Number 251, November 06, 1996.

CHILDREN AND YOUTH ISSUES

- Former street-youth plans to sue state.

In Brazil it is highly unusual that a citizen take legal proceedings against the state for personal damages. For this reason a case reported in the 'Folha de Sao Paulo' on November 03 is unique for a number of reasons. It is of 39 year old Roberto da Silva who will use the material he researched for a masters thesis which he prepared for the University of Sao Paulo (USP) in a court action against the state. In the court action he will argue that the state was responsible for separating him from his two brothers and his sister. He claims that this separation finally was the cause of his entry into the world of crime and was responsible for the poverty which his brother and sister suffer today.

Silva is a former street youth. In 1963 when he was five years old he was abandoned by his mother and placed in a state run orphanage. He was separated from his other brothers and his sister who were placed in other orphanages. Until 1973 when he was 16 years old he lived in various orphanages. Having attained this age he would not be kept for a longer period in state run orphanages. At that stage he was studying in 6th. standard. He had no money when he left the orphanage; he began living on the streets, left school and became involved in crime. Between 1979 and 1984 he was imprisoned on three occasions - in all he spent a total of four years in prison.

When he left prison in the mid 1980s he returned to school and eventually graduated as a teacher. This week he will defend his master's thesis. After an eight month's search he finally found his sister, Aparecida, and brother, Reis, last January in the interior of the State of Sao Paulo. So far he has been unable to discover the whereabouts of his other brother, Flavio.

"We will use the thesis to show that Silva's experience is not an exception but the result of a state policy which afflicts millions of Brazilians" commented his lawyer Flavio Augusto Saraiva Straus. In his thesis Roberto da Silva analyses a group of 370 children who grew up in state orphanages around the same time as he was placed in such an institution. All of the children had three characteristics in common. All were abandoned by their parents in the State of Sao Paulo between 1958 and 1964 - 70% were less than a year old at the time. All remained for more than a decade in the state orphanages and before they entered such institutions neither they nor their families had a criminal record.

Of the 370, 32.9% had single mothers, 28.2% had separated mothers, 23.5% had mothers who had disappeared, 11.8% of the mothers were married and 3.5% of the mothers had died when the children were committed to the state institutions. 25.9% were white, just over 1% were of oriental background and 73% were negroes. After leaving the orphanages, 135 (37%) were arrested for involvement in crimes ranging from robbery to murder. 40 of this group were arrested for murder or causing serious bodily injuries to others. 89 were imprisoned on more than one occasion; 12 died in prison.

Analyzing the data, Silva arrived at three conclusions in his thesis. In the first place he discovered that even though the state orphanages are responsible for the education and professional training of the children they care for, they do not seriously invest in this area. When the youth then leave such institutions they have huge problems in maintaining themselves. For example 47.1% of the group of 135 which spent time in prison had never attended school and 74.1% of this group had no professional formation. Secondly he discovered that the orphanages favor family disintegration. They frequently separate children of the same family and do not allow the children to consult the documents relating to their family and their past. This information if supplied could help the youth to discover members of the family. Finally Silva claims that brutality is what regulates relationships between the children and youth in such institutions. Thus when they leave the orphanages, Silva claims that they react to many situations in the violent manner which they had learned while in state care.

- Street children recognize that school attendance would give them a better future.

According to a survey carried out by the Secretariat of Social Development of the Federal District of Brasilia many of the 896 street children interviewed in the 7 to 18 age group felt that they would have a better future if they attended school. Many of the street girls would like to be teachers and the street boys, football players. 89% of those interviewed were boys.

The street educators who carried out the survey found 138 sleeping on the streets. Of this total 110 were boys and 54 were accompanied by their parents. 43% of the total group live with their family and 18% are being cared for by their mother. 34% of those interviewed felt that their chances in life would improve if they could study and 27% replied that work would bring about this improvement. 22% felt that street children had no chances of significant improvements in their living conditions. 58% of the children belong to families who are not natives of the Federal District.

