Perverse Integration: Drug Trafficking and Youth in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro.

• Author: ZALUAR, ALBA

"Criminalization of the informal sector relativized poverty and exclusion as the primary causes of the violent drug trafficking found in the favelas and other low-income neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro."

In 1994, the United Nations Economic and Social Council stated that "organized transnational crime, a new dimension of more `traditional' forms of organized crime, has emerged as one of the most alarming of challenges." With its singular threat to the security and the economies of all countries--developing and transitional ones in particular--transnational organized crime "represents one of the major threats that governments have to deal with in order to ensure their stability the safety of their people, the preservation of the whole fabric of society, and the viability and further development of their economies."(1)

This paper mainly focuses on the activities of the informal drug market in Brazil and the social and cultural changes that accompany it at the local level. I will not, therefore, discuss the intentions or consequences of the Brazilian government's law enforcement policies and techniques. It is sufficient to say that the repression of the drug trade results in drug scarcity, which in turn raises the price and affects the purity of the merchandise. Accordingly, profits multiply and more people are willing to take on the risks of illegal business at all levels--from wholesale to retail trade--organizing their activities so as to curtail the risk of detection and prosecution and increase profits. This potential for profit has also increased corruption in state institutions.

Little has been published in Brazil about the supply of illicit drugs and the organizational strength of the trafficker networks, particularly regarding their connections to the legal economy. Scant attention has been given to the political and economic interests related to the drug economy, particularly with regard to the interaction between the formal, legal economy and the illegal activities of the economic underworld.

The question that remains to be comprehensively discussed is how the effects of poverty and accelerated urbanization and immigration are linked with institutional mechanisms and the presence of networks(2) of organized crime.(3) Although poverty and accelerated urbanization are clearly connected with the results and causes of exclusion, organized crime crosses all social classes and has bonds with organized legal business. Therefore, it cannot survive without institutional support from state agencies. The related issues of violence, criminality and insecurity cannot be properly understood if removed from larger political, social and economic frameworks. One must assume that many impoverished young Brazilians have insufficient employment possibilities to avoid becoming vulnerable to the drug trade. They are estranged from their families and from older generations, betrayed by an ineffective school system, and lack professional training. Below, I will examine this phenomenon, which Manuel Castels and John Mollenkopf have termed "perverse integration."(4)

The changes in the informal market in Rio de Janeiro because of the presence of drug traffickers in the city's favelas or shantytowns contributed to the extensive criminalization of the informal sector. Criminalization of the informal sector, in turn, relativized poverty and exclusion as the primary causes of the violent drug trafficking found in the favelas and other low-income neighborhoods of Rio de Janeiro. This very risky enterprise is eventually fatal for most of the low-income adolescents who join the drug gangs. It has also prospered via hierarchical, ruthless and fluid organizations that are more than merely "a work alternative" or a "survival strategy" for gang members. Below I describe the limitations, dangers and virility ethos of this activity that mobilizes many young favelados and examine their relation with cultural, political and economic spheres.

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC BACKGROUND OF THE DRUG MARKET

The illegal drug market is doubtlessly one of the biggest sectors of the modern global economy It has, to a greater or lesser extent, become economically and socially integrated into almost every country Since economic sectors--especially illegal ones--intermesh formal with informal markets, and connect governmental agencies with criminal organizations, drug related businesses permeate many sectors of society, including sectors that often function in the formal economy Drug-related activities include robbery, because the trade of stolen goods such as trucks, cars, jewelry and domestic appliances provides alternative currencies for buying drugs. Drug trafficking is also diversified in the sense that it follows the networks already used for other illegal activities, such as smuggling, governmental corruption and gun trafficking.(5) This is not only clear in the case of banks and transport companies that provide services to illegal businesses, but also for legal businesses such as the real estate market that are a key mechanism for money laundering. There are certain types of symbiotic relationships between different actors with common and interrelated interests to form a social, economic and institutional fabric that supports the drug trade.(6) The money and the power that go with the trade are not the only explanations for the expansion of the illegal drug economy Political power and cultural processes which led to the growth of drug use, and the societal changes that followed this growth, are equally important and have been studied less.

The international context is rather dismal. Over the last decade world-wide production of illicit drugs has increased dramatically. Opium and marijuana production has roughly doubled, coca production has tripled, new synthetic drugs have been developed and consumer demand has increased.(7) Brazil has become not only a channel for cocaine transportation to other countries, but it has also become a center for this drug.

Furthermore, the local impact of transnational organized crime--or, if one may say so, globalized crime--has sui generis economical, political and cultural characteristics. In it, those who are in strategic positions in the large network of transnational connections may profit quickly and easily due to the lack of institutional limits, using violent means to resolve conflict.(8)

Among illegal drugs, cocaine is today associated with a lifestyle that puts great value in money, power, violence and consumption of goods with a reputed trademark. Due to very high prices of the drug, which is more costly than gold in several places,(9) its trade has become a source of enormous and rapid profits, as well as significant violence. In this case, the profits to be made are not engendered by productivity or greater exploration of labor, but by the illegality of the enterprise itself.(10)

SOCIAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND

Post-modern society has undergone an accelerated process of social, economic, political and cultural transformations, which have caused social fragmentation and increased the importance of leisure and consumption activities to ascertaining and defining social identities. Such transformations mean that conventional moral restraints, which exist to some degree independent of the law, have weakened. They have not been replaced by new post-conventional ethics that are based on personal freedom and mutuality, respect for the rights of others, or the use of dialogue to arrive at an understanding. What is left is an alternate form of ethics. It surpasses the one existing in civil law or in the conception of interpersonal contracts that bind private domains. It exists also to a certain extent in organized crime.(11) Gambling, drug use and pleasure seeking become objectives in and of themselves for sectors of the population, especially among youth. This makes businesses that exploit the illegal consumption highly profitable, precisely because they are illegal. They constitute an illegal sector that produces and distributes goods supporting the "mass consumption of style."(12) The demand that guarantees high profits is generated by changes in lifestyle associated with individual consumption. "Style consumption," including the use of illegal drugs, is more expensive than post-war family consumption. The secure and comfortable domestic patterns of middle class families stand in contrast to the new conceptions of work that have accompanied changes in consumer habits.

Cultural and economic values in Brazilian society have likewise developed in this way. During the 1970s and 1980s, values based on individualism, consumption, and modernity became widespread. Drug trafficking is part of this new social, economic and political environment, since it is an individualistic entrepreneurial activity and one of the most organized underground and illegal activities.

Finally, due to the violence associated with drug trafficking, a culture of fear has developed around it, increasing social prejudices against the young shantytown blacks, or mestizos favelados, that are associated with the trade. Middle- and working-class Brazilians see these youths, regardless of their real connections with crime, as purveyors of havoc in society. Some of them feel it is as if God no longer exists, moral parameters have weakened, and institutional restraints are unjust, inefficient, on nonexistent.(13)

DRUG TRAFFICKING IN RIO DE JANEIRO(14)

Fear of drug-related dangers in Brazil is not mere hysteria created by the onslaught of media messages. It is, to a certain extent, realistic. Data on violent crimes in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and many other Brazilian cities justify this fear within the urban population. From 1982 and 1990, homicides increased from 23 to 63 per 100,000 inhabitants, and occurred mainly at the poor periphery of Rio and not in the municipality itself. The number of minors who became crime fatalities was three times...