Latin America is the land of homicides. Every year for decades now, more than 100,000 human beings, mostly poor, young, dark-skinned men, die violently in countries supposedly free from âcivil wars .â Roughly 40% of them, or more than 60,000 in 2016, die in Brazil. After many others, we try to make some sense of that tragedy. We do so by looking at the workings of drug markets in Recife, a large and extremely violent metropolis of Brazilâs poor Northeast region.
Scholarly research, public policy discussion, and media coverage closely associate drug markets and violence . A number of scholars have nonetheless pointed out that this association is neither universal nor immutable. High levels of drug consumption in Western Europe have long coexisted with extremely low levels of violence , and drug use peacefully thrives there in bars, raves, and private parties, as they do on most North-American university campuses. The situation, however, is broadly felt to be different in production and transit countries (van Bronkhorst and Demombynes 2010), in corrupt polities , and in unequal middle-income countries with inadequate or violent policing (Velasco 2012; Guerrero-Gutiérrez 2011; Soares and Naritomi 2010). Much of Latin America fall in the latter categories, and the region dominates global violence rankings (Chioda 2017). Brazil has long held a place of honour in these rankings. Every year and for almost two decades, a large portion of the murders committed there are commonly traced to the drug trade, whether around trafficking, confrontations among gangs, or police operations in the areas that those gangs control or where they operate (Arias 2006; Lima et al. 2014). Brazil thus offers a sadly apposite environment in which to explore the intricacies of the nexus between violence and the drug trade.
This short book is part of a broader research programme on drug markets and violence in the capitals of Brazilâs Northeast, which have become the epicentre of the countryâs violence in the last decade (Cerqueira et al. 2017). We explore the drug markets of Recife, the largest metropolitan area of the region and, over the last 25 years, Brazilâs most violent large city. With 3.7 million people, Recifeâs metropolitan area is Brazilâs sixth largest. In the last 20 years, it has lost to violence a larger share of its population than any other major city in the country (see Table 1.1). With diverse and active illegal drug markets, it should be the poster child of the drug-violence equation and the last place where that equation would break down. In other words, it is very much a most-likely case (Eckstein 1975), a situation where it should be hardest to find peaceful drug markets . And we indeed found much violence in those markets. Yet, we also came across several âislands of peace â in the cityâs drug scene and even on markets where violence usually prevailed, but where we documented significant variation over time and space. This comforted to some extent the core intuition of our project: with Peter Leeson , we feel indeed that anarchy and self-governance often work better than most peopleâincluding social scientistsâthink (2014).
Table 1.1
Homicide rates in Brazilâs largest metropolitan areas (> 2 million in 2014): 1996â2014
Average homicide rate (per 100,000) | Homicide count | |
|---|---|---|
Recife | 60.37 | 40,077 |
Rio de Janeiro | 43.28 | 92,415 |
Salvador | 39.32 | 26,452 |
Belem | 37.84 | 15,907 |
Brasilia | 35.95 | 23,137 |
SĂŁo Paulo | 35.72 | 123,732 |
Belo Horizonte | 35.62 | 32,180 |
Fortaleza | 35.18 | 24,063 |
Curitiba | 35.02 | 20,888 |
Manaus | 32.60 | 12,347 |
Goiania | 31.31 | 12,180 |
Porto Alegre | 29.18 | 22,023 |
Campinas | 24.42 | 11,514 |
For that very reason our research programme did not intend to explore the role of inequality in drug violence: one can hardly explain something like homicide rates, so variable over space and volatile over time, by something as broad-based and slow-moving as inequalit y (Daudelin 2017). For centuries, extreme levels of social and racial exclusion have been the sad norm in Brazil. The Northeast is the countryâs poorest region and its coast, since colonial times, the land of sugar cane. Slaves were brought there by the millions to work in the white elitesâ plantations and the legacy of both sugar and slavery remains present in the very fabric of its capitals. Many of the old neighbourhoods of Recife bear the names of former slave-owning sugar mills: Apipucos, Casa Forte, Dois IrmĂŁos, Torre, Engenho do Meio, Monteiro, and so on. Several of those areas, where descendants of mill owners still live, are routinely described as ânobles.â The beautiful Capibaribe river, lined by luxury condos in the cityâs wealthy areas, is an open sewage and closer to the sea; a few kilometres downstream from air-conditioned apartments insulated from the stench, thousands of poor people live on the riverâs tide marshes in flimsy stilt shacks without running water or public services. While details will vary, a similar portrait of shocking inequity could be drawn for every large city of the Northeast, today, 20 or 50 years ago. And yet, until recently, many of them were not particularly or always violent. Recife itself, where violence has long been extremely high, even by Brazilian standards, saw homicide rates decline by 55% between 2007 and 2013 when, for a few years, public security policy focused, for once, on reducing criminal violenceâan episode that we examine in Chap. 4. Inequality , we thought, could not be the story. Something else was going on, and we designed our project to unpack that something else or an important part thereof.
Urban violence in Brazil is multifaceted, but all evidence suggests that illegal drugs and their trade are a large part of the problem.1 Building on Paul Goldstein âs seminal intuition (1985), we focused on âsystemic violence ,â on the ways in which the cityâs drug markets operate and are governed, on what could make some of them, sometimes, smooth running and peaceful, and others, or the same ones at other times, conflict-prone and deadly. And we found, indeed, that the micromechanics of the crack market differed markedly from those of the cocaine and synthetic drug markets, making the first unstable and often extremely violent, while the last two operated without much tension or violence. We also realized that policing, by action and by omission, compounded the deficiencies of the crack market and further smoothened the workings of the LSD and ecstasy trade.
The patterns we identified, however, had an unmistakable mark: the most dysfunctional and violent markets were also those of the poor, while the peaceful and smooth-running ones catered to middle- and upper-class customers. Inequality , in other words, could both underpin and undermine effective self-governance . What this book disentangles, in the end, are the many ways in which deep social inequity and discriminatory security policy interact with the peculiar characteristics and workings of specific drug markets to produce extreme violence in some of them, and little or none, in others.
The book has four chapters. The rest of this introduction presents the core tenets of our analytical framework and discusses the ways in which we have addressed the sizable ethical and methodological challenges posed by a study based on the reconstruction of the workingsâoften violentâof illegal market s, primarily on the basis of participantsâ accounts of their own experiences.
Chapter 2 explores the cityâs middle-class drug markets: high-quality cannabis, cocaine hydrochloride, LSD, and ecstasy. For those who argue that violence is not inherent to illegal market s, this set of markets, in Recife, probably qualify as a âleast-likely caseâ (Eckstein 1975): in a city where middle classes inhabit in, and commute between, small and permeable pockets ...