Class Struggle and Violence in Latin American Cities

Violence is a chronic problem in many parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, especially in urban settings, which have expanded over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 2017, 80.34 percent of the region’s population lived in urban areas. At the same time, the region contains 8 out of 10 of the most violent cities in the world (Koonings and Kruijt, 2015). This startling number is based on the homicide rate, which in 2014 was 66.87 per 100,000 for Honduras, 62.42 in El Salvador, and 27.92 for Colombia (UNODC, 2019). (In the Southern Cone the number was much lower [for Chile, 3.62].) Even more, Peter Imbusch, Michel Misse, and Fernando Carrión (2011) state that for every homicide there are a further 20–40 nonfatal violent attacks. This violence is a regional social problem that most negatively impacts the most vulnerable populations.

In Violence and Resilience in Latin American Cities, edited by Kees Koonings and Dirk Kruijt, and Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence in Latin America, by Eduardo Moncada, scholars explore the reasons for it. The contributors to the former focus on the concepts of fragility and resilience, while the latter adopts an urban political economy framework in relation to armed territorial control. Seeking to problematize a popular homogenizing narrative of violence in Latin America and the Caribbean that overrelies on macro-trends by focusing on institutions, these researchers find evidence for specific causes—social inequality and its spatial distribution, social exclusion, institutional failure, the proliferation of criminal organizations, and symbolic stigmatization—and a possible solution, participatory governance. They point to a set of mechanisms that produce criminogenic environments: corrupt policing and politicians, social exclusion, social inequality, and concentration of poverty (Bobea, 2015; Koonings and Kruijt, 2015). These are processes that drive the systemic breakdown whereby a low-violence stable state can be disrupted. As Moncada points out, the necessary and contingent mix of characteristics makes a social order conducive to criminal organizations that can institutionalize their own rules, delegitimize the state, and break the monopoly on the “legitimate” use of violence. This tends to be true where a criminal organization maintains a monopoly of armed territorial control over a given area and the government competes against a dominant business sector that is not cohesive with other parts of the business community.

By disaggregating the data from national trends to specific municipalities, these scholars show that urban violence has a distinctive, stratified geography. Certain cities have higher (e.g., Guatemala City) or lower (e.g., Quetzaltenango) homicide rates than the national average (Vilalta, Castillo, and Torres, 2016), and within cities violence is concentrated in certain areas. In San José, Costa Rica, the construction of informal housing segregated the population by income and access to social services, public infrastructure, and markets, and these deficiencies were compounded by the social exclusion of the Nicaraguan migrant community, whose legal status in the country was precarious (Gamboa, 2015). Together, institutional and material exclusion produced a situation in which parts of the population were denied resources and opportunity, thus increasing rates of crime.

With segregation, violence is territorialized, and zones can become controlled by criminal organizations that then utilize violence to coerce consent. Wim Savenije and Chris van der Borgh (2015) show how San Salvador, El Salvador, reels from a pandilla (gang) violence that breaks the city into territories controlled by different groups exercising control over movement and levying punishment for perceived infractions. The gangs have produced informal institutions that challenge the legitimacy of the state and the rule of law, both of which are key to maintaining low levels of violence in the current social order (Auyero and Berti, 2015). Similarly, the dons in Kingston, Jamaica, have developed a “garrison politics” based on clientelist relationships, meting out “justice,” controlling the flow of public investment, and ensuring constituents for political parties (Jaffe, 2015). Thus, a parallel informal system exists that delegitimizes the formal system and normalizes violence as a way to control populations and handle disruptions of the social order.

The legitimacy of the state is also challenged by the failure of police to follow the rule of law. In many cities, the police carry out extrajudicial executions, harass residents, accept bribes, and otherwise conduct illegal activities. It should be no surprise that when a sample of people from Latin America and the Caribbean was asked about trust in the police, 64.9 percent expressed little or no confidence, with a high of 78.7 percent in Mexico and a low of 40.7 in Uruguay (Latinobarómetro, 2017). Across many parts of the region, private security has become a stand-in for law enforcement, effectively privatizing malls and other commercial areas as “safe spaces” (Savenije and van der Borgh, 2015). Similar trends reproduce the spatial segregation of violence as the wealthy cordon themselves off in gated communities with private security or in private plazas while residents without economic resources are left to fend for themselves against both criminal organizations and corrupt police.