24% of the group look after parked cars; 32% earn money washing cars and 8% are shoe-shiners. 27 children in the group earn money by selling paper for recycling. 22% of the group admitted drug use - 25% of this total use marijuana; 7% use cocaine; 4% use crack; 35% drink spirits and many sniff glue and other chemical products.

HEALTH ISSUES

- Big increase in number of women with AIDS.

The number of women with AIDS in Brazil increased by 211.46% between 1990 and 1994 according to a report in the 'Folha de Sao Paulo' on November 02. The increase of AIDS suffers in the male population has increased by 62.8% during the same period. In 1988 the ratio was one woman with AIDS for every 18 men. Last year the female/male ratio stood at 1 to 3.

Since 1992 the number of men with AIDS has remained stable whilst amongst women the increase has been significant. The report claims that one of the principal reasons for this has been the transmission of the virus in heterosexual relations. In 1990, the number of people who were infected in heterosexual relations was 6.4%; last year this rose to 29.2%. The number of women infected by their husbands also is on the increase. In 1991, 18.6% of the infections amongst women had been caused by husbands or boy friends. Last year 38.1% were infected in this manner. When the first cases were registered during the first half of the 1980s, most of those infected had university or second level education. At the moment the majority of those being infected are illiterate or have left school by 4th. grade. One of the principal consequences of the increase of women with AIDS is the growth in the number of children infected. In 1990, 173 children were infected during birth. In 1994 the number had risen to 424.

UPDATES

- Update: Asian lumber companies to be investigated.

In the September 25 edition of NEWS FROM BRAZIL we reported that Asian lumber companies had invested large sums of money in buying out Brazilian logging companies in the Amazon. At the time, a newspaper report expressed fears that this investment could lead to wide-scale devastation of areas of tropical forest.

In mid October the National Congress set up an external commission to inquire into the purchase of lands, saw-mills and timber by Asian groups in the region. The commission which is headed by Deputy Gilney Viana of the Workers' Party (PT) has six months to prepare its' report. The commission plans to visit the region to investigate at first hand what is happening.

- Update: Prison violence and riots.

On September 19 we reported at length on the inhuman conditions in the prisons; last week we reported that five people - four prisoners and one prison functionary had been killed in prison riots in Sao Paulo. On November 02 a further four prisoners were killed and nine were injured in a prison riot in the coastal town of Praia Grande, State of Sao Paulo. The riot took place because of over-crowding in the prison; the prisoners demanded the transferral of 18 prisoners to another prison. The riot finished in the early afternoon of November 04 when 15 prisoners were transferred to other prisons.

Also on November 04, 12 prisoners escaped from another prison in Praia Grande. A day later a total of 104 prisoners escaped from two police stations in the city of Sao Paulo. A group of eight armed men freed 31 prisoners during the early hours of November 05 from the Jardim dos Ipes police station in the south of the city - 3 were recaptured. The building was planned to hold 20 prisoners. Only one prison warder had been on duty. Late on the same day, 73 prisoners escaped from the Cidade Dutra police station also in the southern region of the city - 13 were recaptured.

On November 04, 397 prisoners in the Mogi das Cruzes prison 50 kms. from Sao Paulo also staged a riot. The prison was built to house 66 prisoners in 11 cells. The prison population rose to 426 by October 11 last when 121 prisoners escaped. The prisoners demanded legal, medical and dental assistance as well as the removal of ill prisoners and the transferral of prisoners to other prisons.

- Update: death-squad threatens investigation of assassination of human rights activist.

On October 24 we reported the assassination of human rights lawyer and activist Francisco Gilson Nogueira de Carvalho near Maraba, State of Rio Grande de Norte. Mr. Carvalho was assassinated on October 20. He had denounced the involvement of civil police in an extermination group known as the 'Golden Boys' ('Meninos de Ouro'). Human rights organizations at the time denounced the delay of the federal police in starting investigations and called for the dismissal of the Sub Secretary for Security in the state, Maurilio Medeiros, who was under suspicion of participating in the 'Golden Boys' death squads linked to the death of Mr. Carvalho. The Sub Secretary was finally dismissed on October 31.

