The New War on the Poor

The Production of Insecurity in Latin America

John Gledhill

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783603053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

When viewed from the perspective of those who suffer the consequences of repressive approaches to public security, it is often difficult to distinguish state agents from criminals. The mistreatment by police and soldiers examined in this book reflects a new kind of stigmatization. The New War on the Poor links the experiences of labour migrants crossing Latin America's international borders, indigenous Mexicans defending their territories against capitalist mega-projects, drug wars and paramilitary violence, Afro-Brazilians living on the urban periphery of Salvador, and farmers and business people tired of paying protection to criminal mafias. John Gledhill looks at how and why governments are failing to provide security to disadvantaged citizens while all too often painting them as a menace to the rest of society simply for being poor.

1 | SECURITIZATION, THE STATE AND CAPITALISM

Our government is as corrupt as ever, but obviously some things have got better for us. When did you ever see a campesino wearing a wrist watch? (Peasant farmer, Mexico, 1983)

It’s fairly quiet around here. Well, we get the extortion calls on the phone, but there have only been a few cut-up bodies that they left in bags outside the cemetery and they weren’t people from here. We have their protection. (Family in the same village, 2012)

This is a book about what states do to people when they define them as a threat to the security of the rest of society. It is also a book about why states so often not only fail to resolve the problems that the people themselves see as threats to their security, but actually compound them. My argument does not, however, suggest that the causes of these problems can be located simply in national or regional conditions and histories. Transnational and global processes are extremely important, and they are both geopolitical and economic in nature. This complicates the issue of thinking about politically feasible ways of making things better than they are now. For example, we might answer the assertion of the US Department of Homeland Security that it has a right to participate in the reinforcement of security at Mexico’s southern border with Guatemala (Isacson et al. 2014) by saying that the conditions in Central America that have created a ‘humanitarian crisis’ of northwards migration are in part the result of past US intervention in that region. Yet the domestic politics of immigration inside the USA and the state of Central American societies are related to economic processes that are far broader in scope, and deeply anchored in a complex and interlocking chain of power relations. Although some of the corporate actors in these chains, such as mining companies, agro-food transnationals and hedge funds, may be susceptible to campaigns to clean up their acts in terms of social responsibility, what we have surely learned since the 2008 crisis is that it is a challenge to secure even modest reforms to the most scandalous aspects of contemporary capitalism. When it comes to what Latin America might expect in the future, the scenario, as reflected, for example, in the ‘vulture’ hedge funds’ legalized predation on Argentina, remains discouraging.

There is, however, still a lot that Latin America can do for itself whatever the US imperial hegemon tries to do. This is a guiding assumption of a book that focuses principally on the countries with the two largest economies in the region, Brazil, a country that is itself of continental scale, and Mexico. In recent years, the Brazilian government has placed its bets on a heterodox economic strategy that allows real wages to rise,¹ and become a major force on the world diplomatic stage that emphasizes its independence. Mexico has more or less done the opposite. But Mexico’s destiny does not have to depend on its proximity to its gringo neighbour, even if the assumption that it does guides the thinking of its current government, headed by Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Returning to power in 2012 after twelve years in which the presidency was in the hands of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN), the PRI government outdid its pro-business predecessor in its plans for letting gringos profit from the nation’s oil and opening the door to new foreign investment with a ‘reform’ of the country’s labour laws that was not good news for workers. But both Brazil and Mexico have one thing in common. Whatever economic advances they have achieved in recent years, they both suffer from serious problems of violence, and it is this that makes them so central to any discussion of security issues in Latin America. As Arias and Goldstein (2010: 20) point out, Latin America presents ‘an immense diversity of forms of violence’, which I will unpack for these two particular countries in the course of my analysis. But as the title of the book suggests, I will do this with a particular focus.

