) when he argues that relations of personal trust can generate a social or generalized trust when reciprocity norms and civic commitment networks prevail. Such norms and networks are understood as the cornerstones underpinning social capital. In the case of Chile, the most serious risks to social capital are related to the institutional context: low confidence in the institutions, a pervasive perception of inequality before the law, and a relative indifference to the democratic order (Engel and Navia 2006). As for social capital understood as a resource, this refers to the opportunity for accumulation, which is concentrated and segmented (Paras 2003; Buonanno et al. 2006; Savage and Kanazawa 2002). Accordingly, it is possible to assume that there is unequal distribution of social capital based on socioeconomic group, i.e., the higher the education and income level, the larger the social capital share. Last, in historical terms, although there is a reduction in levels of affiliation to social organizations relative to the 1980s, there has been an increase of membership in associations for specific purposes and immediate aims, as well as weak links of a more expressive nature. This ratifies the hypothesis that relations of civic trust and commitment are changing (Paras 2003; Dammert and Malone 2003).

However, it is impossible to ignore the presence of negative social capital (Browning, Dietz, and Feinberg 2000), which quite often operates effectively in the consolidation of disadvantaged social groups. As a matter of fact, in many cases the aims of such groups have to do with facilitating or carrying out criminal actions that bring about high level of fear in the people around them. For this reason, it is essential to make progress in the qualification of the factors that impinge on the construction and orientation of social capital within the framework of the rule of law.

Malaise and Democracy

Researchers that explore the topic of civic malaise have been analyzing why people feel ill-at-ease in democracy. In an attempt to explain why in the year 2001 only 50 percent of the people surveyed said that they preferred democracy as a political system in Latin America and why the levels of confidence that a democratic government system will make Chile become a developed country dropped from 72 percent in 2003 to 61 percent in 2006 (UNDP 2000).

It is worth noting that in neither of these two cases is it possible to transfer the discontent about the economic situation and the government to the valuation of democracy, given that the macroeconomic indicators of the country show that despite the post-Asian-crisis economic slowdown, Chile has steadily shown the best economic indicators in its history. However, inequality and income distribution have still not been tackled in an effective way. This originates the hypothesis that this mismatch may be the result of cultural changes, that is, changes that have taken place in the way in which, in practice, the people live together without there being a parallel reformulation of the collective representations of society (Lechner 2002; Paramio 2002).

In addition, discontent with the political system, with the self-referential dynamics of the political parties, endogamy and corruption, has contributed to this malaise (Valenzuela and Dammert 2006). Additionally, people perceive the changes that involve one or more taking something away from them, which confirms the feeling that the process of transition has failed to generate a forward-looking or meaningful vision that will make people feel identified with its process: they undergo the changes but fail to understand their underlying reasons. Thus, helplessness, dereliction, and impotence are the main feelings shared by the population. There is a process of dual dissociation, described by Lechner as follows: on the one hand, these people do not consider the changes as their own and feel alien to the social process because, on the other hand, they do not feel like citizens. They do not perceive themselves as participants in a democracy, that is, in a decisiontaking process about the course of the changes. Therefore they are unable to discover the relationship between the state of the country and their daily lives. Given this, the question that arises is whether democracy contributes to the production of social meanings that may allow the diversity of individual experiences to formulate a collective identity that articulates the meanings that may operate as mediators between the individual and the dynamics of the functional systems (Gallego 2002).

On the level of imagery, there has been a weakening of the construct of “us,” whose referent used to be the State, particularly in education and public health. Consequently, it has contributed to the fragility of the national identity and it has also prevented the reconstruction of a collective memory, hindering the formation of an us-centered discourse (Salazar 2005). For this reason, the collective imagery of the nation and democracy appears to be valid only for the group of individuals that feel integrated within social and political life. On the other side of the spectrum, those who feel excluded tend to ignore the national and civic us. The outlook seems bleaker than it actually is as the proliferation of technologies and the development of specific cause-based agendas have encouraged the emergence of multiple citizen groups with organization and convening power. Although in many cases these are sporadic processes, the population— particularly the young—is re-assigning significance to the public space and social capital on a daily basis.

