In this guest post, Dr Ana Beraldo describes the results of her research ‘Violence, solidarity, and community: Managing ordinary life on the margins of Latin America’s unequal cities’, funded by an International Fellowship from the Urban Studies Foundation and hosted at the Urban School of Sciences Po (France), under the mentorship of Prof Gabriel Feltran.
Latin America and the Caribbean have concentrated a large share of the world’s lethal violence for decades. Many of these deaths are linked, in one way or another, to illegal markets (UNODC, 2023). Homicide is the most visible and countable form of violence, but it never happens in isolation. Petty crime, extortion, political violence, and sexual violence are also features of life in many of the continent’s territories, and are frequently part of the same dynamics. Of course, these vary enormously between countries and between cities. Still, it is safe to say that violence is one of Latin Americans’ most pressing worries.
But what do these dynamics look like at the micro scale? How does ordinary life unfold in the urban margins, where violence is part of the landscape? What effects does it have on people’s lives, and how do people cope with it? How does it shape urban experience in the most marginalised areas of our cities, among the most vulnerable parts of the population?
During my USF International Fellowship, I explored these questions by comparing two territories that their own residents describe as ‘dangerous’: a favela in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, which I call Morro da Luz, and a villa (slum) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which I call Villa Luna. I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in both, following daily life up close.
Two ‘dangerous’ places, two very different daily lives
Reliable homicide data at the neighbourhood level are not available for either site. City-level figures exist, though. In 2017, the year of my most intensive fieldwork in Belo Horizonte, the city’s rate was 26.70 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants (IPEA and FBSP, 2019), which corresponds to 523 homicides. In 2022, the year of my most intensive fieldwork in Buenos Aires, the city registered 89 homicides (2.88 per 100,000) (SNIC, 2024). It is reasonable to assume that homicides in both cities are concentrated in specific hotspots, and that both Morro da Luz and Villa Luna are among them. Either way, residents of both places would tell you they live in violent territories.
Yet everyday life in each place was strikingly different.
In Morro da Luz, many people left their doors unlocked and their windows open. Children played in the streets without much supervision and teenagers gathered on corners. Bars, churches, restaurants, and shops were full. Many of my interlocutors told me they felt safer inside the favela than outside it.
The scenario in Villa Luna was completely different. People built high walls and padlocked their windows. The streets were mostly empty. Children were always accompanied by their parents. Most people left home only for a specific purpose, such as going to school, going to work, or seeking medical care.
What explains such different urban experiences? The comparison pointed me to one central factor: the predictability of violence.
The predictability of violence
In Morro da Luz, violence was, to a certain extent, predictable. People generally knew who could be a victim, who could be a perpetrator, where and when violence might occur, and why. In Villa Luna, the feeling was the opposite: anyone could be a victim of anyone, at any place and time, for any reason.
Much of this had to do with how criminal groups operated in each territory. In both places, several groups were dedicated to illegal activities, mainly retail drug selling. But the way they acted, and the relationships they built with residents, were very different.
In Morro da Luz, groups competed with one another and sometimes engaged in open conflicts, known locally as ‘gang wars’. Nevertheless, they shared a basic moral code centred on protecting the ‘honest’ residents and looking after the neighbourhood’s interests. Petty crime inside the favela, rape, and any kind of ‘disrespect’ could be violently punished by gang members. Local institutions such as health units, schools, and NGOs were also protected. In other words, criminal groups established a kind of order, however coercive. One interviewee described the favela as a ‘fortress of crime’. Gang members held a considerable, though far from total, degree of legitimacy. This legitimacy, of course, was good for business.
This order did not exist in isolation. My ethnography showed that Morro da Luz was governed simultaneously by three types of normativity: the state, in its diverse and even contradictory forms, from social policies to police repression; religion, with the Catholic Church and, increasingly, many evangelical denominations; and criminal groups. Together, they produced a shared moral evaluation of people and behaviours that valued some lives and deaths more than others. Consider a religious ‘good mother’: a hard worker, active in her church, who treated everybody with ‘respect’ and helped her neighbours in need. She was far less likely to become a target of violence than a drug user who had perhaps failed to treat gang members respectfully. This is what made violence predictable and, to a certain degree, even acceptable.
