Urban Latin America: Space, Security and Struggle

With about three quarters of its population living in dense settlements, Latin America is the planet’s most urbanized region. It is also its most unequal. The well-to-do enclaves of major cities often stand shoulder to shoulder with vast poor areas, variously known as barriadas, barrios marginales, colonias, favelas, inquilinatos, rancherias. Though Latin American urban segregation traces back to the colonial era, most of today’s so-called megaslums and satellite cities have arisen in the last 40 years with rural-to-urban migration, which resulted in an almost 40% growth in the region’s urban population between 1960 and 2000.

July/August
2007
Volume: 
40
Number: 
4

Taking Note

Alejandro Reuss
The backlash against neoliberalism in Latin America is now leading to confrontations between several of the region’s governments and the two major international lending institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In the span of just a few weeks in May, President Rafael Correa announced that Ecuador was expelling the World Bank’s representative from the country; President Hugo Chávez announced that Venezuela would be withdrawing from both the Bank and the IMF; and Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Venezuela all announced their intention to withdraw from the World Bank–affiliated International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

Intro

NACLA
With about three quarters of its population living in dense settlements, Latin America is the planet’s most urbanized region. It is also its most unequal. Though Latin American urban segregation traces back to the colonial era, most of today’s so-called megaslums and satellite cities have arisen in the last 40 years with rural-to-urban migration, which resulted in an almost 40% growth in the region’s urban population between 1960 and 2000.

Updates

Teo Ballvé
Bolivia joined ALBA in 2006, and the government has earmarked $1.5 million for quinoa growers out of the $100 million provided by Chávez for investments benefiting small farmers. This will include credit for at least five quinoa-related projects in the southern altiplano.
John Horne
C.L.R. James’s classic book Beyond a Boundary portrayed, arguably better than any before or since, the relation between cricket and anti-colonialism in the Caribbean. One wonders how the Trinidadian Marxist critic, known to his close friends as Nello (a diminutive of his middle name, Lionel), would have reacted to Mello, the mascot of the Cricket World Cup (CWC), held for the first time in the Caribbean this year.

Report

Cristian Alarcón and Rossana Reguillo
This biographical account of Fredi, an orphaned Salvadoran refugee turned marero, or gang member, traces a translocal migrant’s itinerary through various cities, peoples, and places. Revealing a complex topography of urban violence, Fredi’s story reconstructs the reterritorialization and resignification implied in the practices of pariahs and the expelled, despite the spectacular policies of security, walls, and border controls, founding a parallel order to that of official legality.
Paul Dosh
Famous for its entire districts that began as massive illegal land invasions, Peru’s capital city, Lima, offers a window into the enduring legacy of informality. With a population of almost 9 million, Lima is the region’s fifth largest city and is often viewed as a sad caricature of all that is wrong with urban Latin America: sprawling, polluted, and poor.
Luke McLeod-Roberts
As Rio de Janeiro prepared to host July’s Pan American Games, the largest sporting event in the hemisphere, private paramilitaries occupied favelas near two of the city’s main highways, in an apparent effort to impose security near crucial tourist infrastructure. A NACLA investigation, supported by the Samuel Chavkin Investigative Journalism Fund, finds that for many favela residents, the militias are little better than the gangs or corrupt police they have replaced.
Thelma Mejía
With the rise of zero tolerance, or mano dura (“iron fist”), policing in Honduras, the capital city has experienced a kind of metamorphosis. Once home to a thriving nightlife, Tegucigalpa now shuts down by 2 a.m., in accordance with a curfew imposed last year by the city government. Residents must be in their homes by that time, and anyone wanting to host a party in their house must request permission from the municipal government.
Xavier Albó
The city of El Alto, Bolivia, jumped to international headlines with the outbreak of the “Red October” uprising of 2003. In a matter of days, a massive popular revolt in this unknown city forced President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, a darling of international lending organizations for his model structural adjustment program, to quickly tender his resignation and flee the country.

Reviews

NACLA
From Silver to Cocaine, edited by Topik, Marichal, and Frank; Brewing Justice by Daniel Jaffee; and Unraveling the Garment Industry, by Ethel C. Brooks.
Corinna Zeltsman
In 1999, between the camera flashes of a reelection campaign, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori explicitly supported a Canadian company’s plans to dig a massive gold mine directly over Tambogrande, an agricultural community on Peru’s northern coast. A year later, a truck traveling to the active Yanacocha gold mine in the neighboring mountain region silently spilled 332 pounds of mercury along 25 miles of highway, including the unpaved roads of Choropampa, a small market town on the mine’s outskirts. For residents of both Tambogrande and Choropampa, these events marked the beginning of lengthy and anguished entanglements with the transnational mining corporations that make Peru the world’s foremost gold producer.
Christy Thornton
Since the mid-1970s this country has seen the spectacular growth of what is increasingly coming to be called the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC)—a sprawling constellation of private foundations, service organizations, charities, and institutionalized movement groups operating under 501(c)(3), a somewhat arcane IRS provision that exempts recognized organizations from paying income tax.

Interview

Linda Farthing
Silvia Rvera Cusicanqui is a Bolivian sociologist, activist, and public intellectual who teaches at the Universidad Mayor de San Andres in La Paz and advises President Evo Morales’s government on coca issues. She co-founded the Workshop on Andean Oral History and has taught throughout the Americas, most recently at the University of Pittsburgh.

¡YA! Youth Activism

Jason Wallach
Despite a vigorous nationwide search and a handful of traffic-snarling protests, Edward Francisco Contreras is still missing. The 21-year-old student activist disappeared February 7, and his father and friends say they have made little headway in finding him.