There is no doubt that the changes that have occurred in the last three decades have produced mutations in our mental maps. The interpretive keys of the past have lost their validity and the new codes have not yet become consolidated. For example, there has been a change in the conception of time, with people questioning the idea of a future in which nothing seems to last and everything is diluted into a permanent continuous present (Bauman 2005: 142, 143). There has also been a change in the disintegration of the social space—in terms of socioeconomic inequality and social distances—and in difficulties related to capacity for action and forward-looking leadership of the political power, which has been assigned responsibilities that the new world model prevents it from carrying out. Although this last demand made to the political power does not take into account the current role and functions of the State, it is still valid as it expresses a need for protection and leadership that reflects the existing contradictions between the basic notions to deal with the social reality. In this sense, we are at what Bauman calls a “postpanoptic” stage, in which what matters is that the people that handle the power of the least volatile partners of the relationship can at any time become out of reach and totally inaccessible (2006: 16). This contextual backdrop makes it possible to observe an malaise regarding politics, expressed mainly through the lack of alternatives, which in turn reflects the erosion of cognitive maps. This situation does not however imply an active protest against a given state of affairs, but rather the reaction against a reality that appears unintelligible and not dependent on human will. In the absence of interpretive keys that allow for the verbalization of inconsistency, there only remains a vague malaise that is often left unexpressed.

Fears

The foregoing considerations point to a context in which fear becomes a fact of daily life. In the mid-1980s, many Chilean researchers were of the opinion that democracy will not eliminate fear and, what is more, the idea of a society without fears must be understood as a utopia. Further analysis highlighted that fear can be understood in a life context in which the order has been questioned, in which the subject confronts a future with no prospects and in which anything goes. This allows for the presentation of the initial thesis that fear of crime is the most visible aspect of a more diffuse apprehension characterized by being afraid of losing one's individual identity, social roots, and collective being. This thesis was further reinforced in a UNDP report (1998) and was later empirically verified in a study carried out by Dammert and Malone (2003). The analysis confirmed that most Chileans experienced feelings of general helplessness about losing their jobs or poor health care coverage and that such concerns were habitual. This is not exclusive to the case of Chile: a study carried out by Farrall, Jackson, and Gray (2006: 32) concluded that the people who implement the language of fear and crime often do so as an excuse to communicate other fears that are not as easy to express.

Fear of the other is understood as a form of explicitly voicing other social fears that have their own history. Thus, their interpretation and analysis call for a review of the historical processes that have occurred in Chile, the form in which memory has been sorted out and the answers given to the violent processes experienced in the past. For example, the image of the “internal enemy,” which in the 1970s and 1980s was personified by the extremist, has nowadays come to be embodied by the delinquent. There is some cause for concern in this direct transfer between two completely different processes that appeal to similar ways of perceiving one's social life.²

There is no doubt that fear has a direct connection to the collective in which people live. Lechner goes even further and says that the size of the fear is inversely proportional to the size of the “us” (2002: 47). Therefore, the slow but steady process of limiting the social spaces of people has a negative impact on their development as true citizens, given that it reinforces the processes of privatization of the public space and increases interpersonal distrust. In addition, this malaise about democracy is associated with a feeling of exclusion from society, and especially, from things that are considered a central part of social success. Paradoxically, the increase of access to education, health coverage, and improvement in the social security system has not been accompanied by an improved perception on the part of citizens of the real capacity to access these social services. On the contrary, the perception is that there is a strong possibility of becoming excluded, which spreads a general feeling of fear and anxiety in the population. Evidence shows that this social anxiety is strongly related to a central element of the Latin American and Chilean development model, namely, inequality. Similarly, there exists in Chile a pervasive perception that the actual alternatives to access these benefits are exclusively associated with inclusion in or access to the upper socioeconomic classes. This implies that the process of societal modernization has not taken place in an equitable way, but has rather benefitted some in an excessive way, to the detriment of others (Valenzuela and Dammert 2006; Engel and Navia 2006).

