DEBATE DEBATE
Debate on the paper by Roberto Briceño-León
Debate sobre el artículo de Roberto Briceño-León
Maria Cecília de Souza Minayo
Escola Nacional de Saúde Pública Sergio Arouca, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. cecilia@claves.fiocruz.br
The dynamics of social violence in Latin America
The paper by Roberto Briceño-León is an undeniably profound, mature, and sociologically and socially committed effort by the author to the process of transformation in Latin America, highlighting how the dynamics of violence corrupt the region's entrails. His erudite, methodical, and complex reflection on the convergence of factors that contribute to generate this phenomenon is certainly the most complete document of its kind produced in recent years, dealing with the issue in an explicative, contemporary, and comprehensive way. His paper especially reveals an experienced sociologist, with vast capacity to read the international and Latin American classics, in dialogue with contemporary data on the region's demographic, epidemiological, educational, socioeconomic, and cultural transformations. Thus, without a shadow of a doubt, Briceño-León's paper is a milestone in the reflection on violence, due both to its original proposal and the wealth of theoretical and informational material provided to readers as the basis for his arguments.
In my role as discussant, I will attempt to raise a few questions to complement the reflection, in the understanding that a study of such breadth will leave out a few questions that need to be approached. In this debate I will mention three aspects: I will approach conceptual aspects; I will delve into some necessary distinctions in the Brazilian case; and I will contextualize the issue of contemporary crime (a term used throughout the paper as an implicit quasi-synonym for violence) in the world and Brazil, creating an ethos differentiated from the traditional forms of social transgression.
Conceptual aspect
The first point I wish to highlight is that Briceño-León does not refer exactly to violence as a multifaceted phenomenon ranging all the way from cruel and fatal aspects (e.g., homicides) to those that are taken for granted (like traffic violence) and covert, subtle forms (as in the case of intra-family violence, moral harassment, and others). Rather, he uses the phenomenon that is most visible and easiest to count, to treat statistically, and to compare, namely homicide. As a backdrop, his concept of violence runs up against the notion of crime, especially crime perpetrated and experienced by poor youth. In fact, this is an appropriate approach, as long as it is made explicit and viewed in a relative light, since homicide rates are the most reliable and sensitive indicator to reflect on social violence and its trends. However, this category does not encompass the entire phenomenon of violence which, from the public health intervention perspective, needs to be unveiled, understood, and explained in its multiple dimensions.
Further within the conceptual sense, and even referring only to the homicide phenomenon, Briceño-León leaves a conceptual gap when he omits the weight of subjectivity (and what kind of contemporary subjectivity is being created?). This theoretical and practical parameter is crucial for dealing with processes of violence and victimization if we are not to believe in a historical trend moved only by economic and political macro-forces, responsible for the maintenance of secular inequalities and poverty. The presence and complicity of the historical subject, as Sartre 1 reminds us, occurs even when he accepts all the determinations. Proof of the need for "subjects' adherence to the crime" is the fact that, as Briceño-León recalls in his paper, the majority of poor and destitute young people, although victimized by inequality, behave peacefully, opting for the established order.
I hope not to be parochial if I make some distinctions about the case of Brazil, a country of continental dimensions which, in addition to its metropolitan areas, has prosperous and dynamic large and medium-sized cities as well as very small county seats, the latter often formally classified as urban, but where the urban and the rural coexist indistinctively. First, in Brazil, despite high urbanization along with perennially poor and even destitute remote areas, especially in the Northeast, it is not true that the countryside is stagnated. On the contrary, in recent decades there has been an increase in cultivated land, agricultural and cattle-raising areas, and family farming, in an unprecedented process of agribusiness modernization, to the point where the country has become the world's largest grain producer. However, the rural world in Brazil, which is undeniably changed and incomparable to various other Latin American countries in this regard, has failed to become less unequal or unjust.
In the distribution of violence, we have a quite diversified situation, and while population density is certainly accompanied by extensive poverty and lack of decent housing conditions and unemployment have become a predisposing factor for entry into the illegal work market where the labor force feels more valued, recognized, and better remunerated, there are many other intervening factors in localities with high homicide rates. According to a still-unpublished study by Souza (personal communication; 2005) in which the author works with compound indicators capable of orienting the interpretation of the main causes of violence in Brazil, taking 2000 as the base year, of 5,507 Brazilian municipalities (or counties), 48.0% did not record a single homicide. Of those with the majority of the country's homicides, the first ten places were occupied by some capitals and metropolitan areas, in the following order: 1) São Paulo; 2) Rio de Janeiro; 3) Recife, Pernambuco; 4) Guarulhos, São Paulo; 5) Diadema, São Paulo; 6) Jaboatão dos Guararapes, Pernambuco; 7) Olinda, Pernambuco; 8) Nova Iguaçu; Rio de Janeiro; 9) Brasília, Federal District; and 10) Osasco, São Paulo. The twenty municipalities with the highest violence and accident rates which include seven capitals (out of the total of 27), 12 metropolitan areas, and a large city from the interior cover 54.0% of all these deaths. In short, this remark is meant to say that the highest violence and crime rates occur in large urban concentrations. However, not all urban concentrations in Brazil (and perhaps not all those in Latin America as a whole) have high homicide rates and other rates of violence, and it is important to distinguish between different social dynamics.
Finally, besides the elements proposed by Briceño-León, I wish to add the specificity of contemporary violence, where the revolution in microelectronics and communications media and formats play a special role in mediation. The French social historian Wieviorka 2, also cited by Briceño-León, Castells 3, and Minayo 4, shows the specificity of this global crime (operating in networks) linked by the most violent and despicable interests in the shadow of national states' weakness, constituting an infra-politics in itself, linking legal and illegal apparatuses, international and national players, and perversely encompassing the poor, who are left with the warfront and the alternative of eking out employment in an increasingly restricted and exclusionary market. It is clear that current crime that has drastically increased the homicide rates in Latin America does not consist only of activity by organized groups acting in collusion. It reveals an exacerbation of growing social conflicts, without civilizing mediation and added to the traditional and culturally manifest threshold of violence present in the history of Latin American countries, merging all these dynamic relations that are expressed in the current homicides rates, where the various expressions feed on each other.
Is there hope? Yes. The study by Chesnais 5 on two hundred years of violence in European history shows the beneficial role of processes of social inclusion and rights, decreasing inequalities, and access to formal education as significant elements for a downward curve in homicide rates which in the 19th century were higher than in the most conflict-ridden countries of Latin America.
1. Sartre JP. Sartre. São Paulo: Abril Cultural; 1980. (Coleção Os Pensadores.)
2. Wieviorka MO. O novo paradigma da violência. Tempo Social 1997; 9:5-42.
3. Castells M. Fim do milênio: a era da informação. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Paz e Terra; 1998.
4. Minayo MCS. A violência dramatiza causas. In: Minayo MCS, Souza ER, organizadores. Violência sob o olhar da saúde. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz; 2003. p. 23-47.
5. Chesnais JC. Histoire de la violence en Occident de 1800 à nos jours. Paris: Robert Laffont Éditeur; 1981.