On November 05, the Commission for Human Rights of the National Congress published a list with the names of ten people who are on a death list in Natal (Rio Grande do Norte). Heading the list is the Procurator General for Justice in the state, Emanuel Cavalcanti, six public prosecutors, one chief of police and two members of the Center for Human Rights and Collective Memory (CDHMP) where Mr. Carvalho had worked. The public prosecutors have been accompanying 54 inquires which are investigating the involvement of the 'Golden Boys' in assassinations.

VIOLENCE

Reprinted from the Sept/Oct 1996 issue of NACLA Report on the Americas. For subscription information, E-Mail to nacla-info@igc.apc.org

- Democracies without Citizenship by Paulo Sergio Pinheiro

Paulo Sergio Pinheiro is professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Violence at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. He is also a member of NACLA's editorial board. Translated from the Portuguese by Judy Rein.

In the middle of Rio Branco Avenue in downtown Rio de Janeiro, three men robbed a bank. As they were making their get-away, private security guards assaulted them, stealing their spoils and killing one of the thieves in the ensuing struggle. The original thieves, whose weapons were rented, decided to file a complaint at the police station to try to at least recoup their stolen weapons--which they did after the police apprehended the private guards. Six other bank robberies occurred on that same day in Rio de Janeiro, but in only one case did the affected business file charges with the police. In Brazil, the inversion of order has reached the point that criminals seem to trust the police more than established businesses do.

In Brazil, as in many Latin American countries, there is a dramatic gap between the letter of the law and the brutal reality of law enforcement. Brazil's new Constitution, promulgated in 1988, incorporated broad provisions for the protection of individual rights, which were systematically violated during two decades of military rule. The rights to life, liberty and personal integrity have been explicitly recognized, and torture and racial discrimination are now considered crimes. But despite the formal recognition of these rights, official violence continues.

This gap between law and reality is rooted in the failure of Latin American democracies to consolidate one of the most basic cornerstones of democratic governance: the legitimate control over violence. This failure has resulted in the persistence of endemic violence in many countries in the region. On the one hand, violence is exercised by elites to maintain "social order"--deadly force, torture and arbitrary detention continue to characterize police behavior in countries like Brazil. And because such official acts of violence enjoy widespread impunity, arbitrary police behavior continues unabated. On the other hand, violent crime and delinquency have also increased in Latin American societies, particularly in the 1980s and 1990s. Crimes against life and physical integrity--homicide, assault, rape--have risen sharply, and murder rates account for a growing percentage of unnatural deaths. In Sao Paulo, for example, the homicide rate jumped from 41.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1988 to 50.2 in 1993.1 Crimes against property--theft, robbery, fraud--are also on the rise. So is organized crime, especially drug trafficking and money laundering.2

This endemic violence--embedded in a context of broad economic inequalities and a system of profoundly assymetric social relations--is hardly a new phenomenon in the region. It has worsened over the past two decades, at least in part because neoliberal economic policies have deepened inequalities and doomed millions of Latin Americans to lives of poverty and social exclusion. But violence is also the direct result of the continuation of a long tradition of authoritarian practices by elites against "non-elites"--practices that are often reproduced in social relations among poor people themselves. The return to democratic constitutionalism did little to eradicate the authoritarian practices embedded in the state and in society.

