Critique of Urban Violence: Bismarckian Transformations in Managua,Nicaragua

Introduction

Cities have long been associated with violence. Conceptually, this correlation is largely due to the persistent perception that urban contexts are inherently ‘unruly, unsettling and disorderly’ spaces (Bannister and Fyfe, 2001: 807). Such a vision of things can be traced back to the work of late 19th and early 20th century sociologists such as Ferdinand Tönnies (2001 [1887]) or Georg Simmel (1950 [1903]), but the first and probably still the most systematic formulation is the Chicago School sociologist Louis Wirth’s famous essay on ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, first published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1938. This article attempted to articulate a general epistemology of the city, and explicitly placed violence at the heart of urbanity. In essence, Wirth (1938: 8, 11) contended that due to the fact that they were ‘large, dense, and permanent settlement[s] of socially heterogeneous individuals’, cities were spaces of secondary rather than primary contacts, because ‘the bonds of kinship, of neighborliness, and the sentiments arising out of living together for generations [characteristic of small-scale, bounded rural life] … are likely to be absent or, at best, relatively weak’. This made urban living ‘more complicated, fragile, and volatile’, because ‘the close living together and working together of individuals who have no sentimental and emotional ties fosters a spirit of competition, aggrandizement, and mutual exploitation’, and cities consequently suffered heightened levels of ‘delinquency, crime, corruption, and disorder’, according to Wirth (1938: 22, 15–16, 23).

As Ulf Hannerz (1980: 65) has pointed out, this particular imaginary of the city has come ‘to occupy by itself most of the central ground in its sort of thinking about urban life’. Certainly, such an epistemological perspective can be said to often explicitly underpin much of the recent scholarship about the dynamics of contemporary urban violence around the world (see, for example, Beall, 2006; Brennan-Galvin, 2002; Kilcullen, 2013; Koonings and Kruijt, 2007; Muggah, 2014), and arguably also implicitly informs general folk understandings about cities. At the same time, however, Wirth’s epistemology has also been criticized, for example on the grounds that it constitutes a form of ‘spatial fetishism’ (Katz, 2007: 352), that its depiction of ‘the breakdown of primary group life … [is] greatly exaggerated’ (Wilensky and Lebeaux, 1958: 125), or that it fails to consider ‘the critical importance of political economy questions concerning access, control, and the distribution of resources within cities’ (Rodgers, 2010: 236). Such criticisms, however, only focus on one element of Wirth’s approach, namely its particular conception of urban contexts as inherently impersonal, anonymous, and ‘naturally’ – or ‘ecologically’, to use the Chicago School of Sociology’s terminology – organized. The other key aspect of his conception of urban dynamics, the idea that their putative ‘disorderliness’ intrinsically leads to violence, is rarely explicitly challenged.

This is partly due to the fact that, from a general epistemological point of view, violence is effectively seen as a socially exogenous phenomenon, something that is bubbling away beneath the surface of things, but held in check by social structures and relations and unleashed only when these break down or are distended – for instance as a result of processes of urbanization. This particular vision of things means that violence is also inevitably conceived as a singularly destructive phenomenon. Yet neither presupposition necessarily holds true, as Walter Benjamin (1986a [1978]) famously highlighted in his essay ‘Critique of Violence’. Specifically discussing the relationship between violence and law, he distinguished between three different types of violence: ‘lawmaking’, ‘law-preserving’, and ‘law-destroying’. The former two are socially endogenous in nature for Benjamin. Lawmaking violence establishes the basis for rules and norms, as well as establishing the boundaries of a given political community. It is often performative and spectacular. Law-preserving violence maintains the established status quo, and is generally much more routine and unseen, often involving the threat of violence rather than actual violence. Both lawmaking and law-preserving violence are instrumental means to an end, ¹ and there exists ‘a dialectical rising and falling in the lawmaking and law-preserving formations of violence’ (Benjamin, 1986a [1978]: 300).

Law-destroying violence, on the other hand, is a qualitatively different form of violence that is not instrumental but an end in itself that is, moreover, socially exogenous. Inspired by Greek mythology and the work of Georges Sorel (1972 [1908]), Benjamin (1986a [1978]: 299) argued that law-destroying violence is ‘divine’, in that it opens up a ‘pure’ social space for the expression of a new social order by destroying the symbolic and structural bases of existing society. Because it does not do so in a utilitarian manner, Benjamin (1986a [1978]: 300) contended that law-destroying violence constituted ‘sovereign violence’, implicitly seeing it as a precondition for lawmaking – and therefore law-preserving – violence. Although Benjamin is neither the first nor the only person to distinguish between different forms of violence, his framework arguably provides a particularly useful lens through which to think about urban violence more critically when juxtaposed with his general understanding of the city as ontologically ‘disruptive’ (see Savage, 1995). Such a conception of urbanity has obvious affinities with Wirthian epistemology, but focuses on the general nature of urban experience in a way that is neither singular nor unidirectional, especially in relation to violence, as Benjamin can be said to effectively conceive of urban space as being both constituted by and constitutive of different iterations of the phenomenon.

