Violence and Resilience in Latin American Cities

Kees Koonings, Dirk Kruijt, Kees Koonings, Dirk Kruijt

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781780324579
• eBook ISBN: 9781780324593
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Violence in Society
• Index: Social Sciences

Why are Latin American cities amongst the most violent in the world? Over the past decades Latin America has not only become the most urbanised of the regions of the so-called global South, it has also been the scene of the urbanisation of poverty and exclusion. Overall regional homicides rates are the highest in the world, a fact closely related to the spread and use of firearms by male youths, who are frequently involved in local and translocal forms of organised crime. In response, governments and law enforcements agencies have been facing mounting pressure to address violence through repressive strategies, which in turn has led to a number of consequences: law enforcement is often based on excessive violence and the victimisation of entire marginal populations. Thus, the dynamics of violence have generated a widespread perception of insecurity and fear.

Featuring much original fieldwork across a broad array of case studies, this cutting edge volume focuses on questions not only of crime, insecurity and violence but also of Latin American cities' ability to respond to these problems in creative and productive ways.

1 | URBAN FRAGILITY AND RESILIENCE IN LATIN AMERICA: CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES AND CONTEMPORARY PATTERNS

Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt

Over the past decades Latin America1 has not only become the most urbanised region of the global South. It has also produced the highest rates of the urbanisation of poverty, exclusion and violence. New, predominantly urban actors in that violence emerged after the disappearance of the military dictatorships and the implementation of negotiated peace agreements in Central America. Gangs, urban vigilantes, organised crime, lynching parties, private security companies and violent law enforcement agencies are the actors that deploy violence and reproduce insecurity, fear and distrust in many Latin American cities (Caldeira 2000; Rotker 2002). The broader social, political and spatial impact of urban violence includes a widespread distrust in the law enforcement capabilities of the state, paradoxically combined with broad support for zero tolerance policing by the very same state (Bailey and Dammert 2006). It has also brought forth the establishment of extra-legal power and control in many urban areas by gangs, drugs factions or vigilantes (Arias 2006; Jones and Rodgers 2009). This in turn further deepens established and new patterns of socio-spatial urban fragmentation which mean that the actual ‘encounters with violence’ (Moser and McIlwaine 2004) are unevenly spread across the cityscape but the fear of insecurity has become a generalised feature of urban society (Glebbeek and Koonings 2016).

This state of affairs can be called ‘urban fragility’. We follow Beall, Goodfellow and Rodgers (2011; see also Beall 2007; 2009) in their argument that there is a dual relationship between cities and fragile settings (the latter mostly related to states or regions). On the one hand, violence has become increasingly urban, and cities are often the theatre of what they call ‘civic conflict’ (Beall et al. 2011: 10–11), with disruptive consequences for those cities, their inhabitants and their governance structures. On the other hand, cities are also sites of ‘generative civic engagement’ (ibid.: 4) and innovative formats for social mobilisation, political participation and creative governance (Beall 2009).

This is the other side of the coin. Latin American cities are not only about fragility. They are, of course, spaces where non-violent forms of engagement, mobilisation and participation have been developed and often successfully implemented. Rodgers, Beall and Kanbur (2012) resist what they call one-sided ‘dystopian’ (or ‘utopian’) perspectives on Latin American urban development. They make a plea for a recovery of a ‘holistic’ interpretation of Latin American cities:

Certainly, the current vision of ‘fractured cities’ obscures the fact that cities are social, economic, political and cultural systems that bring different (and often contradictory) processes together, and unless we focus our attention more on the interrelatedness of these different processes within cities, our analysis – and concomitant policy initiatives – will unavoidably remain inadequate. (ibid.: 18)

We propose here to pursue a specific kind of interrelatedness, namely the specific responses and alternatives to urban fragility. We call this ‘urban resilience’. Put simply, resilience means that communities, networks, grassroots organisations, and public and non-governmental support structures mobilise to create alternative, non-violent spaces and practices in cities. We will elaborate on this concept later in this chapter, by proposing a typology of urban resilience. At this point, it is important to understand that fragility and resilience are, in most cases, mutually constitutive processes that combine to shape the dynamics and variations of urban processes and their outcomes in any given place at any given moment in time. The city cases presented in this book were selected to offer different examples of this interplay. Although one consideration for selection has been differences in relative qualities of fragility and resilience, we also suggest that it is not always meaningful to make a distinction between more or less violent or safe cities. Violence and security differ in degree as well as in kind. ‘Unsafe’ cities in terms of average homicide rates, such as Medellín, may simultaneously be presented as showcases of urban regeneration (Martin 2012). A ‘safe’ city such as San José may at the same time be perceived as being under threat from social fragmentation and the activities of gangs and criminal groups (see Abelardo Morales Gamboa in Chapter 6 of this volume). Other cities, including city cases analysed in this book, show different panoramas of the dynamic interplay between danger and safety, or fragility and resilience.

In this chapter, we elaborate the notions of fragility and resilience and connect these to the main findings offered by the city cases assembled in this book, although we will refer not only to the cities to which separate chapters are dedicated. These cases have been selected not only because they exemplify different scenarios, but also, and more prosaically, because some of these cities have not often been included in volumes of this nature. We also take into account the overview we provide in Chapter 2 of five megacities in the region – Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo – although our overview is, admittedly, quite general.

Starting point: the basic contours of urban violence in Latin America and the Caribbean

During the decades of civil war and dictatorship, from the 1960s to the 1980s, violence was mostly political (Koonings and Kruijt 1999; 2002; 2004), instigated on behalf of the state by military forces, paramilitary units, and police forces and policing extensions (Van Reenen 2004). The era of political violence also generated pseudo-official and illegal security and repression outfits such as death squads operating in the interstices of political repression. These political violence actors confronted the real and imagined enemies of the insurgent left: guerrillas and militias. These were often part of structured revolutionary political-military organisations...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the editors
• Series titles
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures, tables and box
• About the contributors
• Abbreviations
• 1 | Urban fragility and resilience in Latin America: conceptual approaches and contemporary patterns
• 2 | Exclusion, violence and resilience in five Latin American megacities: a comparison of Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo
• 3 | Caracas: from heaven’s branch to urban hell.
• 4 | Bogotá: countering violence with urban government
• 5 | San Salvador: violence and resilience in gangland – coping with the code of the street
• 6 | San José: urban expansion, violence and resilience
• 7 | Kingston: violence and resilience
• 8 | Santo Domingo: criminogenic violence and resilience
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index