Between Morro and Asfalto. Violence, insecurity and socio-spatial segregation in Latin American cities

Urban Latin America has become synonymous with violence and insecurity. Whereas levels of violence since 2000, in terms of homicide rates, dropped everywhere else in the world, Latin America and the Caribbean were the exception. Often, efforts to explain this make a connection between poverty, crime, and violence that finds its typical representation in peripheral urban areas: shanty towns. This paper challenges such one-dimensional assumptions by critically examining the complex nexus between violence, insecurity and urban space in urban Latin America. We will define contemporary urban violence in the region and discuss its key characteristics and explanatory factors. Then, we will examine the socio-spatial dimensions of violence and insecurity in three domains: the linkages between criminal gangs, drugs, and violence in peripheral areas; the impact of violence and fear on the strategies of seclusion employed by specific social classes; state responses, especially policing, to show how regimes of public security are differentiated in socio-spatial terms. We will argue that these differences reflect differences in citizenship status and citizenship subjectivity, between the privileged and the excluded. This in turn generates bottom-up responses by urban residents that take matters of security and law enforcement in their own hands.