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Abstract
From the later 1970s through to the end of the military government in Brazil (1985), many social scientists saw signs of a new form of citizenship and a deepening of democracy emerging in favela residents' associations. Some maintained the dream, even as it became clear that the restoration of party politics, pervasive clientelism, and effects of economic globalisation tended to corrode and isolate the associations. Over the decades, however, the dream has been further shattered by studies, mainly of favelas in Rio de Janeiro, which show the associations destroyed or enfeebled in the course of drug wars and the dynamics of ‘the militarisation of urban marginality’ (Loïc Wacquant). This paper reviews several of these studies, and concedes much to them. However, a basis for maintaining the dream is found in a shift of focus from residents' associations in particular favelas to networks and a ‘new institutionality’ in urban politics.
Notes
1. For example, Tilman Evers, ‘Identity: The Hidden Side of New Social Movements in Latin America’, in David Slater (ed.), New Social Movements and the State in Latin America, Amsterdam, CEDLA Publications, 1985, pp. 43–71; Scott Mainwaring and Eduardo Viola, ‘New Social Movements, Political Culture and Democracy: Brazil and Argentina in the 1980s’, Telos, 61, Fall 1984, pp. 17–54.
2. Rowan Ireland, Kingdoms Come: Religion and Politics in Brazil, Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh UP, 1992.
3. The fullest elaboration of this kind was encountered in a conference paper by John Friedmann, which the author came across as he was about to enter the field in 1988. It later appeared as ‘The Dialectic of Reason’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 13:2, 1989, pp. 217–36.
4. For example, Pedro Roberto Jacobi, ‘Movimentos populares e resposta do Estado: autonomia e controle versus cooptação e clientelismo’, in Renato Raul Boschi (org.), Movimentos coletivos no Brasil urbano, Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 1983, pp. 145–79.
5. For example, Mainwaring and Viola, ‘New Social Movements’.
6. An excellent example from the academic literature is Tilman Evers, ‘Labor-Force Production and Urban Movements: Illegal Subdivision of Land in São Paulo,’ Latin American Perspectives, 14:2, Spring 1987, pp. 187–203. The newspaper reports were found in the Folha de São Paulo and the Estado de São Paulo in the second half of 1988.
7. Manuel Castells, The City and the Grassroots: A Cross-cultural Theory of Urban Social Movements, Los Angeles, California UP, 1983.
8. Castells, p. 212.
9. Castells, p. 212.
10. Castells, p. 327. Note that Castells' full analysis of failed urban movements, including squatters' movements, is more subtle than it appears in this outline. Having failed, either by attempting too much (Utopia) or too little (extension of urban services) they may still help produce ‘new historical meaning … nurturing the embryos of tomorrow's social movements’, p. 331.
11. Maria da Glória Gohn, Reividicações Populares Urbanas: Um estudo sobre as Associações de Moradores em São Paulo, São Paulo, Editora Autores Associados/Cortez Editora, 1982.
12. Lúcio Kowarick, ‘The Pathways to Encounter: Reflections on the Social Struggle in São Paulo’, in David Slater (ed.), New Social Movements and the State in Latin America, Amsterdam, CEDLA Publications, 1985, pp. 73–91.
13. Kowarick, ‘Pathways’, p. 85.
14. At the time, support for this position was found in Geert Banck, and Ana M. Doimo, ‘Between Utopia and Strategy: a Case Study of a Brazilian Urban Social Movement’, in Geert Banck, and Kees Koonings, Social Change in Contemporary Brazil, Amsterdam: CEDLA Publications, 1988, pp. 71–87.
15. Ruth Cardoso, ‘Movimentos sociais urbanos: balanço crítico’, in B. Sorj and M. de Mello (eds), Sociedade e política no Brasil pos 64, São Paulo, Brasiliense, 2nd edn, 1984, pp. 215–39. For the view post-1985, see Cardoso, ‘Os Movimentos Populares no Contexto da Consolidação da Democracia, in Fábio Wanderley Reis and Guillermo O'Donnell (eds), A Democracia no Brasil: Dilemas e Perspectivas’, São Paulo, Vértice, 1988, pp. 368–81.
16. Mainwaring and Viola, ‘New Social Movements’.
17. Scott Mainwaring, ‘Urban Popular Movements, Identity and Democracy in Brazil’, Comparative Political Studies, 20, July 1987, pp. 131–59.
18. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Social Theory: Its Situation and its Task, (2nd edn) London and New York, Verso, 2004. The first edition was published in 1987.