In Villa Luna, I could not find a comparable mechanism. Illegal markets were just as present and were also run by several groups, but I did not identify any moral standard of internal protection. Residents were mugged, robbed, and burgled, and the general feeling was that this could happen to anybody: pregnant women, older people, children, public workers. Armed groups did not prevent these crimes or punish those responsible. The groups held little legitimacy, except among some young people who aspired to become narcos themselves. State institutions seemed to have little power in governing local violence, and the same was true of religious organisations. The Catholic Church, in particular, had a very significant presence, with a large and complex institutional apparatus that, among other things, worked directly with people struggling with substance use. Yet it, too, seemed unable to establish any kind of predictability in conflict and violence.
Conclusion: Living with (un)predictable violence
Predictability, not necessarily safety, shaped how people used space. In Morro da Luz, someone who did not ‘mess with’ gang members and treated everyone with ‘respect’ could reasonably expect to avoid violence. This allowed people to leave their houses open, enjoy public spaces, cultivate relationships with neighbours and take part in community life. In Villa Luna, people locked themselves in. Relationships with neighbours were limited and public spaces were empty.
These differences matter beyond the question of fear. Many residents of Villa Luna told me they felt ‘trapped’, ‘as if they were in a prison’, and desperately wanted to leave the neighbourhood. Those who stayed and tried to improve things faced obstacles of their own. Local leaders are vital in territories like this one. They run community kitchens, support people struggling with substance use, offer school support for children, and organise politically to make demands on the state. In Villa Luna, their work was extremely important, but faced significant limitations. Many did not feel safe walking freely around the neighbourhood, and so could not reach as many people as they wished or carry out the activities they had in mind on the scale they wanted.
In Morro da Luz, leaders also had to be careful. They needed to avoid upsetting the criminal groups and stay open to dialogue with them. They could not turn to the police if they faced any kind of trouble. But they knew what to do. Those who understood the ‘rules’ and acted prudently could work more effectively. Predictability, in other words, was a condition of their work.
This points to something broader. For people living on the margins of the city, neighbours and local organisations are often the first resource when something goes wrong: someone to watch the children, lend a little money, share information about a job or help in an emergency. These everyday exchanges depend on a minimum of trust, and trust depends on being able to anticipate how others will behave. Where there is a feeling that violence can come from almost anyone and anywhere, people withdraw behind walls and padlocks, and those ties become thinner. Isolation is then more than a psychological burden. It can deepen the effects of poverty, by closing off the support that circulates through neighbourly relations, and by weakening the local leadership that people rely on to get by.
None of this means that Morro da Luz’s order should be romanticised. It is not a democratic one. Residents do not choose it and cannot hold it to account, and they often pay a high price for it: arbitrary punishments, restrictions on movement, the pressure to stay silent, and the ‘employing’ of their children in the drug business, which often led to early violent deaths, at the hands of rival traffickers or of the police. A misunderstanding could have violent consequences, and residents felt they had to be careful even with their smallest everyday actions. Those who fall outside its moral standards are far more exposed to violence. What this order offers, however, is not safety or fairness, but intelligibility: residents know, at least roughly, the rules of the game, and can organise their lives around them.
If we want to understand urban life on the margins of Latin American cities, counting homicides is not enough. We also need to ask how violence is organised, who it targets, and whether people can anticipate it, because the answers shape how people live together in the city, and whether they can rely on one another to get by.
Thank you to the Urban Studies Foundation for supporting this research.
Sources
- UNODC (2023) Global Study on Homicide 2023. Vienna: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.
- UNODC (2024) Homicide and organized crime in Latin America and the Caribbean (research brief excerpted from the Global Study on Homicide 2023). Vienna: UNODC.
- IPEA and FBSP (2019) Atlas da Violência 2019. Brasília/Rio de Janeiro: Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada and Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública.
- Ministerio de Seguridad de la Nación, Sistema Nacional de Información Criminal (SNIC), Informe del Sistema Nacional de Información Criminal, 2024.