While the most egregious forms of human rights violations committed by the region's military regimes have been eliminated under civilian rule, the long-awaited democracies have not fulfilled their role as guardians of public order and protectors of the fundamental rights of all citizens. Consequently, the rule of law remains precarious in many Latin American countries. In Brazil as elsewhere, the difference is that the victims are no longer political activists, many of them educated members of the middle class, whose opposition to the military regimes got them killed or brutally tortured. Today, the principal targets of arbitrary police behavior are the most defenseless and vulnerable groups in Brazilian society: the poor, rural workers and trade-union activists, minority groups, and destitute children and adolescents, many of whom live in the streets. Much of this violence is fueled by ingrained discrimination against poor people and racial minorities, who constitute a high percentage of homicide victims. Arbitrary detention and torturing suspects are still common police practices. Extrajudicial killings are also shockingly common, including the assassination of street kids by off-duty police and the repression of rural workers struggling for land and labor rights in the Northeast. The common denominator in all these cases is impunity. The failure to enforce law not only affects the equality of citizens before the law, but also makes it more difficult for governments to strengthen their legitimacy. It feeds the circle of officially sanctioned violence.

Brazil, like other Latin American countries, is a society based on exclusion--a democracy without citizenship. The impact of globalization, coupled with the crises resulting from economic adjustment programs, separate the rich and poor as never before--"as if," says Hector Castillo Berthier, "they were oil and water."3 Countries with greater inequality--high rates of income concentration in upper-income groups--tend to have higher crime rates as well as higher levels of human rights violations. Brazil is a shocking example in this regard. A country with one of the most appalling maldistributions of income on the planet--in 1992, the richest 20% earn 32 times more than the poorest 20%--Brazil also has correspondingly high rates of crime and official violence.4 For example, residents of Rio de Janeiro--along with Buenos Aires, Kampala and Pretoria--run the highest risk of having their homes broken into.5 And Brazil's militarized police forces, which come under the authority of state goverments, are among the most deadly in the world. In 1992, for example, military police killed a record 1,470 civilians in Sao Paulo alone (compared to 27 police killings in New York City that year). Those who are most affected by unemployment and most marginalized from the education system are also those most likely to be victims of arbitrary police repression as well as of ordinary crime, whether against life or property.6 In Brazil, for example, those most likely to be the victims of violent crime were individuals whose family income falls below the poverty line.7 The authors of violent crimes, such as homicide, are usually from the same social strata as the victims, and poor neighborhoods and shantytowns are the most common settings of such violent crimes. In fact, in most of Latin America's huge metropoli, there is a correlation between poor neighborhoods and deaths from violent causes, and a clear link exists between living conditions, violence and mortality rates.

This is the case in the shantytowns that dominate the landscape of almost all Latin American cities--favelas in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo,ranchos in Caracas,barriadas in Lima,campamentos in Santiago,ciudades perdidas in Mexico City,villas miserias in Buenos Aires. In these "geographic and social pre-cities," says Ignacy Sachs, "the majority do not possess the minimum conditions of what could be called urban life."8 They lack adequate housing, uncertain access to work and income, and difficulty obtaining basic services. Moreover, the state, particularly those institutions charged with maintaining peace and order, is rarely present in these "pre-cities," leaving the socially excluded to fend for themselves. In such a milieu, violence often becomes the mediator of daily social relations. Whenever the state's monopoly on legitimate violence is relaxed, survival may depend on an individual's ability to maintain his or her reputation by displaying a "credible threat of violence." "A seemingly minor affront is not merely a 'stimulus' to action, isolated in time and space," according to one study of violent behavior among poor classes in the United States. "It must be understood within a larger social context of reputations, face, relative social status, and enduring relationships."9 The offended party may feel the need to use violence defend his or her status. In this sense, violence is, to a large extent, performance.10

This kind of inner-city violence may be the result of a "loss of structure in society." In other words, where social restraints have been loosened, and violence is considered a legitimate means of resolving conflict, resorting to violent acts to resolve disputes may actually be encouraged.11 But violence may simply be a reaction by normal people to oppressive circumstances--be it poverty, the humilitation of unemployment, the pressure of organized crime, or the arbitrary power of the police. Violence is a marked characteristic of social relations in poor countries like Brazil, and as such, is a constitutent element of social deprivation.12