In many ways, this is not a surprising point of view. As Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois (2004: 19) have pointed out, violence exists on a ‘continuum’, and it is not unreasonable to expect that different forms of violence are the outcomes of different experiences of urbanity, and have different impacts on the urban fabric. At the same time, however, Benjamin (1986a [1978]: 300) also contended that different forms of violence are ‘dialectical’ in nature, implicitly suggesting that the important issue is not so much the diversity of violence but how distinct iterations of the phenomenon interconnect systemically. ² On the one hand, this suggests that different articulations of urban violence are neither contingent nor predetermined, but contextually and relationally specific, and that there may, moreover, also be affinities between specific instances of the phenomenon that connect to each other. On the other hand, such a perspective also inherently imbues certain forms of violence with a transformative potential that is not necessarily solely destructive, insofar as one form of violence can clearly lead to another, and in doing so contribute to re-shaping the urban environment. It is these two issues that are the real keys to understanding the underlying nature of urban violence and that this article will endeavour to explore in relation to the phenomenon’s manifestation in Managua, the capital city of Nicaragua, a city that has long suffered a range of forms of urban violence (see Rodgers, 2008).

At the same time, however, as the poet William Blake (1988 [1965]: 250) famously put it, ‘general forms have their vitality in particulars; and every particular is a Man’. Violence ‘is a dimension of people’s existence, not something external … that “happens” to people’, and any analysis of the phenomenon ‘must confront [it] head on, place it squarely in the center of the lives and cultures of the people … precisely where they themselves find it’ (Robben and Nordstrom, 1995: 2–3). This, as AbdouMaliq Simone (2004: 408) highlights, is all the more critical in urban contexts, where we must be aware that the ‘economy of perception and collaborative practice is constituted through the capacity of individual actors to circulate across and become familiar with a broad range of spatial, residential, economic, and transactional positions’. Consequently, this article will empirically explore the nature of Managua’s urban violence through a detailed life history of Bismarck, ³ a former gang member turned drug dealer turned property entrepreneur living in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighbourhood in Managua where I have been carrying out longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork since 1996. ⁴ It explores the evolving role that violence has played in the different stages of his life, tracing how these can be categorized according to distinct Benjaminian logics, but also how different forms of violence interrelate with each other over time, the impact of particular articulations on the urban environment, and the systemic nature of urban violence.

An Individual History of Urban Violence

Bismarck was a happy-go-lucky 16-year-old gang member when I first met him in December 1996. Born in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández in 1980, he was the third of four children. After the death of his father in 1984, his mother re-married, but Bismarck did not get along with either his step-father or his step-father’s two children. He described how he fought constantly with the latter, while his step-father often beat him, and how this had led him to spending most of his time hanging out in the streets of the neighbourhood rather than at home. He explained that he had started skipping school almost as soon as he had begun attending and that when a youth gang emerged in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández in the late 1980s – founded by demobilized youth who had been conscripts in the Sandinista Popular Army – he had naturally gravitated towards them. Although the gang members were all much older than him, they adopted him as something of a mascot, and he described how he would often get into trouble hanging out with the gang, fighting with kids from other neighbourhoods, committing petty crimes such as shoplifting, and also how during this period he became addicted to glue-sniffing.

When Bismarck was 11 he stole money from his mother to buy glue, and she decided that she could no longer cope with him, and through the intermediary of the local parish priest arranged to have Bismarck sent to a youth rehabilitation centre run by Spanish Catholic priests in Estelí, a town in northern Nicaragua. He spent a bit more than a year there, ‘studying, learning carpentry, and working in a bakery’. He also met Father Paulo, who adopted Bismarck as his protegé, and following a violent episode where Bismarck sent one of his centre co-residents to hospital in early 1993, arranged for him to work as an apprentice fisherman in a coastal village near the northern port city of Corinto. Bismarck told me that his two years fishing for lobster were probably the happiest of his childhood, ‘especially after I stopped trying to go to school at the same time’, and he proudly boasted how he would sell the lobster he caught ‘for US$3 per pound. I saved lots of money, which I sent to my mother who was working as an empleada at the time, washing, ironing, and cooking for rich households in colonia Las Condes. Although she worked for rich people, they didn’t pay her very much, and so I would send her whatever I could, especially as my step-father gave her nothing to live on. Then when I was 15, my step-father left my mother, and so I came back to the barrio to live with her again.’

