Abstract
High urban violence rates have been one of the leading development challenges in Caracas, Venezuela, as its homicide rates have been higher than most other Latin American cities. However, most violence occurs in its barrios or socioeconomically marginalized urban neighborhoods. This book aims to examine the structural causes of high violence rates in the barrios of Caracas while socioeconomic indicators improved through qualitative comparative analysis and a political economy approach. The outcome of high violence rates under improving socioeconomic conditions counters the established literature on urban violence, which shows the significance of this book. The introductory chapter discusses the structural parameter under which violence in the barrios of Caracas took place, which also frames the study’s qualitative comparative analysis . It discusses Venezuela’s dependence on oil exports since the 1920s, which generated economic rent , reduced the productivity of non-oil sectors, and increased the urbanization rate. However, the chapter shows that in the early twenty-first century, socioeconomic indicators improved, thus reducing marginality or economic deprivation. A reduction of marginality should have theoretically also led to lower urban violence rates, as lower marginality should reduce the incentives of committing homicide to achieve economic and cultural goals such as accumulating economic resources. This book forwards social capital as a possible intervening substructural variable that can explain the politico-economic structural conditions—or “causes of causes”—for high violence rates in the barrios of Caracas to occur. The analysis of social capital’s intervening role can explain the theoretical puzzle of increased violence rates under improving socioeconomic conditions .
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- 1.
In English: “15 million illegal firearms in the country. 72% of homicide victims are from 15 to 29 years of age and primarily male. 63% of firearm victims suffer over five gunshots ” (El Nacional 13 August 2010, accessed on 19 October 2017, http://kiosko.net/ve/2010-08-13/np/ve_nacional.html). This and other translations in this book are the author’s own.
- 2.
Early modernization theory attempted to explain the phenomenon of barrios by arguing that it was the first step toward the social mobility of the rural-to-urban migrant, and that secular economic growth would increase barrio -dweller savings rate, and thus investment in capital that lifts them out of poverty (Frankenhoff 1967, 29; Pachner 1977, 18). However, in many developing countries of the contemporary world the stability of informal settlements has been resilient (Marx et al. 2013, 188–189). Furthermore, evidence shows that barrio-eradication programs worsen the problem, because they do not eradicate the structural conditions creating these marginal urban spaces (Bettencourt and West 2010, 912).
- 3.
Durkheim provides an illustrative example by explaining that suicide, a seemingly individual action, has its causes in the structural constitution of a society, like religious cultural structures (Durkheim 1897, 8, 335–336; Durkheim 1893, 356, 360). In his example, social structures created by Protestantism appear to lead to more suicides than those created by Catholicism (Durkheim 1897, 8, 335–336). Structures arise and reproduce social outcomes because individuals require information to assess whether their recursive actions will keep on having desirable payoffs (North 1991, 97–98; North et al. 2009, 16). They channel information in recursive human actions, which delineates individual choices affecting attempts by groups to organize toward achieving community goals (Giddens 1984, 2; Collins 2004, 5–6).
- 4.
Checkel (2006, 362) illustrates the point behind “black box” explanations through the example of the international relations thesis “that democracies do not fight other democracies.” Empirical evidence seems to back such thesis, but that there is little theoretical explanation for how the mechanics of that process work. Meaning, there is little process tracing between foreign policy in democratic countries and lack of war between democracies.
- 5.
Putnam et al. (1993, 83–86, 164–167) examined the widely differing performances of the Italian regional governments. Although the different regional governments were constituted under a similar institutional framework and endowed with similar economic resources, socioeconomic performance between them was highly inequitable. Putnam’s conclusion was that some Italian regions developed civic networks of cooperation or social capital. Social capital like any capital generates positive-sum growth because it solves dilemmas of collective action , such as the prisoner’s dilemma, without the need of third-party contractual enforcement. Moreover, De Tocqueville’s (1841, 452–445) observation of how nineteenth-century Americans regularly engaged in political and civil associations is noteworthy because—he argued that this was a major factor in keeping this young nation “civilized” and to promote progress and democratic stability. Tocqueville’s work was an important source for the development of Putnam’s conceptualization social capital.
- 6.
The Dutch disease refers to the effects of an overvalued currency and an overheated economy, due to a high multiplier effect, which are caused by artificially increasing aggregate demand due to the high hard currency inflow coming from natural resource exports. This makes importing goods cheaper that producing them domestically, which crowds out preexisting national industries—whose rent creation is not as high—resulting in the rapid contraction of labor-intensive industries leading to both greater unemployment and inflation (Auty 1993, 3–5; Gelb 1988, 321; Sid Ahmed 1987, 889–890).
