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.
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.
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.
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.
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.