Gangs

The presence of youth gangs, drug warlords and their enforcers, criminal bands, and other violence brokers in Latin American cities is a phenomenon that emerged in the 1980s. The appearance of these urban-based armed gangs was accompanied by the fragmentation and deterioration of urban areas, a by-product of the economic crisis of the 1980s and its massive spin-off of trans-generational poverty, informality of economy and society (labor without formal labour rights and formal protection by the law), and increasing social exclusion. Geographically, this process surfaced in the expansion and consolidation of the huge metropolitan slums of Latin America.

Poverty and violence are facts of everyday life in cities fractured by inequality, exclusion, and inadequate municipal administration. Persistent social exclusion, linked to alternative (i.e., informal and/or illicit) sources of income and power, combined with absent or failing national and municipal authorities, provides the means and motives for violence and intergang mini-wars. The whole or partial withdrawal of the national and municipal security functions (e.g., the police, the judiciary) in poor urban areas such as favelas, barrios, and comunas o barriadas generates a system of territorial "governance voids," where civilians fill the gap left by the legitimate (local) authorities. Governance voids exist where the legal authorities and the representatives of law and order are absent or only symbolically present. In these local vacuums of "regular" law and order, a kind of osmotic symbiosis emerges between the state (the police, the law system) and "common" criminals and criminalized former members of the armed forces, the police, paramilitary units, and, sometimes, guerrilla combatants. In this situation, "law and order" is the result of a fluctuating order of parallel forces of local power players in shifting alliances. The political dimension of this phenomenon is that the national and municipal authorities oscillate between selective involvement and abandonment. In these governance voids—generally smaller enclaves of territorial violence—informal or parallel structures arise, seeking various forms of confrontation or accommodation with the legitimate authorities and with civil society.

In many cases, the police and the judiciary are ineffective in dealing with crime and violence. Sometimes they are the most active protagonists. At present, in many of the largest Latin American cities the police are highly distrusted and often seen as the most undesirable of all the armed groups in the slums and poor neighborhoods. Even the explicitly violent youth gang leaders and drug lords—who at least are residents of the poor neighborhoods—are less hated than the formal representatives of legitimate law, order, and public security, who are widely detested for their militarized approach and warlike tactics. This sentiment has been voiced time and again by leaders of slum associations and federations and confederations of poor neighborhood organizations across the Latin American and Caribbean region. The urban poor are disproportionally affected by violence and criminals: This has been demonstrated by anthropological and sociological research in the major cities of Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru during the 1990s and 2000s. This research often comes under the heading "divided" or "fragmented cities"—cidades partidas in Brazil and ciudades divididas in the Spanish-speaking Americas—and indicate an "uncivil society" in the larger cities of Latin America and the Caribbean. Scholarly attention to this relatively new problem of urban violence has been reinforced by moving and critically acclaimed films, such as City of God (Cidade de Deus, 2002), which depicts youth gangs and mini-narco-wars in a well-known favela of Rio de Janeiro, and Carandiru (2003), a film about Latin America's largest prison, in São Paulo, which culminates in the police's ruthless repression of an inmate rebellion that leaves 111 prisoners dead.

BRAZIL

In the metropolitan cities of Brazil a spatial segregation has taken place, resulting in the formation of hundreds of local favelas where children and adolescents gain prestige, income, identity, and respect through criminal activities associated with drugs and violence. The formal labor market is not easily accessible to slum dwellers, and informal and illegal work is the alternative. Most of the informal jobs involve low-paid, microentrepreneurial or self-employment activities. Drug-related opportunities of the illicit economy are more attractive to many, particularly the favela youth. In cities such as Rio de Janeiro, law and justice often is represented by the local drug traffickers (traficantes) and their drug gangs (quadrilhas). The traficante dominates significant aspects of the favela economy, and his political weight must be acknowledged on matters of codes of conduct, protection, and contact with rivals and with the municipal authorities, including the police and the judiciary. Infractions are severely sanctioned, often by expulsion or by death. Sometimes the traficante is also the local development benefactor, financing educational and recreational facilities, sports clubs, religious centers, and various community groups. Employers and enforcers in the drugs trade act as the local mediators, judges, and punishers. In 2007 these local drugs associations were loosely organized in several city-wide factions; even in the penal institutions the differences between the rival factions are strictly perceived. Conflicts between competing factions occur frequently; when mini-wars spill out of the favelas into public consciousness, the police enter the favelas with hundreds of special troops. Then the favela communities are caught between two competing armed groups on different sides of the law, and the effect typically is distrust, even hatred, toward the official representatives of law and order and the municipal authorities. Since the 1980s a continuous cycle of violence and repression has been one of the leading characteristics of everyday life in large segments of the Brazilian urban environment.

CARIBBEAN COUNTRIES

In the case of the Caribbean—and of Central America—migration flows and of previous deportation schemes from the United States influenced the origin of youth gangs and drug-related bands. Violence and drugs determine the ambience in which armed youth gangs operate in Kingston, Jamaica. The first territorial gangs operated in the city's ghettos and slums where the underprivileged and the poor received a hard-handed "suggestion" during electoral campaigns. Clientelist political entrenchment to a system of bipartisan political representation was accompanied, from the 1970s on, by gunmen organized in gangs and affiliated to one of the two political parties. More than half of the constituencies of the poor Kingston districts are characterized by ingrained preferences for political candidates. Whereas politicians previously protected ganja trading and drugs bosses, the affluence of the drugs money started to reverse the relation between gangs, drugs and political support. In the 1980s a crack and cocaine trafficking network was consolidated in Kingston—in fact, across Jamaica—with linkages to the Colombian producer market and the U.S. and European consumer markets. In the early twenty-first century, drugs gangs finance politicians and even share part of the drugs surplus with the police to buy "protection." The Jamaican posse—a loose collection of Jamaican gangs—have established "posse colonies" on the U.S. West Coast and especially in New York City. The U.S. posses and their British affiliates—called "yardies"—are notorious for their use of violence in drugs-related activities.