Young people are increasingly the victims of violent crime in large cities across Latin America. In Sao Paulo, an average of 102 youths between 15 and 24 years of age are murdered for every 100,000 inhabitants in that age range. In some poor neighborhoods, the figures for this same group reach epidemic proportions of up to 222 homicides per 100,000--more than ten times the national average.13 The degree to which young people are victimized, and involved with, crime reveals a clear link between poverty and violence.14 This is not to say that there is a direct or mechanistic relationship between poverty and violent crime, but it is imperative to consider how inequality factors into the problem of growing crime in Latin America. Many young people are unable to find jobs or pay university tuition fees--the result of economic-adjustment policies that exclude large segments of the population from productive employment and exacerbate existing inequalities. Many youths try to compensate their marginality by joining street gangs, while others become involved in drug trafficking. Crime becomes a quick, easy means to social mobility in a society in which legal and "respectable" channels for such mobility are largely cut off.

Analyses of crime rarely make these qualifications. Even though most victims of crime are from the lower classes, the middle and upper classes perceive crime as a problem that uniquely affects them. They see crime, moreover, as a constant threat from the lower classes--the "dangerous classes"--that must be held in check, whatever the cost. The police tend to act as the border guards of the rich to fend off the poor, and police violence remains cloaked in impunity because it is largely directed against these "dangerous classes" and rarely affects the lives of the well-to-do. Crime prevention policies--especially those proposed during election time--are less aimed at controlling crime and delinquency than diminishing the fear and the insecurity of the ruling classes. Elite perceptions of the poor as part of the "dangerous classes" are fueled by a judicial system that prosecutes and convicts crimes committed by individuals from the lower classes, while the criminal practices of the elites remain untouched. These criminal practices--including corruption, financial scams, tax evasion and the exploitation of child or slave labor--are not perceived as threatening to the status quo. The same is largely true for organized crime, including drug trafficking, money laundering and contraband, and even the very profitable arms trade, which are not targets of consistent enforcement policies.

Even if the state no longer engages in systematic coercion against political dissidents, as it did during authoritarian rule, it is of course responsible for impeding the repressive illegal practices of the police and the military that have survived the transitions to democracy. For this to happen, the state must work towards eradicating the impunity of official crimes to the same extent it tries to punish violent crimes committed by individuals. In Brazil and many recently democratized Latin American countries, the state has shown itself incapable--or, more likely, unwilling--to punish the criminal practices of state agents.

The problem, of course, is that installing elected civilian governments does not necessarily mean that state institutions will operate democratically. Guillermo O'Donnell referred to this as passing from the "first transition"--away from authoritarian rule toward elected civilian government--to the "second transition"--institutionalizing democratic practices at all levels of the state.15 In many post-dictatorship countries that lack a strong democratic tradition, the "second transition" has been immobilized by innumerable negative legacies of the authoritarian past. This continuity suggests that the authoritarian regimes of the past and the new civilian democratic governments are barely differentiated expressions of the same system of domination by the same elites, notwithstanding the political transitions to elected rule. Political democratization does not attack the roots of embedded forms of social authoritarianism, or "socially rooted authoritarianism."16 Deeply rooted authoritarian practices in the new democracies permeate both politics and society. Authoritarian practices persists at the level of macropolitics, for example in state institutions like the police. It has proven far more difficult to institute democratic practices in state institutions involved in controlling violence than was anticipated during the mobilizations against the region's authoritarian regimes.

This socially rooted authoritarianism also persists in what could be called the "microdespotisms" of daily life, manifested as racism, sexism, elitism and other entrenched social hierarchies. A dramatic inequality between rich and poor, a deep and historic gap that has not diminished, plagues Latin America's democracies. The combination of a lack of democratic controls over the ruling classes and the denial of rights to the poor reinforces historical social hierarchies, and rights and the rule of law become little more than a smokescreen for sheer domination. As a consequence, only the middle and upper classes actually benefit from the effective control that democracy exercises over the means of violence in the social interactions of daily life. For the poor and destitute majority of the population, unchecked power continues to be the most visible face of the state.