19. This was CEDEC, the Centro de Estudos de Cultura Contemporânea.
20. Sonia E. Alvarez, ‘“Deepening” Democracy: Popular Movement Networks, Constitutional Reform, and Radical Urban Regimes in Contemporary Brazil’, in Robert Fischer and Joseph Kling (eds), Mobilizing the Community: Local Politics in the Era of the Global City, Newbury Park, Sage Publications, 1993, pp. 191–219. Quotation from p. 196. See also Alvarez, ‘Reweaving the Fabric of Collective Action: Social Movements and Challenges to “Actually Existing Democracy” in Brazil’, in R. G. Fox and O. Starn (eds), Between Resistance and Revolution: Cultural Politics and Social Protest, New Brunswick NJ, and London, Rutgers UP, 1997, pp. 83–117.
21. Compare their view to the evidence and arguments for some positive effects of patron–client politics in Mexico City, in Tina Hilgers, ‘“Who is using whom?” Clientelism from the Client's Perspective’, JILAR, 15:1, July 2009, pp. 51–75.
22. This civic culture, constructed on the basis of observation of the practices of Commission members, and long interviews with leaders of the Commission is outlined in Rowan Ireland, ‘Fragile Synergies for Development: The Case of Jardim Oratório SP Brazil’, In Alberto Cimadore, Hartley Dean and Jorge Siqueira (eds), The Poverty of the State: Reconsidering the Role of the State in the Struggle Against Global Poverty, Buenos Aires, CLACSO Books, 2005, pp. 241–62.
23. Ireland, ‘Fragile Synergies’, pp. 252–56.
24. The process of isolation had been advancing for some time. It was already evident in the results of a household survey, conducted by the author in 1992–93, in which, among other things, residents were asked about recognition of the Commission and its key personnel. Compared to almost universal recognition in the period 1983–87 when the Commission led the struggle for land tenure, the survey suggested a massive decline in recognition once that struggle was over and residents, acting alone or in small groups, sought means to achieve urban infrastructure other than the cooperative, participatory projects led by the Commission. By 2005, rapid population turnover diversification in the favela had resulted in even less recognition, according to members of the Land Commission Executive of the 1990s who still lived in the favela and strove to keep Commission projects alive. On the other hand, in interviews conducted in 2005, praise for the Commission's record and positive assessments of the projects came from two sources that I would not have expected in the 1990s: the male offspring of erstwhile Commission leaders, and one of the Pentecostal pastors who had lived and built-up his church in the favela for many years.
25. Pedro Jacobi, ‘Public and Private Responses to Social Exclusion Among Youth in São Paulo’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 606, July 2006, pp. 216–30.
26. Compare the effects of violence in favelas of Rio de Janeiro discussed in Marcelo Lopes de Souza, ‘Social Movements in the Face of Criminal Power: The Socio-political Fragmentation of Space and “micro-level warlords” as Challenges for Emancipative Urban Struggles’, City, 13:1, March 2009, pp. 27–52.
27. For a brief summary of current indicators of continuing inequality evident in favela residents' income levels, educational opportunities, access to public services, and employment, see Maria da Piedade Morais ‘Condições de vida e moradia nos assentamentos precários brasileiros’, IPEA: Desafios do Desenvolvimento, 16:25, outobro/novembro 2010, p. 41. Piedade Morais notes that the proportion of Brazilians living in sub-standard housing in areas lacking basic urban services (she equates these to favelas) fell substantially between 1992 and 2008, but that despite sustained growth in the economy, 50 million Brazilians in 2010 continued to live in such places. Piedade Morais attributes this to the model of development adopted by the country and applied in the urban policies of the administrations of both Fernando Henrique Cardoso and his successor, Luiz ‘Lula’ Inácio da Silva of the Workers' Party. Piedade Morais draws on raw data available in Pnad 2008. Pnad is the National Household Sample Survey conducted yearly by IBGE (the Brazilian Institute for Geography and Statistics), but with a lag before the full reports are available. Some data e.g. on demography, income and employment are available on the web for 2009, but these do not appear to alter the picture presented by Piedade Morais from the more complete 2008 data. More detailed exploration of why areas of concentrated poverty in urban areas persist despite high economic growth in contemporary Brazil may be found in Carla Bronzo, ‘Intersectoriality, Autonomy and Territory in Municipal Programs to Fight Poverty: Experiences of Belo Horizonte and São Paulo’, Planajamento e Politicas Públicas, 35, July/December 2010, pp. 119–59. The studies cited here leave no room for the argument that favela residents' associations and urban popular movements in general have faltered because their projects for material welfare and emancipation have been achieved. However, in particular cases, successful urbanisation may be followed by de-mobilisation.
28. Compare analysis of how leaders of drug gangs replace associations of residents in Rio de Janeiro: Arias, Enrique Desmond, Rodrigues, Corinne Davis, ‘The Myth of Personal Security: Criminal Gangs, Dispute Resolution, and Identity in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas’, Latin American Politics and Society, 48:4, 2006, pp. 53–81.