CENTRAL AMERICA

Violence is also the characteristic of the Central American maras, youth gangs in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and—in lesser degree—Nicaragua. The maras emerged during the 1980s and were consolidated after the Central American Peace Agreements in the 1990s. The names of the oldest maras in San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, and San Pedro Sula are reminders of their U.S. origins: The Salvadoran maras Salvatruchas and Barrio 18, for example, are named after Salvadoran street gangs in Los Angeles, and were formed by gang leaders deported from the United States to El Salvador. Maras proliferated in the poor barrios in Central America's most important cities, recruiting the unemployed—and unemployable, because of their tattoos—young boys and girls in the slums. In 2007 the maras were considered a serious threat to national security in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala. The estimates of their affiliates vary widely, from 10,000 to 35,000 in each country. In the early twenty-first century the number of victims of mara violence had already surpassed the number of victims of the civil war in the 1980s. In 2003 deaths from mara confrontations accounted for 45 percent of all homicides in El Salvador and Honduras and for 20 percent of homicides in Guatemala.

The mareros (mara members) form a very loose collection of rival gangs engaged in disputes over small territories. Their subsistence is guaranteed by extortion of local smallholders, taxi drivers, and transporters, and by petty drugs trafficking. They have comparable repertoires of rituals, tattoos, codes of conduct, internal loyalty, and extreme violence in order to "be respected." The Central American authorities have specific anti-mara laws and special anti-mara units, formed from the armed forces and the national police. In Nicaragua and Costa Rica, where the national police have elaborate intelligence networks and rely strongly on community policing, there are considerably fewer local maras.

COLOMBIA

Of all the Latin American countries, Colombia is the country most plagued by armed gangs of various kinds. Organized crime associated with the drug economy manifested itself openly in Colombia in the 1980s, and Medellín and Cali acquired a lugubrious reputation as the capital cities of the world's major drugs cartels—criminal rings that controlled the regional illicit economy. Bogotá was less affected, but the southern sectors of the city, where the poor neighborhoods are concentrated, is a territory of violence. In Medellín, the worst affected, after the destruction of the drug cartels by army and police in 1993 about 250 mini-cartels were established, each with its associated sicarios (young hired assassins) and oficinas (cartel-controlled outfits and enforcers). The possibility of controlling urban territories attracted other power players—urban-guerrilla units (frentes), criminal gangs (bandas, combos, and parches, a typology in descending order of violence and internal organization), and paramilitary units (bloques)—who disputed local territories and sometimes fought mini-wars over the control of a few street blocks. Between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s Medellín was the theater of continuously shifting territorial wars in shifting alliances, always accompanied by violence, extortion, and deaths. Sometimes the municipal administration succeeded in negotiating local pacts and cease-fires. But the variety of (state and nonstate) armed groups, and the fact that most gangs are fuelled by the illicit economy, was a certain guarantee that after a while a new succession of urban mini-wars would erupt. The national pact between the government and the paramilitary forces, and the subsequent disarmament and reintegration of most of the rank-and-file members, resulted in a substantial reduction of the urban violence. As of 2007, Cali was becoming a new focal point of urban violence, with a growing presence of criminal bands and guerrilla frentes moving from the Amazon regions of the country to the Pacific Coast to safeguard "their" drug trafficking corridors.

Colombia's cities are not the only areas affected by violence and criminality. The disputed drug regions, the (former) zones of paramilitary forces, and the territories of guerrilla influence are mostly in the country's periphery: in the mountains of the three cordilleras (mountain ranges), in the northeastern and northwestern Pacific and Atlantic Coast zones, in the Amazon regions, and in the frontier regions with Ecuador, Brazil, and Venezuela. These are also the regions of illicit coca cultivation protected by the drug gangs, the remaining paramilitary forces, and the criminalized segments of the guerrilla. Armed disputes over control of the regional economy by contesting gangs, bands, and other armed groups; interventions by the Colombian armed forces; and the effects of the Colombian and U.S. spraying programs account for most of the internally displaced persons. This refugee stream and the inhabitants of the large urban slums provide a continuous recruitment reservoir of new rank-and-file members for Colombia's manifold gangs and armed groups.

See alsoCities and Urbanization; Drugs and Drug Trade.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chaves Pandolfi, Dulce, and Mario Grynszpan. A favela fala: Depoimentos ao CPDOC. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getulio Vargas, 2003.

Clarke, Colin. "Politics, Violence, and Drugs in Kingston, Jamaica." Bulletin of Latin American Research 25, no. 3 (2006): 420-440.

Koonings, Kees, and Dirk Kruijt, eds. Fractured Cities: Social Exclusion, Urban Violence, and Contested Spaces in Latin America. London: Zed Books, 2007.

Moser, Caroline, and Cathy Mcllwaine. Encounters with Violence in Latin America: Urban Poor Conceptions from Colombia and Guatemala. London: Routledge, 2004.

Rotker, Suzana, Katherine Goldman, and Jorge Balán, eds. Citizens of Fear: Urban Violence in Latin America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002.

Ventura, Zuemir. Cidade partida, 1st edition. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Companhía das Letras, 2002.

Walton, John. "Guadalajara: Creating the Divided city." In Metropolitan Problems and Governmental Responses in Latin America, edited by Wayne Cornelius and R. U. Kemper. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1976.

                                        Dirk Kruijt