Bismarck quickly fell back in with the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang on his return. This had changed significantly since the early 1990s. The older gang members that Bismarck had associated with in the past had all ‘matured out’, but the gang had institutionalized and grown. It now had almost 100 members, who were divided into three geographical subgroups, respectively associated with the central, ‘abajo’ (west), and ‘arriba’ (east) areas of the neighbourhood, and called ‘los de la Calle Ocho’ (named after the alleyway where this group congregated), ‘los Cancheros’ (because of a ‘cancha’, or playing field on that side of the neighbourhood) and ‘los Dragones’ (because all members sported a dragon tattoo), although all the subgroups considered themselves part of a generic barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang. The geographical subgroups were further divided into three age cohorts – the 7- to 12-year-olds, the 13- to 17-year-olds, and the over 18s, each involved in different types of delinquent activities: low-level pick pocketing and stealing by the youngest, mugging and shoplifting by the middle group, and armed robbery and assault by the oldest (see Rodgers, 2006, for further details). Because his mother lived on the east side of the neighbourhood, Bismarck joined the Dragones, and rapidly became one of the dominant characters of this subgroup’s 13- to 17-year-old cohort.

One motivation for this course of action was undoubtedly economic, as joining the gang clearly ensured Bismarck a significant revenue stream. The gang, for example, occasionally committed collective robberies, as occurred in May 1997 when it held up a Belmont cigarette delivery van doing the rounds of the local neighbourhood pulperías (corner stores), stealing both money and cigarettes which were then divided up equally between the participants, including Bismarck. Most gang delinquency, however, tended to occur either individually or in small groups of two or three. Being part of the gang group nevertheless clearly facilitated Bismarck’s regular engagement in a range of criminal activities, offering him a pool of potential partners in crime as well as a repository of specialist knowledge. He once remarked, for example, that he had learnt a lot from older gang members about mugging and assaulting ‘best practices’, and that this knowledge had been particularly useful when he subsequently decided to ‘graduate’ to committing armed robberies on a regular basis. Similarly, as part of the gang, he learnt about other gang members’ delinquency, which gave him models and ideas to follow. On average, gang members in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández made about 450 córdobas (US$50) per month from delinquency in 1996–7 (younger gang members made less and older ones more, due to the different delinquent activities that they focused on), a sum equivalent to about two-thirds of the average neighbourhood household’s monthly income at the time.

Despite the undoubted pecuniary significance of the revenue stream from gang delinquency, gang members’ motivations for joining were clearly more social than economic, however. Gang members did not spend their money on food, clothes, or other basic goods, and moreover never contributed any of their illicit revenue to their household economies. Instead, they generally spent it quickly on ephemeral goods such as cigarettes, alcohol, glue, or marijuana, all of which were almost always consumed communally, thereby creating a sense of collective identity based on common emotions and shared pleasures. This sense of social solidarity was clearly the primary raison d’être for the gang, and was much more important than any potential financial gain, as a botched robbery by Bismarck and his fellow gang member Jader in the neighbouring colonia Las Condes in May 1997 highlighted well. The pair of them had heard about a party being organized there, and thought that they might be able to mug a guest or break into a parked car. They quickly spotted a car with a badly closed window which they managed to jack down, and as they searched it for something of value, a young woman on her way to the party stopped and challenged them.⁵ They told her to mind her own business, to which she responded ‘what do you prefer, moving off or being shot?’ Bismarck immediately answered ‘being shot’, and posed defiantly with Jader by the car as the young woman alerted the security guards. The pair waited until these came in sight and began shooting before running off, managing to get away without suffering injury. Neither was by any means disappointed by their failure to steal anything, though, Bismarck instead concluding his dramatic account of their escapade to an enthusiastic audience of fellow gang members with a self-satisfied and expressive ‘¡Hijo de la setenta mil puta, maje, ni un cinco riales, pero ni verga, clase de alboroto!’ (‘Son of a bitch, mate, not even half a córdoba for all that, but fuck it, what a brilliant uproar!’), something which generated great mirth and no little admiration.

