Violence and territorial order in Caracas, Venezuela (original) (raw)

2020, Political Geography

In 2015, Caracas, Venezuela, had a homicide rate of 75 per 100,000 inhabitants, which made it one of the most violent cities in the world that year. Despite these high rates of violence, the international community knows relatively little about the dynamics underlying conflict in the city. Through a systematic comparison of three poor and working-class neighborhoods in the Caracas metropolitan area, this article analyzes the factors that have driven these remarkably high rates of violence, as well as those factors that have configured the heterogeneous violent conditions that operate across the city. Building on extensive interviews in these neighborhoods, we argue that the levels of violence in particular locales derive from the ways in which the Bolivarian political regime failed in its efforts to incorporate the poor and working-class inhabitants of different parts of the metropolitan area into the political, social, and economic systems that dominate the country today. We also argue that variation in violence results from the way in which certain neighborhoods are geographically inserted into local illicit economies and the political and social dynamics of an increasingly violent and unstable political system. In January 2019, Caracas erupted in protests after National Assembly leader Juan Guaid� o challenged Nicol� as Maduro's claim to the presidency. These rallies, as has occurred over the years, left scores dead and hundreds injured. While the international community focused on the demonstrations and the economic crisis that led millions to emigrate, relatively little attention has been paid to the problem of violence. In 2016, Venezuela's Attorney General reported that violence led nationally to 70 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, leaving 21,752 dead with police accounting for 4,667 of those killings. 1 The violence affecting Venezuela and Caracas, with 75 homicides per 100,000 in 2015, 2 is part of the wider crisis affecting the Bolivarian Revolution but also reflects Venezuela's place in a region with exceptional criminal violence. Despite global condemnation of state abuses, the dramatic violence Venezuela suffers at the hands of state forces and illicit actors is reminiscent of the violence that underlies public life in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Jamaica, and Central America. Simply replacing the Maduro government with a putatively liberal democratic one will not address the perilous violence Venezuelans face. This article, which focuses on three impoverished neighborhoods, argues that the violence affecting Caracas is historically grounded in these neighborhoods' geographically specific experiences and how they evolved within Venezuela's wider political system prior to and during the Bolivarian regime. 3 We emphasize the importance of urban geography in understanding crime and argue that the location of these neighborhoods connects each community to particular economic, social, and political contexts that shape the violence that occurs in those neighborhoods. These experiences of violence point to complex dynamics through which the government engages with social actors to undertake repression and sheds light on political practices in a region riven by social and criminal violence. As such, they point to lessons for scholars of a region where countries such