Violência

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.

This paper explores the housing challenges that Rio de Janeiro faces, which is specifically manifested in the form of favelas or squatter settlements, and that municipality’s strategies to overcome these challenges. The Favela Bairro slum upgrading program (FBP), which seeks to transform favelas into formal neighbourhoods, is seen as a complex and appropriate solution to Rio’s housing woes. The paper specifically focuses on land tenure challenges in Rio and the way the FBP dealt with this issue. The FBP is noteworthy as an example of slum upgrading without full land tenure legalization and for its use of state of exception, primarily the concession of right to use but not full ownership of land in order to allow this program to take place. This placed greater emphasis on infrastructural and living condition improvement rather than legalization of land tenure. As a result, the implementation of FBP has had the effect of increasing the security of tenure of favela residents.

Emerging from the global city literature of the 1980s and 1990s, a vast scholarship has developed that embraces the ‘dual city’ concept as a useful analytical tool for explaining how global transformations produce polarization within cities. However, less is known about how local policies shape uneven patterns of development. Through an examination of Rio de Janeiro's Favela Pacification Program, we argue that state-level public policies play a significant role in institutionalizing duality. The recent military occupation of the slums in Rio de Janeiro demonstrates how the historically and politically contextualized public policy of confrontation has exacerbated tensions between the city's elites and poor residents along a number of social, economic, and political dimensions. Local policymakers can influence the impact of globalization on social polarization by considering the effects of public policies on spatial justice.

Brazil's main housing program, Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV), has contracted the construction of over 3 million housing units since 2009, providing access to homeownership for low and middle-income households through a combination of credit, subsidies and guarantees. In this paper, we analyze disaggregated delinquency information at the project level for the section of the program that serves households in the lowest income range (Faixa 1). Our analysis of program performance in six metropolitan regions shows an overall level of delinquency of 28% as of the end of 2015. We identify four hypotheses to explain this elevated level of delinquency: the peripheral location of the units, insufficient income to cover ongoing costs, moral hazard in the management of the program, and organized crime in some projects. Our analysis shows that in 4 of the 6 regions, low-income projects in peripheral locations exhibit substantially higher non-payment levels and that lower income households have higher levels of delinquency. Based on our analysis, we recommend modifications to program design, including the inclusion of location criteria in subsidy scaling. The findings provide evidence of the limits of MCMV Faixa 1's approach to solving Brazilian low-income housing needs and contribute to an emerging body of literature pointing to the importance of location in housing programs.

Populism is a notoriously unstable phenomenon. This instability has been on full display in contemporary Latin America where the progressive gains of the Pink Tide have confronted a rightwing backlash. How do we understand the sudden shift of fortunes from left to right? What tilted the balance of power in the region? One familiar answer to these questions is the exploitation by rightwing actors of tough-on-crime or mano dura rhetoric, which scapegoats already vulnerable populations (minorities, the poor, the “deviant,” etc.) as the source of insecurity. In conversation with this collection of papers on revanchist populism in Brazil, I want to propose a subtle twist on the theme of security and its role in rightwing populist mobilization. It draws on my research in neighboring Venezuela. Specifically, it looks at the unraveling of the Bolivarian Revolution’s progressive promise to defend the urban popular sectors against death squads, torture, arbitrary detention and other oppressive forms of policing. Comparing Venezuela, the vanguard of Latin America’s left turn, to Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil may seem scandalous at first blush, but doing so asks us to confront an inconvenient truth about what I call the will to security. Rather than imagining security as something imposed from above, the will to security reframes it as an articulation of demands that resonate, at least in part, with the popular sectors. Adding this perspective to our analysis of rightwing populism provides an alternative spatial paradigm to the conversations about security that lends it historical depth and policy relevant positioning.

This paper aims to understand the multiple strategies developed by frontline workers to deal with situations of violence in vulnerable territories. We analyze the micro-dynamics within which workers operate to understand how the State deals with violence. Empirically, we analyzed data from interviews with 140 frontline workers implementing different policies not directly related to violence in neighborhoods located in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, known for their populations’ precariousness and vulnerability. The results expand the understanding of the different ways in which violence expresses itself in these places and show that the reactions developed by frontline workers are more complex than those suggested by the existing literature. The multiple violence to which these workers are exposed is used and manipulated by them in various ways during policy implementation. Frontline workers can ignore, negotiate with, or combat violence. They use their agency to develop different reactions based on how they and the policies are embedded or disconnected to the territories.

This article examines the trafficking of Venezuelan truck drivers for labour exploitation in Brazil. The remilitarisation of politics is increasingly a hallmark of elite-driven strategies to manage the circulation of labour and goods from extractive zones. This article introduces the notion of logistics of unfreedom to explain the growing imbrication between techniques of control by the state and corporations that confine the reproduction of migrants within the realm of logistics processes. The analysis focuses on data from participatory observations and the narratives of 22 Venezuelan refugees who were trafficked from a militarised humanitarian zone in Brazil's Amazon to work for a freight road transport company in Southern Brazil. Findings show that a concerted logistic approach to refugee employment channelled mobility, constrained statutory protection and shaped the ethno-political differentiation of Venezuelans in the labour market. This forced Venezuelans to live in trucks where both productive and socially reproductive aspects of their daily lives were overdetermined by the rhythms of goods distribution. The article concludes that this logistic rationale has converged towards a self-contained regime of labour unfreedom that facilitates the labour trafficking of Venezuelan refugees.

In this paper, we argue the emotional life of corruption narratives underwrite the rise of the extreme Right in Brazil. Further, we argue that the talk of corruption is pervasive, polysemic, contested, racialized and emotional. It is deeply entwined with social struggles over the form, content and ends of political life. Drawing on this perspective, we analyze discourses of corruption in the wake of a seismic corruption scandal, Operation Lava Jato. We identify two competing narratives of corruption. The hegemonic form uses emotions to create political enemies, promote anti-Black punitivism and uphold social hierarchies. In contrast, a counternarrative of corruption rooted in Black feminist epistemology centers racialized spatial inequality as Brazil’s central challenge and offers pathways to reclaim political life from punitive neoliberalism. We contribute by specifying how the emotional life of corruption talk helps build support for Jair Bolsonaro’s cross-class project of revanchist populism. Ultimately, we argue that the Right has successfully mobilized corruption talk in the service of necropolitics.