These particular social dynamics are by no means uncommon, whether in Central America (see, for example, ERIC et al., 2001; Levenson, 2013; Núñez, 1996; Rocha, 2007; Savenije, 2009), or elsewhere around the world (see, for example, Suttles, 1968; Lepoutre, 1997; Jensen, 2008; Stephenson, 2015). Indeed, they are not new either, having been noted by Frederic Thrasher (1927: 29) in his foundational study of Chicago gangs in the 1920s, where he argued that they were in fact fundamental to the creation of a sense of ‘group-consciousness’. Thrasher (1927: 487), however, saw this group consciousness as little more than an organizational epiphenomenon of the gang’s violence, which ultimately was a ‘symptom … of the more or less general disorganization incident to … the rapid growth of cities and all the internal process of kaleidoscopic movement and rearrangement which this growth has entailed’. Such a vision of things obviously echoes Wirth’s broader epistemology about cities, and sees gang violence as a destructive consequence of urban social disorganization, but in the case of the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández gang, group consciousness not only clearly went beyond the gang group, including the local community more broadly, but was also socially constitutive rather than destructive. This was, for example, well reflected by the fact that gang delinquency obeyed a number of clear rules, including most cardinally the stricture that it was forbidden to prey on local neighbourhood inhabitants. Indeed, gang members went out of their way to protect the local population from outside predators, and sometimes actively acted as bodyguards whenever local neighbourhood inhabitants had to run errands outside the neighbourhood.

The same was also true of another major form of gang violence, namely gang warfare, which was semi-ritualized and involved set patterns of dramatic public violence that provided local neighbourhood inhabitants with an ‘early warning system’, thereby functioning as a means of circumscribing broader urban insecurity (see Rodgers, 2006, for more details). In the cases of both delinquency and warfare, however, it was telling that gang members always sought to commit their acts of violence very publicly, with a certain insouciant style and cheerfully exuberant panache, something that points to delinquency having constituted something of a ‘cultural performance’ (Linger, 1992: 9). This could especially be observed during gang warfare, as gang members recklessly threw themselves into fighting, with an obvious enthusiasm and performative flamboyance which only added to the ritualized nature of the fighting. Another of Bismarck’s fellow gang members called Julio, for example, systematically sought to expose himself to gunfire during battles in order to better ‘defy’ his adversaries, ‘daring them to do their best to injure me seriously’, as he put it. ⁶

Such actions arguably constituted the basis for a communal ‘aesthetic pleasure’, very much along the lines described by Maurice Bloch (1996: 216) in relation to the appreciation of youth violence among the Merina and Zafimaniry of Madagascar. There existed a clear sense of identification with the local gang in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, and residents would constantly swap stories about it, exchanging eyewitness accounts about gang wars, spreading rumours and re-telling various incidents over and over again, thereby converting the gang and its violence into a symbolic medium for the constitution of a neighbourhood social imaginary. This was by no means exceptional or anodyne. As Katherine Isbester (1996: 455) has starkly highlighted, the legacy of civil war from the 1980s, a stringent structural adjustment programme, high levels of corruption, political disillusion and polarization, declining international aid, and a profound economic crisis all contributed to a process of ‘state and societal disintegration’ in Nicaragua during the 1990s. This was especially acute in urban areas, where the erosion of what might be termed a sense of ‘ontological security’ (Giddens, 1990: 92) reached such levels that neighbours turned on neighbours, families and households fell apart, and suspicion and desconfianza (distrust) became the major characteristics of neighbourhood life (see Lancaster, 1992; Rodgers, 2007d). Urban gang violence became the principle institutional vehicle for the continuation of a sense of collective belonging, and in doing so was arguably analogous to Benjamin’s lawmaking violence or, in other words, a performative phenomenon that aimed at establishing a baseline reference point for the organization of community life in circumstances that were otherwise lacking any other form of social integration.

I left Nicaragua in July 1997, after a year of fieldwork, and rapidly lost touch with people in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández over the course of the next few years as my letters went unanswered, and telephone calls proved costly and difficult to arrange in a neighbourhood where there were only a dozen landlines. I was able to return in February 2002, however. As is often wont to happen following long absences, everything seemed to have changed, including in particular the neighbourhood gang, which had evolved, and was smaller, meaner, and was much more profit-oriented than in the past. A significant proportion of neighbourhood households were also very visibly much better off than before, with over half of what had previously been a relatively uniform collection of ramshackle, monochrome wooden houses completely remodelled and rebuilt out of often brightly painted concrete blocks. But perhaps the most immediately striking change that I noted on the day of my return was the physical transformation that Bismarck had undergone, mutating from a wire-thin youth to an oversize giant who must have been approaching 200 kg, and whom I did not recognize when he greeted me:

‘Oye, Dennis, good to see you! How have you been? It’s been ages since you were here!’