In turn, the social response was not direct confrontation with the problem, but its removal to the private sphere, which has generated a process of naturalization of the changes and characteristics of the system (Bourdieu 1998). This is a crucial point, as the “community” seems to disappear in its foundational design and become a social aggregate of individuals attempting to cater for their main needs. In addition, this situation shows the crisis of political representation that the country is undergoing and, in addition, the so-called “symbolic and cultural Chilean crisis” (Lechner 2002). In this vein, during the government of President Bachelet (2006–2010) some signs of citizen action began to appear, as members of civil society verbalized their aspirations and criticisms in a public way (Valenzuela and Dammert 2006).

It is striking that the initial perception of failure or problem during this period coincided with the demonstrations of school children against the perceived exclusiveness of the educational system. In the political sphere, dissension, or opinions that differ are regarded as disruptive and even negative for democracy. This perception was not shared by the voters who in late 2009 manifested themselves openly for a political turnover and new faces and practices in the performance of politics.

During President Sebastian Piñera's administration the presence of riots and social movements have become more prominent throughout the country. There is still little understanding of this phenomenon but the general perception that Chileans are no longer conformed to the model and that they are requesting more benefits for the middle and lower class is evident.

Therefore, the approach to analysis identifies a fear that is more diffuse and associated with finding no sense in life. In the present social context, which rewards success—translated mainly into access to material goods—ordinary life is characterized by stress and long working hours (Tironi 2006). Social life is lived as a type of turmoil in which the ultimate objective is not clear to those suffering its consequences. The short-term goals especially related to tangible benefits are easily identified. As in the risk society depicted by Beck (1998), society today can be characterized by the increase in risk and, consequently, the near impossibility of limiting uncertainty by means of technological advances or even ideological definitions. Thus, Chileans seem to have climbed onto a treadmill, along a road going nowhere, in which the end is justified by the means, i.e., the road is privileged over the final destination. There is no doubt that this situation generates uncertainty and anxiety in the people, who do not have a clear idea of the future being thus constructed and also feel that they play no part in such construction.

Cultural interpretations are also associated with institutional approaches, which despite recognizing the relevance of the subject's actions still focus on the institutional framework. In a following section of the book a brief description of the institutional perspective based on an examination of the criminal justice system will be furthered discussed.

CRIME: THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE STRUCTURAL

Penal welfare is one of the paradigms in the organization and operation of the penal system in the welfare State structure and is part of its social and economic policies. Its period of splendor—the mid-20th century—was one in which the criminal policy was subordinated to the ideal of rehabilitation rather than to the punishment of the lawbreaker. This originated a structure, principles, laws, practices, and operators in which the actors of the traditional justice system were relegated from the center of the penal sphere and “prison in general was regarded as counter-productive from the point of view of reform and correction of the individual” (Garland 2001: 82).

Another feature of this period is the conviction that knowledge of criminology is the way to understand crime. This produced mechanisms to facilitate the performance of operators, and a significant number of social experts on crime. Penal measures were not the exclusive province of specialists, and the citizens' expectations were partially considered in the process. For this reason it was necessary to attempt to strike a balance between the demands for punishment for the more serious offenses and the opinion of the specialists in each particular case. The intervention of politicians and the opinion of the citizens in the everyday aspects of penal justice were minimal because this was believed to be a strictly technical issue. Thus, the word of the specialists prevailed, although not devoid of conflict with the criminal justice institutions. The focus of action for criminology was the “psychopath offender” or “criminally insane,” that is, criminals that are misfits and require assistance from the system for their correction.

In short, penal welfare was made up of a series of elements: “fundamental sociopolitical assumptions, a series of cultural compromises, and a given form of criminological knowledge” (Garland 2001: 87), with its main axiom being that the reduction in crime is a consequence of social reform and economic growth. The State h...