29. Goetz F. Ottmann, Lost for Words: Brazilian Liberationism in the 1990s. Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh UP, 2002. The Land Commission in Jardim Oratório, like many another favela residents' association, had decisive input from the ‘liberationist’ Church from its inception. This came in various forms: first from the central parish in Mauá, then from young priests and seminarians who came (invited by residents) to live in the favela as part of a twelve-year fixed term pastoral project, and finally from Catholic tertiary students and junior academics who, on weekends, came into assist the Commission in its literacy training classes, and to provide technical assistance on publications and urbanisation projects.
30. Manuel A. Vásquez, The Brazilian Popular Church and the Crisis of Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1998. For an account of how ‘base communities’ might fail to develop autonomous voice and agency among Catholics of the popular classes, see David Lehmann, Struggle for the Spirit: Religious Transformation and Popular Culture in Brazil and Latin America, Princeton, Princeton UP, 1996. Lehmann's case material shows the hegemony exercised through them by Brazil's educated elites (albeit a leftist and religious segment thereof). Lehmann's case study was conducted in Salvador Bahia.
31. For an early development of this argument, see Geert Banck, ‘Mass Communication and Urban Contest in Brazil: Some Reflections on Lifestyle and Class’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 13:1, 1995, pp. 45–60. For a later elaboration with direct reference to the effect of neo-liberal policies of successive governments in Brazil on civil society and the popular movements, see John Gledhill, ‘Citizenship and the Social Geography of Deep Neo-liberalization’, Anthropologica, 47:1, 2005, pp. 81–100, especially 90–93.
32. Many residents of Jardim Oratório had been forced into the favela, having lost employment in industry and construction during the ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s. Some of these had experience of the new unionism that had developed in the satellite cities of São Paulo in the late 1970s into the 1980s. Three members of the executive of the Land Commission had had this experience.
33. Peter Evans, ‘State–Society Synergy: Government Action and Social Capital in Development’, World Development, 24:6, 1996, pp. 1110–32.
34. G. Baiocchi, ‘Participation, Activism and Politics: The Porto Alegre Experiment and Deliberative Democratic Theory’, Politics and Society, 29:1, 2001, pp. 43–72. See also, Goetz F. Ottmann, Democracy in the Making: Municipal Reform, Civil Society, and the Brazilian Workers' Party, Hauppauge NY, Nova Science Publishers, 2009.
35. For a fuller listing see Renato Cymbalista, ‘Refundar o não fundado: desafios da gestão democrática das políticas urbana e habitacional no Brasil’, Instituto Pólis, 27/04/2005, www.polis.org.br/artigo interno.asp?codigo = 95, accessed 20 July 2010.
36. However, Gledhill, ‘Citizenship and the Social Geography’, pp. 93–94 cuts through any euphoria regarding these developments, pointing to ways in which some NGOs in the new participatory fora endorsed by the state become socially distanced from the communities and local associations whose interests they seek to mediate with municipal and state governments.
37. The phrase was used in Sílvio Caccia Bava and Veronika Paulics, ‘Experiências inovadoras em uma nova governação democrática’, Instituto Pólis, 9/03/2005, www.polis.org.br/artigointerno.asp?codigo = 26, accessed 20 July 2010.
38. For example, see A. Berkman, J. Garcia, M. Muñoz-Labay, M. Paiva, and R. Parker, ‘A Critical Analysis of the Brazilian Response to HIV/AIDS: Lessons Learned for Controlling the Epidemic in Developing Countries’, American Journal of Public Health, 95:7, 2005, pp. 1162–72. For a less specialised account: Avert, ‘HIV & AIDS in Brazil’, www.avert.org/aids-brazil.htmAVERT.org, accessed 20 July 2010.
39. Cymbalista, ‘Refundar’.
40. See the report of recent campaigns against the land market logic embodied in the national government program Minha Casa, Minha Luta in the report from Abong posted in Adital, 18/06/2010, www.adital.com.br/SITE/noticia.asp?lang = PT&cod = 48714, accessed 18 June 2010.
41. Leonardo Avritzer, Participatory Institutions in Democratic Brazil, Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. Avritzer examines differences between cities, as well as between functional areas in the establishment, modus operandi and effectiveness of the consenlhos populares.
42. The word ‘arguably’ is used here advisedly. Victor Albert, who is completing his PhD thesis at La Trobe University, has been examining how conselhos populares in Santo André SP function in relation to the ideals of popular participation. See also Gledhill, ‘Citizenship and the Social Geography’, for reflections on the limitations of these participatory institutions. Avritzer, Participatory Institutions, chapter 8, provides systematic comparisons between cities and functions of the councils which show, at best, only spotty realisation of the dream. A useful survey and critical assessment of popular participation under the new institutionalisation is found in Regina Fátima C. F. Ferreira, ‘Participação e Controle Social nas Políticas Públicas Urbanas no Brasil’, Proposta, 120, 2010, pp. 4–16. Proposta is a journal of the NGO known as FASE, the Federation of Organizations for Social and Educational Assistance.