‘I know, I know, sorry about that, the will was there but not the means, and I couldn’t afford to make it back until now,’ I answered. ‘But I’m doing well, thanks, and it’s good to be back! I’m afraid, though, that you’re going to have to refresh my memory as to who you are as it’s been so long that I don’t recognize you.’

‘No jodás, you don’t remember me? Hah! Well, I guess it’s true that I’ve changed quite a bit since you were last here. But you should remember me, we did lots of interviews together, and you also took a photo of me, don’t you remember? The one of the two kids on a bicycle? That was me, with Jader!’

‘Fuck! Bismarck? What the hell happened to you? ¡Te pusiste gordíssimo, maje! (You’ve become monstrously fat, mate!).’

‘Así pasa, broder … (Such is life, brother …). And in any case, you’re one to talk, you’ve put weight on too! Anyway, we’ll talk like old times, and I’ll tell you everything about how my life has changed. Everything’s completely different, I’ve got my own house now, my own business, a wife, and even a daughter!’

Bismarck was a púsher, that is to say a middle-level drug dealer, but even at the bottom of the pyramid the potential rewards of drug trafficking in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández were substantial. Muleros made between US$350 and US$600 a month selling on street corners, for example, while a bodeguero could be paid anything from US$15 to US$70 a month to keep drugs, depending on the quantity and the length of time they had to be stored. I have less detailed information about the narco’s income levels, although it was clear that these were much higher. He owned two houses in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, at least two in other neighbourhoods – one of which had two storeys, something that is relatively rare and a sign of conspicuous affluence in earthquake-prone Managua – two motorbikes, and a fleet of eight cars, six of which were ‘working’ as taxis. This generalized affluence across all levels of the drug-dealing pyramid of course contrasts strongly with Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh’s (2000: 757, 771) famous analysis of the finances of a drug-dealing gang in Chicago, which found that most of those involved earned little more than ‘roughly the minimum wage’, as a result of which ‘gang members below the level of gang leaders live with family because they cannot afford to maintain a separate residence’. This observation provided the basis for a well-known chapter in Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s (2005: 105) best-selling popular book Freakonomics – drolly entitled ‘Why do drug dealers still live with their moms?’ – in which they contended that ‘the problem of crack dealing is [that] … a lot of people are competing for a very few prizes [and] … an immutable law of labor [is that] when there are a lot of people willing and able to do a job, that job generally doesn’t pay well’.

This, however, only applies to contexts where drug-selling occurs in a relatively open and competitive urban labour market, which does not require particular skills – something that was not the case in the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández drug economy. This was in fact a highly exclusive component of an extremely segmented urban labour market that generally offered few opportunities to local neighbourhood inhabitants (see Rodgers, 2008). There were major requirements for entering into drug dealing, as the fact that the 29 individuals directly involved amounted to just over 1 percent of the barrio Luis Fanor Hernández economically active population highlights well. Their common point was that they were all either former or current gang members, which was significant – and indeed to a certain extent logical – insofar as the illicit nature of the drug trade means that drug dealers do not have access to legally enforceable contracts or property rights, and violence rapidly emerges as a primary tool with which disputes are resolved and uncertainty minimized (Goldstein, 1985). Gang members were local ‘violence specialists’ (Tilly, 2003), and therefore positioned in a privileged manner to engage in drug dealing by virtue of their violent comparative advantage, but also the particular nature of drug dealing as an occupation that sustained patterns of violent behaviour.

Certainly, there were numerous continuities between gang violence in the 1990s and drug-related violence in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández in the early 2000s. Not only did they involve the same individual social actors, but their prior experiences as gang members were very much what enabled them to be successful drug dealers. Bismarck, for example, can be said to have effectively undergone something of an ‘apprenticeship’ in the use of violence when he was a gang member during the 1990s, experimenting with different forms of brutality in different contexts over time, learning little by little. This previous exposure to violence clearly made him much more confident and strategic in his deployment of brutality as a drug dealer, to the extent that he actually rarely resorted to violence, relying instead principally on its threat, particularly as it was known that he always carried a hand gun. ‘I know what violence is and how to use it’, he once told me, ‘and I also know when to use it’. Indeed, whenever Bismarck did become actively violent during the course of his drug dealing, he would either do so in a very measured way, for example slapping somebody in order to humiliate them, or else very spectacularly, as for instance occurred when he shot a regular client who owed him money in the foot in order ‘to teach him not to double-cross me’ when this person came into the neighbourhood to buy some crack from another púsher rather than pay his debt to Bismarck.