Much of the violence I examine has the characteristics of ‘new wars’ as defined by Mary Kaldor (2012), in contrast to the ‘old wars’ based on military conflicts between states. Kaldor emphasizes a blurring between violence carried out by states and other political actors competing for power, and violence on the part of ‘private’ groups, such as criminals and paramilitaries. It is often difficult to separate out economic and political motives, ‘private’ and ‘public’, and, because of the significance of transnational connections, the ‘local’ and the ‘global’. In referring to a ‘new war on the poor’, however, I am borrowing an expression used by anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer (2003). Farmer is known both for his personal humanitarian work and for his insistence on the need to understand ‘structural violence’, a term he borrows from Johan Galtung, the Norwegian sociologist who was one of the founders of peace studies. Structural violence is about the ‘machinery of oppression’ embedded in social orders, which includes racism and gender inequality (Farmer et al. 2004: 307). For Farmer, the concept is necessary not simply because it is not always possible to pin the blame for suffering on specific social actors, but also to avoid a romantic overestimation of how successfully ‘oppression’ can be ‘resisted’ by those at the receiving end of it.

I am sympathetic to Farmer’s arguments, but I think it is important not to allow a diffuse account of structural violence to obscure the historical connections between specific situations and the actions of identifiable actors that I illustrated above in the case of the relationships between the United States and Central America. What I aim to do in the ethnographic parts of this book is avoid the dangers of excessive abstraction by exploring how large-scale processes and relations work themselves out in local contexts that are populated by people who are socially heterogeneous, often conflictive among themselves, and not necessarily agreed even on how to deal with a common enemy. It is important to explore actor subjectivities and what might shape them (which is seldom something that is directly ‘visible’ in ethnographic data), keep the plurality of ‘violences’ in view, and explore how multiple forms of violence intersect and what the effects of that intersection are. Nevertheless, although the anti-romanticism that Farmer advocates is salutary, it is important to recognize that ‘the oppressed’ do have some capacity for collective ‘resistance’ and self-organization, since, as we will see, state security interventions may not only refuse to build upon that capacity in a democratic way, but actively seek to undermine it as potentially threatening to the power relations that the state seeks to maintain or expand.

As a preliminary window on to what those power relations are about, I turn first to questions of poverty reduction and social mobility in Latin America, which at first sight appear to be the more positive aspects of developments in the region over the past decade, despite the fact that indigenous and black ‘Latin’ Americans remain relatively disadvantaged.

Poverty, inequality and social mobility

Advocates of the free market economic policies usually termed ‘neoliberal’ might seem justified in citing Latin America as proof of the success of their ideas. Chile, turned into a laboratory for neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ by the military coup that ended the democratically elected left-wing government of Salvador Allende in 1973, has enjoyed four decades of sustained growth that have lifted the country’s per capita income beyond that of Brazil and Mexico. Chile also ranks higher than both Brazil and Mexico in terms of the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Index (HDI), at number 40 in the world, compared with Brazil’s position at 85, and Mexico’s at 61 (UNDP 2013). The standard HDI adds life expectancy as a measure of health, and mean years of schooling as a measure of education, to income statistics. Chile’s score is 0.819, not that far off the 0.875 HDI score of the United Kingdom, which is ranked number 26 in the world. However, the UNDP also offers an inequality-adjusted HDI measure. When inequality is factored in, Chile’s HDI score falls from 0.819 to 0.664, whereas the UK’s score descends only slightly, to 0.802. Both Brazil and Mexico also suffer major declines when their HDI scores are inequality-adjusted, from 0.73 to 0.531, and from 0.775 to 0.593, respectively.

Social inequality and inadequate investment in quality public education and healthcare lay at the heart of the mobilization of students that rocked the right-wing government headed by businessman Sebastián Piñera in Chile from August 2011 onwards, opening the way to the re-election for a second term of centre-left president Michelle Bachelet in March 2014. Similar issues dented the popularity of Brazil’s centre-left president, Dilma Rousseff, in mid-2013, when what were predominantly students from middle-class families took to the streets to protest against the rising costs of public transport, and question the costs of hosting the football World Cup and parallels between corruption in FIFA and corruption within Brazilian politics. Defenders of neoliberal economic policies might argue that their very success provokes a crisis of rising expectations among the upwardly mobile, made particularly ironic in the Brazilian case by the success of the governments led by the Workers’ Party (PT) in reducing not simply poverty but also social inequality relative to the levels produced by the neoliberal restructuring of the economy during the 1990s, following the ‘lost decade’ of crisis in the 1980s.