- 7.
Clientelistic policies are macroeconomic hurtful in the long term, as they require inefficient investment that increases the willingness of population to become “clients” of the “patron” ruling elite. Rent distribution through clientelistic policies such as jobs in public employment, subsidies, or other forms of cash transfers must be conditional or discriminatory, which increases the willingsness of some to become “clients,” as not to miss the economic opportunities provided by such policies. Since the distribution of rent or other economic resource occurs as a result of political power and not market mechanisms, such policies tend to be macroeconomically inefficient. However, clientelistic policies resolve the “political-commitment problem” by increasing the rewards of rent-seeking (Robinson and Verdier 2013, 261–263).
- 8.
Oil production in Venezuela increased in absolute terms but decreased in relative terms since the time of the industry’s nationalization and up to 2012. From 1975 to 2012, it increased from about two to over three barrels million batters per day. However, oil production in the major oil exporters of the Middle East increased in the same time-period from about 11 to about 28 million barrels per day (British Petroleum 2016). This shows Venezuela’s relative oil production decrease.
- 9.
However, oil rent-induced rural-to-urban migration was not the only factor allowing for urban populations to increase. The near eradication of malaria through DDT fumigation from most of Venezuela, especially the country’s plains, and improvements in basic healthcare during the 1950s—pushed forward by the pioneering work of physician Arnoldo Gabaldon—allowed for a population boom, especially outside Caracas and the Andes. Before the 1950s, and Gabaldon’s work, most of Venezuela was virtually uninhabitable. Malaria was a greater cause of death than the influenza epidemic of the 1910s, its death rate about twice as high as the urban violence rate of the recent decades (Gonzalez 2005, 1698–1700; Yepes Colemenares 1995, 17–19). As explained by Fox (2012) improvements in health, which where a global phenomenon, allowed for populations to boom in most of the so-called developing world, which helps to explain increased rates of urbanization.
- 10.
Since rentier states like Venezuela appropriate and monopolize rent windfalls through political power, then membership or access to the state class determines wage increments instead of labor productivity. Rent windfalls and their distribution determine employment—or unemployment—instead of the reinvestment of profits in capital and the skill of the labor force ( Sid Ahmed 2000, 506–507). Therefore, under a rent-cum-marginality macrostructure microeconomic success becomes a function of personal connections to the rent accumulating elite instead of one’s own labor or entrepreneurial skills. Socioeconomic development takes place when a wage-laborer or entrepreneur can accumulate wealth without the need of contacts, connections, or prestige, except for his or her own productive skills (Elsenhans 1996, 58) .
- 11.
Venezuela has experienced three different FX control regimes and they have operated through multiple tiers of FX rates; all of them since the 1980s. The first one took place between 1983 and 1989, the second one from 1994 and 1996, and the third one began in 2003 and has been in place up to the writing of the present book (Karl 1997, 176–177; Oliveros 2013; Padron 1995).
- 12.
However, this study does not make use of unemployment as a proxy of marginality even though the Keynesian roots of the marginality concept would suggest its use. This is because marginal individuals could have formal employment and still consume more than they produce, or vice a versa (Barrios et al. 1985, 65–73). Moreover , Levitt and Venkatesh (2000, 771–772) show the convoluted nature of employment in barrio dwellings, which makes its use as an indicator of marginality problematic.
- 13.
The national poverty line measured by the “Canasta Básica” or basic basket of consumer prices entails the monthly costs of covering basic food necessities (2200 calories per person) and nonfood necessities (housing, healthcare, water, and electricity) for a an average household (5 persons per household has typically been used in recent years, as it is the average size of the Venezuelan family). The classification of households as economically deprived follows if their income falls below the monthly “Canasta Básica,” which varies constantly due to the country’s volatile inflation rate. (Instituto Nacional de Estadística 2016d).
- 14.
This book takes the methodological position of recognizing the strengths and limits of the positive approach. One can refer to this as the “realist approach” (Maxwell 2012, 656–658).
- 15.
To date, no barrio-specific homicide rates have been found, which requires the use of county-wide or parish-wide figures. These statistics have the limitation of encompassing population settlements other than those studied because political geographies are often arbitrary divisions of space. However, county-wide statistics are still valid for an exploratory qualitative comparison because the barrio areas selected are the biggest ones found in their respective counties or parishes.
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Leon, D.S. (2020). Introduction. In: Violence in the Barrios of Caracas. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22940-5_1
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