At the same time, however, gang violence in the mid-1990s and drug-related violence in the 2000s also constituted significantly different phenomena. The logic of drug dealing was very different from that of either gang delinquency or warfare, for example. While the former were very much underpinned by a social impulse, the violence associated with the regulation of the drug economy was parochial and profit-oriented. Due to drugs, barrio Luis Fanor Hernández was a much more unequal community in the 2000s than in the 1990s, to the extent that drug trafficking can plausibly be said to have constituted something of a process of ‘primitive accumulation’, with drug dealers such as Bismarck violently establishing themselves as a local ‘narco-bourgeoisie’, making it good within a context of otherwise extreme poverty and limited alternative opportunities for capital accumulation (see Rodgers, 2007c).

Seen in this light, the logic of drug dealing was clearly much more ‘prescriptive’ than that of the gang delinquency and warfare of the 1990s. In particular, it instrumentally forced a particular dynamic on local community life in a way that can be assimilated to Benjamin’s law-preserving violence. While the lawmaking gang violence of the 1990s had effectively been socially sanctioned by the local community, this was not the case of the law-preserving violence of the 2000s, which amounted to a reign of terror for those not involved in drug dealing. Drug-dealing gang members would aggressively ‘patrol’ the neighbourhood, randomly intimidating local inhabitants, arbitrarily threatening and beating individuals in the streets, and carrying out petty property thefts in order to pre-empt denunciations and ensure that drug dealing could occur unimpeded. Individuals who were suspected of having ‘grassed’ or who had impeded a drug transaction were specifically targeted. In March 2002, for example, gang members beat up the son of an elderly neighbourhood inhabitant who lived next to a púsher’s house, as a warning after she had thrown a bucket of water on crack buyers who had knocked on her door by mistake. Most dramatically, in November 2002, gang members mobilized a crowd and set fire to the house of an individual whom they suspected had called the police to denounce them.

The contextually high rate of return from drug dealing for those who could be involved clearly meant that they had an ongoing incentive to maintain the status quo, which meant that it was a surprise to discover that Bismarck had got out of the drug business when I next returned to barrio Luis Fanor Hernandez in 2007. ‘So you’re no longer selling drugs?’, I asked him, during our usual interview.

‘No, no, I stopped about a year, a year and a half ago.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, on the one hand, el Indio viejo was arrested, and so it became more difficult to buy the cocaine in the barrio. This was only for a few months, though, until he managed to get his affairs sorted out from prison, and he’s started selling again through his wife and mother, but I took the opportunity to get out of the business. I was able to say that because of the break I didn’t have any money to buy regularly anymore, because I’d spent my savings, but what really happened was that several things occurred which made me think, including almost getting caught myself, and I figured it was a good time to get out … In any case, el Indio viejo sells much less now, and there’s only a few expendios [drug dispensaries] left in the neighbourhood, it’s no longer a big drug dealing neighbourhood like it was in the past. Most business has moved to other neighbourhoods, including especially barrio Nosara next door, which is where el Indio viejo’s wife and mother run his business from.’

‘I heard that the narco was arrested transporting drugs, but I never understood why, because I thought he never did anything himself, and had loads of people working for him.’

‘He did, but this was exceptional. Somebody had ordered 20 kilos of cocaine at the last minute, and he was all alone because he’d sent all his workers on a paid holiday to Montelimar.’

‘He sent them where?’, I spluttered.

‘Montelimar, you know, the seaside resort.’

‘I know what Montelimar is, but I can’t believe that the neighbourhood narco sent his workers on a paid holiday there! It’s seriously luxurious!’

‘Sure, what do you think? The narco was a good employer, he took care of his workers. He paid them well too, and this included paying for holidays and things.’

‘I can’t believe this! It’s completely surreal! Anyway, so because of all his workers having a good time in Montelimar he had to transport the drugs himself?’

‘That’s how it was, and the transport police caught him on the main road.’

‘Do you think somebody tipped them off?’

‘Not as far as I know, I think it may just have been bad luck that he was stopped. But el Indio viejo had it coming in any case, for sure. What happens is that when one reaches a certain point, when your business reaches a certain size, you can’t be a family enterprise any more, and you have to employ people who you don’t know that you can trust. So you become vulnerable. Many people, including me, had been telling the narco to retire, that he had made enough to live comfortably for the rest of his life, and to pass on something to his children, but the thing is that it’s always difficult to stop. When you’re making good money, you always want more. That’s how it is. What ultimately made el Indio viejo fall was his greed, because he should have never taken the risk of transporting the drugs himself, but he did it because he didn’t want to lose out on the profits from selling 20 kilos. It would have been a lot of money, for sure, but you have to know how to stop before you fall, and he didn’t.’