State institutions charged with providing law and order are perceived as widely dysfunctional. A large percentage of Latin American citizens do not believe that their governments have implemented--or attempted to implement--the law with equality and impartiality for all citizens, even after the political transitions. Formal guarantees enshrined in the Constitution and the legal code are systematically violated, largely because of the glaring gap between what the law says and the way the institutions charged with protecting and implement the law--i.e., the police and the judiciary--function in practice.

In almost all Latin American countries, the poor see the legal system as an instrument of oppression at the service of the wealthy and powerful.17 The judicial system has been widely discredited for its venality, ineffeciency, and lack of autonomy. The legal system is deficient in every respect: material resources are scarce, judicial procedures are excessively formalistic, judges are not sufficiently trained, and too few judges oversee too many cases. Many judges, moreover, have been proven impotent to prosecute cases of organized crime, and some have even been linked to drug trafficking. The investigative capacity of the police in most countries of the region is very limited, and a low percentage of investigated cases make it to the courts. Almost half of the nearly 5,000 homicides that occurred in Sao Paulo in 1995, for example, remain unsolved.18 In most countries, the practices of the judicial tribunals are intimately linked to the hierarchical and discriminatory practices that mark social relations.

The inability of Latin America's judiciaries to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators of serious human rights violations highlights the incompetence of the region's legal systems. In Brazil, for example, the criminal-justice system has failed to investigate and prosecute numerous cases of rural violence against the poor. According to Brazil's Pastoral Land Commission, of the 1,730 killings of peasants, rural workers, trade union leaders, religious workers and lawyers committed between 1964 and 1992, only 30 had been brought to trial by 1992. Of those, only 18 resulted in convictions. In Chile, not a single assassin of the 1,542 trade unionists killed since 1986 has been successfully convicted. Throughout the continent, impunity is virtually assured for those who commit offenses against victims who are considered "undesirable" or "subhuman." As a result, those responsible for serious human rights violations, unpunished and undeterred, continue to commit other violations.

As a result of the failure of Latin America's democracies to rein in the police by imposing greater civilian controls, abusive practices against suspects and prisoners have become entrenched. The police in many countries have been criticized for the unjustified use of deadly force. In Chile, for example, the UN criticized the police for their policy of "shoot first, ask questions later."19` In Brazil and elsewhere, torture is still practiced in the majority of police inquiries. Accusations of torture are rarely investigated; when they are, those responsible are even more rarely punished.

Military police throughout Brazil continue to practice summary executions of suspects and criminals. In Sao Paulo, there are 18 police killings a month, and in Rio de Janeiro, the monthly average is 24. Most of these deaths take place in the poor neighborhoods, and the victims are usually from the most vulnerable groups--the poor, the homeless, African Brazilians. For the military police, these killings are part of a larger strategy of confronting criminals. Cops see the rule of law as an obstacle rather than an effective guarantee of social control; their role is to protect society from "marginal elements" by any means available. Such killings enjoy broad support from elites as well as the poor--who are, after all, the largest category of victims of violent crime. In each of Brazil's 26 states, official crimes are tried in military-police courts. Made up of millitary officials and based on shoddy criminal investigations carried out by military-police officers, these courts often sanction the impunity of acts like police killings and other violent crimes.

Police massacres--such as the summary executions of 19 landless peasants in the northern state of Para last April--are all too frequent. In areas dominated by rural conflict, largely over control of the land, the police often act in collusion with large land owners and local politicians. On August 9, 1995 in Corumbiara, in the state of Rondonia, nearly 200 military-police officers killed ten squatters when they stormed a camp of 1,200 rural workers and their families who hoped to farm the land. Deadly force has also been common in repressing prison riots. After a riot of more than 7,000 inmates at the House of Detention in Sao Paulo in February, 1992, the military police killed 111 detainees.

