"Bullets from the military police ('PM') only kill black people". Protest in São Paulo, 2014. Image: Oswaldo Cornetti/fotos públicas. Some rights reserved.Latin America faces an increase in the use of
violence as a way to resolving everyday conflicts. The overwhelming presence
of organized crime in most Latin American countries has led to homicide rates which
multiply world rates by four, to state-of-emergency and epidemic dimension
levels.
Although the countries with the highest homicide
rates are Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, and Venezuela, regional averages
often obscure bloody local realities. The violence index in cities
as diverse as Acapulco in Mexico, Trujillo in Peru and some
Greater Buenos Aires areas in Argentina is also very high. So, if
we are to integrate the geography of violence into our analysis of
the diverse of phenomena which are degrading everyday life in Latin America, we
must take care to use a specific and localized focus.
The resulting picture is necessarily multidimensional. In
many countries which were not previously known for their violence rates, crime
is now way higher than it used to be ten years ago. Available
surveys show that almost a third of the citizens in Costa Rica,
Uruguay and Chile, for example, have been victims of some crime in
the last 12 months. This makes it clear that a process of erosion of the
quality of daily life is currently going on in many countries in the region.
The visibility of gender violence – which,
admittedly, has surfaced progressively -, a violence that strikes in many
contexts under many forms – from street harassment to rape and sexual assaults on
young girls, teenagers and adults -, is also a recent development.
Undoubtedly, traditional patterns of distribution of power between men and women play a
central role in the current high level of gender violence, as does institutional
indifference towards impunity involved in this kind of crime.
What all of this means is that too many citizens
in too many places in Latin America are living in chronic worry and fear,
and admit that their main anxiety has to do with the possibility of
becoming victims of a crime in the near future, even though it
encompasses in fact a variety of constituent elements of present day society. Fear, or
the feeling of insecurity, has become a social problem on its own, with
an impact on the quality of life of citizens, on the way they relate to each
other and on the demands they put to their governments and institutions.
This complex scenario has been chosen
by DemocraciaAbierta as a main field of analysis and agency in the region.
In partnership with the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Santiago de
Chile, our objective is to deepen the discussion on and the knowledge of the
multiple, diverse and complex realities of violence we are facing today.
Our purpose is to publish, within
DemocraciaAbierta’s Violencias section,
contributions from specialists, public actors and civil society representatives
who will be addressing topics related to this intolerable epidemic
phenomenon in high need of in-depth study.
We invite you to follow us through our Twitter
accounts @demoAbierta @LuciaDammert @fbadiad and through our section specific account @ViolenceDemoA