The PT administrations led by two-term president Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva had reduced the number of Brazilians living in poverty from 37.5 per cent to 20.9 per cent of the population by the time Dilma Rousseff entered office in 2011, more than halving extreme poverty, to 6.1 per cent (CEPAL 2012). Under Rousseff’s own ‘Brazil without Misery’ programme (Brasil sem miséria), direct income transfers to poor families with children aimed to eliminate extreme poverty entirely. Yet the real measure of the success of the PT governments was that the creation of more jobs that paid living wages and offered social security benefits enabled many poor families to move out of dependence on poverty alleviation programmes altogether. This had a significant impact on levels of social inequality.

The Gini coefficient of inequality in income distribution in Brazil was 0.604 in the early years of the 1990s, falling to 0.587 by the end of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s second term as president in 2002, and reaching 0.5687 by the end of 2004 (Ivo 2008). Although this was still a high level, the tendency to reduction in inequality of monthly income was evident for all regions, and for both men and women, in the 2007 figure of 0.534. The annual pace of reduction was increasing, leading some analysts to suggest that Brazilian income inequality could converge with that of western Europe within a decade (Suarez Dillon Soares 2008). By 2011 the Brazilian Gini had fallen to 0.501, although the gap between the Brazilian inequality figure and the UK’s Gini index of 0.34 in that year remained large (IGBE 2012). Nevertheless, as the gap between rich and poor in the UK has continued to increase, along with the number of families obliged to resort to food banks, O Globo newspaper’s London correspondent, Vivian Oswald, was inspired by an interview with Oxfam’s research director, Ricardo Fuentes-Nueva, to write a piece suggesting that, however imperfect Brazil’s government might be, it was at least to be praised for trying to move the country in the opposite direction to that favoured by the British Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition (Oswald 2014).

Brazil’s efforts compared favourably with those of Mexico. Figures published by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean in 2012 did show that poverty measured in terms of income levels had also diminished in Latin America’s second-richest country, but only by 4.1 per cent, while extreme poverty or ‘indigence’ had actually increased, standing at 13.3 per cent in 2011 in contrast to 12.6 per cent a decade earlier (CEPAL 2012). Although the multidimensional method of poverty evaluation used by the Mexican government’s National Council for Evaluation of Social Development Policy (CONEVAL) showed small improvements in some areas between 2010 and 2012, including access to education and health services, income-based indicators of poverty and indigence in Mexico had continued to deteriorate, leaving more than sixty million citizens below the official poverty line (CONEVAL 2013). Furthermore, as Mexican sociologist Julio Boltvinik has consistently argued over the years, even accepting the narrow normative terms of reference of official poverty measures when it comes to asking fundamental questions about what kind of societies we need to construct in order to offer all who live in them an opportunity to realize their full potential as human beings, the official Mexican poverty statistics suggest that only 20 per cent of the country’s population live comfortably, without suffering from any form of vulnerability or deprivation (Boltvinik 2014).

In Brazil social mobility ended during the two decades of neoliberal structural adjustment. Industrial centres such as São Paulo experienced the same kind of downsizing of workforces as deindustrializing cities in the global North, but without having the blow moderated by the kind of social protection that most workers in the old centres of the capitalist world economy still enjoyed (Guimarães 2006). The children of former industrial workers, a minority of the labour force, found their own employment prospects restricted to low-paid service sector jobs and work in general became more precarious (Druck 2011). Under Lula, however, unemployment fell, real wages rose, and social mobility resumed (Pochman 2009). This process continued under the first Rousseff administration, laying the basis for the president’s re-election by a narrow margin in October 2014, even though economic growth had slowed considerably. Almost twenty-four million Brazilians, mostly young and many black, ascended into the ‘C’ class of persons, with earnings in the range between four and ten times the minimum wage. It is, however, sociologically misleading to describe this group as a ‘new middle class’ as distinct from an upwardly mobile working class. Entry into the world of mass consumption through the generalized extension of consumer credit, and even access to state-subsidized home loans, does not erase the accumulated social advantages that the ‘old’ middle classes acquired through private primary and secondary education, easier access to free public higher education, and membership of social networks that ease entry into professional careers (Souza 2009). In a society in which differences in lifestyle are maintained through residential arrangements and use of public space, and prejudices that link race and class remain significant despite affirmative action programmes and changing public sentiment, ‘feeling’ middle class is not the same as having the ability to consume more goods and services that results from a higher disposable income. Inequality has been reduced in terms of earned income, but not capital, which has important non-economic dimensions everywhere (Bourdieu 1989).