43. Elizabeth Leeds, ‘Cocaine and Parallel Polities in the Brazilian Urban Periphery: Constraints on Local-level Democratization’, Latin American Research Review, 31:3, 1996, pp. 47–83.
44. Janice Perlman, The Myth of Marginality: Urban Poverty and Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Berkeley, California UP, 1976. For summaries of results from her later survey see Perlman, ‘The Metamorphosis of Marginality in Rio de Janeiro’, Latin American Research Review, 39:1, 2004, 189–92; and ‘The metamorphosis of Marginality: Four Generations in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 606, July 2006, pp. 154–77.
45. Perlman, ‘Metamorphosis’, p. 189.
46. In her recent book, Perlman appears to harden her critique of Wacquant as she shows the mobility of former favelados, stresses the diversity of favela residents, and charts agency against structural determination in the biographies of her interviewees. Janice Perlman, Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro, New York, Oxford UP, 2009. Here, though, she also notes that ‘favela residents remain pseudo-citizens who have yet to reap the benefits of Brazil's 1985 return to democracy’ (p. 11).
47. Loïc Wacquant, ‘Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality’, Thesis Eleven, 91, November 2007, pp. 66–77; Wacquant, Loïc, ‘The Militarization of Urban Marginality: Lessons from the Brazilian Metropolis’, International Political Sociology, 2, 2008, pp. 56–74.
48. Wacquant, ‘Territorial Stigmatization’, p. 66.
49. Wacquant, ‘Territorial Stigmatization’, p. 72.
50. This analysis of the precariat is elaborated in Wacquant, ‘Territorial Stigmatization’, pp. 71–73.
51. Marcelo Lopes de Souza, ‘Social Movements in the Face of Criminal Power: The Socio-political Fragmentation of Space and “micro-level warlords” as Challenges for Emancipative Urban Struggles’, City, 13:1, March 2009, pp. 27–52.
52. Perlman, ‘Metamorphosis’, p. 173, provides supporting evidence and interpretation. The more recent generation of favelados living in a closed-off ‘sphere of fear’ experience a decline in social capital relative to the residents she interviewed in 1969. They report ‘less use of public space, less socializing among friends and relatives, less membership in community organizations, and less networking in general’.
53. Souza, ‘Social Movements’, pp. 33–34.
54. Souza, ‘Social Movements’, p. 30.
55. Enrique Desmond Arias and Corinne Davis Rodrigues, ‘The Myth of Personal Security: Criminal Gangs, Dispute Resolution, and Identity in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas’, Latin American Politics and Society, 48:4, 2006, pp. 53–81.
56. Arias and Rodrigues, ‘The Myth of Personal Security’, p. 54.
57. Arias and Rodrigues, ‘The Myth of Personal Security’, p. 55.
58. Arias, Trafficking, Social Networks and Public Security, Chapel Hill NC, North Carolina UP, 2006.
59. Arias, ‘Faith in our Neighbors: Networks and Social Order in Three Brazilian Favelas’, Latin American Politics and Society, 46:1, Spring 2004, pp. 1–38.
60. Arias, ‘Neighbors’, p. 6.
61. The move from popular movement associations as the salient actors in civil society for social justice and emancipation in the 70s and 80s, to ever-changing, flexible networks and alliances struggling for recognition and rights for racial, ethnic, gender, environmentalist communities in a wide variety of forums in the twenty-first century is documented and analysed by Maria da Glória Gohn, Movimentos Sociais e Redes de Mobilizações Civis no Brasil Contemporâneo, Petrópolis RJ, Editora Vozes, 2010. Gohn shows us not so much the replacement of the old movements and associations by new forms of collective action with new agendas, but rather the overlapping of old and new, the operation of the old in new Brazilian and international social spaces, and the transfers of personnel across shifting mobilizations in civil society.
62. Arias, ‘Neighbors’, p. 6 outlines how networks function to allow groups with different oppositional cultures and strategies to cooperate in specific confrontations with drug gangs and corrupt police.
63. Souza, ‘Social movements’, pp. 32–38.
64. However, a third wave of challenge to the dream is mounting in critical analyses of how the new institutions work, at two levels. First, down at the level of the poor neighbourhoods (represented here by Gledhill, ‘Citizenship and the Social Geography’). Second, up at the level of meetings of the conselhos and encounters between local politicians, administrators and conselho members from poorer neighbourhoods (the doctoral research of Victor Albert referred to previously). The small number of remaining leaders of residents' associations interviewed by the author in 2010–11in Mauá and São Bernardo do Campo lamented the failure of the conselhos and PT administrations in their municipalities.