Urban Spaces

Last year Sérgio Cabral, governor of Brazil's Rio de Janeiro State, praised the Colombian government's success in reducing violence in Bogotá. Formerly one of the most dangerous cities in the world, Bogotá has seen a dramatic decrease in violent crime rates in the last five years. Cabral announced that he intended to transplant the Colombian model to Rio de Janeiro, but he has since changed his mind. Bogotá's new urban order, he may have realized, resulted not from the rule of law, but from the rule of private right-wing militias.

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, rancherías. 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.

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.

At 13,000 feet, the hip hop movement in El Alto, Bolivia is probably the highest in the world. The music blends ancient Andean folk styles and new hip hop beats with lyrics about revolution and social change.