In Cities, Business, and the Politics of Urban Violence Moncada argues that policing failures are compounded by political corruption. Corruption creates specific lacks in infrastructure as money for public investment is either pocketed or doled out through patronage networks to preferred business partners. The misuse of public funds increases social exclusion, further stratifying society. These same politicians are then directly implicated in the reproduction of violence, as part of their corruption involves links to criminal organizations (see also Jaffe, 2015). As a result, instead of government there is a clientelist network operated at different times by different parties that leverage coercion and consent to maintain their power. Modern bureaucracy is largely placed at the service of this network, permitting the private use of violence in the pursuit of accumulation. This is reminiscent of a Weberian understanding of politics as the ability to access the “external rewards . . . adventure, victory, booty, power, and spoils” (Weber, 1946: 125).

Despite these important insights, what is missing from these books is the role of violence in capital accumulation. As Mike Davis (2006) has argued, the geographic concentration of urban misery is intertwined with cycles of capital accumulation, with land grabs in rural areas compounded by declining rural incomes pushing an urban population boom without the requisite infrastructure or even a pretense of building it. Jaffe (2015) points to a similar dynamic leading to increases in Kingston violence as structural adjustment programs fueled rural-to-urban migration. In essence, the poor who flee transnational capital’s rural land grabs become the socially excluded poor segregated in hotspots of insecurity and confronting urban development aimed at accumulating capital by creating luxury and security for capitalists, politicians, and the professional-managerial class.

In many cases, violence is necessary to implement specific projects for capital accumulation, such as that seen in Mexico’s drug war, which enables extractive industry to operate, and the use of paramilitaries in Colombia (Hristov, 2014; Paley, 2014). Violence, which causes up to an 8.4 percent reduction of the gross domestic product in countries such as Colombia and Mexico (Buvinic, Morrison, and Orlando, 2005), ensures fear that makes employees more pliant, dispossesses peasants of their land, and maintains the power of dominant groups. A clear example pointed to by Moncada is Ciudad Juárez, where resources are devoted not to confronting femicides but to protecting supply chains. Since the 1980s, workers have migrated in search of jobs in the export sector to Juárez, where urban development has not kept up with a population explosion, leading to social exclusion (Eisenhammer, 2013). Femicide has become a chronic problem as the dehumanized, exploitable female worker has been made increasingly disposable by the North American Free Trade Agreement’s emphasis on cheap labor (Pantaleo, 2010; Wilson, 2013). The transnational capitalist class has become akin to an accomplice in murder, creating and abetting (even if unconsciously) the conditions for femicide through increasing exploitation.

Advocates for solutions to violence such as participatory governance have to account for this ongoing class struggle. Capitalists understand why they should not support participatory governance. Moncada reports, for example, that the business community in Cali, Colombia, considers it an avenue for subversive politics in marginalized communities, and some businessmen even support the police in carrying out social cleansing campaigns. Blame for the violence is readily shifted to criminal organizations, and there are calls for police professionalization and community input rather than recognition that a liberal capitalist order is in part founded upon this violence. The solution proffered functions only if the current order is what Antonio Gramsci (1971) termed an “integral state,” one that unites the political state with civil society in carrying out a capitalist project to which the population consents spontaneously as well as because of the threat of violence. Moncada explains that the largest declines in violence have occurred when business, the state, and civil society came together on terms that did not disrupt the structure of the social system. By accepting the capitalist integral state as the goal, these works omit difficult questions about how that state generates the conditions that lead to violence. Problems of inequality, poverty, and segregation are expected to be resolved by the very institutions and classes that conjure them into existence.

Scholarship that focuses on the “crimes of the powerful” is more apt to provide understanding that reliance on capitalist hegemony, while perhaps initially conducive to reduction in crime, is in the long run criminogenic (Patten, 2019). Such scholarship is rooted in Marxist and critical theories that address how a set of relationships forms a structure that advantages certain groups over others through their capacity to exploit labor in order to accumulate capital and wealth (Lasslett, 2010). When we abstract institutions and individuals from the structures in which they are embedded, we begin to treat the root of the problem atemporally and maintain the conditions that will, sooner or later, lead to another cycle of heightened violence.

These are thorough works of scholarship that provide important qualitative and quantitative evidence of what causes concatenations of interpersonal harm at the local level (Auyero and Berti, 2015). Rather than offering a black-box explanation in terms of macro-level trends, they demonstrate how local-level institutions and access to resources affect the geography of violence. Where they falter is in circumscribing solutions within the system, capitalism, that conditions urban violence. While an integral state reduces harm, it does not overcome the contradictions caused by a hierarchy of exploitation based on the commodification of labor. Future research should include case comparisons of integral states and violence reduction to examine whether the relation holds in other places and how long integral states can last.