‘So what are you doing now if you’re not dealing drugs?’

‘I’ve got these new businesses which I’ve set up with the money I made from selling drugs – I’ve diversified, Dennis!’

‘Uh-huh, and to what?’

‘Well, like a year ago I bought a ranchón (night club), but the stupid place didn’t make any money, so I sold it a few days ago to some sucker who thinks he can make it work. Good luck to him, I say!’

‘How much did you get for it?’

‘US$40,000.’

‘Hey, that’s a good sum of money! What are you going to do with it?’

‘I don’t know yet, I’m thinking again that I might buy a pulpería, here in the barrio, at least I know how this place works, and what people want. With that amount of money, I could buy one that already exists in a good location, with nobody else around it. Or I might expand my shop at the Huembes market instead. I haven’t decided yet.’

‘You have a shop at the Huembes? What does it sell? Is it a proper shop or is it a stall?’

‘No, no, it’s a proper shop, and it sells secondhand clothes.’

‘Wow, that’s something different! … So how did you go about setting up your shop? Have you bought it or do you rent it? And why did you set it up in the Huembes?’

‘Well, the Huembes market is a good place to have a shop because it’s nearby, you save on transport costs, and I know the place well, because I used to hang around there all the time when I was in the gang. So what I did was that I went to the market authorities and told them that I wanted to buy a shop, and they offered me this one, which was in a good location, and so I said yes.’

‘How much did it cost?’

‘I bought it on credit, so I had to pay US$3,000 up front, and then I have to pay a cuota [monthly instalment] which varies depending on how much I sell.’

‘So this is all legal and official?’

‘Yes, it’s all authorized by COMMEMA [the Corporación Municipal de los Mercados de Managua, or Municipal Managua Markets Corporation]. I have a property title, and authorization to sell, and I pay a monthly business tax of 200 córdobas to COMMEMA. I’ve also just finished remodelling it, to make it look modern and all. I spent 5,000 córdobas, and it looks really good now, like a real store in one of the commercial malls. It’s got to have the right onda, you know, otherwise it won’t work, people won’t come. You should go and see it for yourself.’

‘I will. When are you there?’

‘I’m not there very often, I’ve got family working there for me, and since they’re family, it means I just have to feed them, and occasionally let them take a shirt or a pair of trousers if there’s something they really like. That’s also one way I cut costs, when family work for you it’s always cheaper, and you can also trust them not to rob you. I also have some of the barrio gang members look after the store at night, and I only have to give them a few pesos from time to time to do that, or a beer or soda, or whatever, and it’s much cheaper than the official market vigilancia. I know them, because I was a gang member myself, and it also means that they won’t stiff me and rob the store.’

‘It sounds like you’ve got it all worked out!’

‘Yes, and God willing, if this works out well, I’ll be able to expand, and this way my kids will have a whole chain of stores to help them survive in the future, once I’m gone.’

‘Well, I suspect that you’re not likely to die for some time, Bismarck, especially now that you’ve got out of drug dealing. Selling secondhand clothes is a much less dangerous occupation!’

‘Heh, heh! That it is, Dennis, that it is …’

He obtained the corner store in a non-violent manner conforming to standard property market practices, but built his motorcycle mechanic’s workshop on public land near his home. When I discussed this with him during an interview in 2012, he said that he didn’t care, and rhetorically dared anybody to challenge him, declaring that he would ‘deal with them’. The three houses, on the other hand, he acquired in a coercive manner. He purchased the first house by forcing the family of an individual who had to go on the run after almost being lynched when caught raping a young girl to sell him their property at a major discount by threatening to set a crowd on them, something that was reminiscent of some of the tactics that gang members used in the early 2000s to create a climate of terror to avoid any denunciation of the drugs trade. The second house happened to be owned by a drug addict who had been one of Bismarck’s most faithful clients when he had been a drug dealer, and he was able to ‘persuade’ him to sell it to him by threatening to have the neighbourhood drug dealers cut him off. The occupants of the third house saw the writing on the wall and directly approached Bismarck, asking him to make an offer for their house, which they accepted on the spot, and then moved out speedily, something that caused Bismarck great mirth. Indeed, during an interview in 2014, he cheerfully mentioned how this had led to his gaining a reputation in the neighbourhood which ‘has enabled me to buy several other properties cheaply, at less than market prices’.