We already know from the experience of the global North that it proved difficult to sustain the continuing intergenerational social mobility and ever-rising living standards that seemed possible during the long boom that followed the Second World War and the apparently successful Keynesian management of capitalism. Thomas Piketty has argued that the principal structural transformation of this period was the growth of a true ‘patrimonial’ or propertied middle class, in a context in which the ‘shocks’ created by two world wars had reduced the extreme concentration of capital that had characterized the developed world up to 1910 (Piketty 2014: 260–1). Even so, this was a middle class whose ‘capital’ consisted of owning a home (whose value likely appreciated over time) and retirement savings. The poorest 50 per cent of the population still owned ‘practically nothing’ (ibid.). During the unprecedented period of growth that occurred after the Second World War, income inequality also diminished. From the 1970s onwards that process went into reverse with the beginning of the redistribution of income back from labour to the owners of capital that David Harvey (2007) sees as the essence of ‘neoliberalization’. Piketty’s point, based on an analysis that starts in the eighteenth century, is, however, that low rates of economic growth are the historical norm. Once the rate of return on private capital exceeds the rate of growth of income, output and labour productivity, wealth accumulated in the past grows more rapidly than wages, wealth concentration increases, highly paid entrepreneurs become rentiers, and property-less workers fall ever further behind (Piketty 2014: 571). Piketty argues that as the emerging economies ‘catch up’ with the old centres of capitalist accumulation, and their growth also slows, this tendency will become a global challenge.

Capital as wealth in the twenty-first century is not what it was in the previous era of high wealth concentration, since landed property has become less significant as a source of rents while rents arising from new kinds of financial markets have become increasingly important. In the era of ‘financialization’, any good or service, including mortgages and student loans, can be converted into a tradable asset (‘securitized’ in the financial sense). A good deal of current wealth is generated by increases in the value of financial assets and the ability to participate in financial investments that bring especially high rates of return through trading that is essentially speculative. These trends are socially problematic in various ways. Financialization can create price instability in the increasingly globalized markets for commodities that are essential to human survival, notably food (Van der Ploeg 2010), along with housing and energy. Rapid price hikes have catastrophic implications for poor families. Members of the middle and working classes lack the opportunity to participate in the kinds of activities that are generating further wealth for the already wealthy, even if their purchasing power is not actually falling, and it is often falling severely for the most vulnerable families as labour market restructuring continues through innovations such as zero-hours contracts. Middle-class people and better-paid workers are vulnerable to financial market turbulence because their own stake in these markets is in the form of debt, or pension schemes that can be restructured to their disadvantage. The large-scale holders of capital, including those who command the fabulous salaries and bonuses paid in the financial sector itself, and information technology entrepreneurs, now have better opportunities than ever to pull ahead of everyone else, and to pass their advantages on to their children.

Joseph Stiglitz (2012) has argued that the ultimate price of inequality in the global North is a stifling of truly dynamic capitalism and erosion of public confidence in democratic politics. Emphasis on the problem of wealth distribu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Securitization, the state and capitalism
• 2 Violence, urban development and the privatization of public power in Brazil
• 3 Pacifying the urban periphery: a case study of the Bahian UPP
• 4 State transformations, illegal economies and counter-insurgency in Mexico
• 5 Paramilitaries, autodefensas and the pacification of Michoacán
• 6 Achieving human security: the contradictions of repressive intervention
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index