Seen from this perspective, Bismarck’s brutality can plausibly be assimilated to what Benjamin described as law-destroying violence, insofar as it undermined the basis for the established property exchange regime in the neighbourhood. The new order that this has enabled is a violent one, however, as Bismarck regularly resorts to violence to run his property business, frequently beating up rent defaulters, for example, something that most other landlords in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández do not do, partly because it is formally illegal, but also because a majority of those renting out individual rooms in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández are women, and most do not have the same capacity for violence as Bismarck. It was clear that Bismarck’s past experiences as a gang member and then a drug dealer had provided him with an ‘expertise’ that allowed him to engage in violence, and this in turn permitted him to be a successful slum lord. At the same time, the interconnections between these different forms of violence have both been enabled by the broader urban environment – including in particular the nature of the labour market – but have also actively locally shaped it in ways ranging from the way that barrio Luis Fanor Hernández is conceived and lived by local inhabitants to the nature of its infrastructural fabric and property market.

Conclusion

This article has explored the nature of urban violence by considering the evolving role that the phenomenon has played in different stages of the life of Bismarck, a gang member turned drug dealer turned property entrepreneur. It has traced how different instances of brutality can be categorized according to distinct Benjaminian logics, but also how they interrelate with each other over time. In doing so, they not only highlight the fact that urban violence is far from being a singular phenomenon related to a putatively universal city-dwelling condition, but also that it is a systemic one that intertwines with a range of urban social processes and relations. Seen from this perspective, it is clear that rather than being an external force impacting on the urban fabric from the outside looking in, it is one that very much permeates the urban universe, and is interwoven into the social relations of cities. This can sometimes occur in a destructive manner, but in other instances violence can clearly contribute to constituting this urban fabric. This was obviously the case of the gang violence that Bismarck was involved in during the 1990s, for example, which it can be argued constituted a form of urban violence that did not so much reflect the putatively disorganizing nature of urban contexts but was rather a positive response to such a situation, generated from within rather than without the city, and offering a form through which urbanity was collectively experienced in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández. Having said this, it can clearly also be contended that gang violence constituted something of a ‘Nietzschean laugh’ – to adapt a comment made by Benjamin (cited in Wohlfarth, 1994: 163) – insofar as it might have permitted the continuation of urban social life but did not manage to ‘acquire it’ in any meaningful and sustainable manner.

Certainly, the fact that the community-generating gang violence of the 1990s gave way to a much more parochial drug-related violence in the 2000s highlights how, if anything, violence became detached from the urban order as this manifested itself in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, as the latter was clearly primarily related to the particular nature of the economic activity it was associated with (even if to a certain extent the nature of this particularity can also be linked to the broader nature of the urban labour market). This disconnection is perhaps even more noticeable in relation to Bismarck’s brutality linked to his property entrepreneurship. Although this can partly be linked to broader urban processes, including in particular the constrained nature of the labour market, it was clearly principally a function of the type of person he is, and to the way he has been constituted by his particular life trajectory. This of course reinforces the notion that this iteration of his violence is a form of law-destroying violence, insofar as Bismarck here is highly reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s (1986b [1978]: 301–3) famous ‘destructive character’, who is ‘young and cheerful’, and ‘sees a way everywhere, [as a result of which] he has to clear things from it everywhere. Not always by brute force; sometimes by the most refined. Because he sees ways everywhere, he always positions himself at crossroads … What exists he reduces to rubble, not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it’. From this rubble, however, a new order can emerge, and it will be interesting to see what will be the next iteration of Bismarck’s trajectory.

More generally, however, seen in the light of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, Bismarck’s trajectory so far suggests that a tripartite critique of urban violence can be formulated. Firstly, urban violence is neither a singular nor a socially external phenomenon, but rather it is manifold and can also be associated with multiple socio-economic processes in cities, sometimes to the extent of being deeply – and contradictorily – embedded within the urban fabric. Secondly, urban violence is not a solely destructive phenomenon but rather one that can offer significant individual and collective dividends, both intrinsically and instrumentally. Finally, different iterations of urban violence intertwine and interrelate together in systemic and dynamic ways, often dialectically but not always sustainably, and in doing so impact on their context and environment. When seen from the perspective of this critique, the question, then, is less whether violence can be said to be a particular hallmark of urban contexts but, rather, how do different types of articulations of violence emerge in cities, when are they destructive, when are they productive, and why it is that violence can play such contrasting roles in our lives? As Bismarck’s trajectory highlights well, however, this is ultimately a function of ‘a conjunction of heterogeneous activities, modes of production, and institutional forms’ in which ‘the specific operations and scopes of these conjunctions are constantly negotiated and depend on the particular histories, understandings, networks, styles, and inclinations of the actors involved’ (Simone, 2004: 410).