This succession of killings and massacres in the countryside and in the city are the legacy of a militarized approach to public security. This militarized approach was carried to its most logical extreme in December, 1994 when the army occupied the hills of Rio de Janeiro, where the city's slums are precariously perched. The army occupation was justified to regain control from the drug mafias that effectively rule extensive areas in Rio's favelas. While some have referred to such areas as a "parallel state" because the police often refuse to enter them, these are not "occupied territories" that need to be "liberated" by the armed forces. In fact, the current situation of disrespect for the law subsists in these areas largely because of the extensive association between organized crime, public officials, business people and state agents. Organized crime flourishes in these neighborhoods because public officials tolerate--and sometimes finance--their illicit activities, and because consumers among the elites assure a regular market, which is in turn protected by the police. On the other hand, the populations of Rio's slums have been abandoned by public officials, and their main experience of state authority is extortion and illegal repression by the police. It is not surprising, then, that traffickers in the slums--usually adolescents acting as intermediaries for the real traffickers that live in the city--are venerated as benefactors when they distribute some crumbs from the enormous profits of their patrons in the form of jobs and protection. The army occupation of the favelas failed to put even a small dent in drug trafficking or in the criminal gangs that continue to terrorize the residents of these poor neighborhoods. Military strategies to fight crime--an approach that is increasingly common in many new democracies--are doomed to failure. Crime prevention requires more complex and subtle forms of intervention that military occupation.The massive discrediting of the police and the criminal-justice system has led to a wave of privatized justice in poor neighborhoods throughout Latin America, in which groups carry out justice on their own through vigilante groups or spontaneous lynchings of criminals caught en flagrante delicto. Lynchings have become commonplace in Brazil, Peru and Venezuela. In a recent study, the sociologist Jose de Souza Martins inventoried 515 lynchings in Brazil between 1970 to 1994, which resulted in a total of 366 deaths. In Brazil's largest cities, justicieros, or gunmen, are charged with maintaining order in poor neighborhoods. These private "enforcers" of order are often supported by merchants, and at times by local neighborhood associations. The abundance of lynchings and justicieros indicates the ineffectiveness of state institutions charged with controlling illegal violence and crime, and the degree to which the state has abdicated its role as provider of order and security to all citizens. In this sense, these private acts of "justice" consolidate the cycle of illegality and violence.

While spontaneous responses to crime such as lynchings are increasingly common in poor neighborhoods throughout Latin America, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other groups in civil society have been organizing to deal with the problems of crime, impunity and human rights abuses. Across the continent, an important network of human rights organizations has developed over the years since the dictatorships, and they coordinate their campaigns with professional associations, environmentalists and indigenous-rights groups.

The organization Viva Rio, created in 1993 in the state of Rio de Janeiro, shows how groups in civil society have tried to articulate these different organizations into a network of networks. Viva Rio includes religious activists, popular movements, business people, private foundations, churches and media. In 1995, protesting crime and ongoing official impunity in Rio, the group mobilized a huge "walk for peace" along the central avenues of the city--the first large public demonstration in Brazil since the campaign for direct elections decades before. Working through pacts between grassroots groups, businesses and government, the organization is trying to tackle the problem of urban violence and how to integrate the city's slums into the larger metropolis.20

While these groups face serious disadvantages in terms of resources and influence--and in some countries they are still subjected to death threats and other forms of intimidation--their efforts are remarkable attempts to defend vulnerable groups in society. At the same time, however, their work has been more difficult to define in the post-dictatorship period. It is more difficult to identify the new victims, unlike the smaller groups of political dissidents under the dictatorships, because they do not constitute a homogeneous and immediately identifiable group and their numbers are infinitely greater. An additional obstacle is that poor people often are not aware of their rights.21 In addition, the illegal practices of state agents are widely viewed as acceptable by the population at large--even among the poor, who, despite the fact that they are the most likely victims of such official violence, see acquiescence as a way of distancing themselves from the "criminals." Despite the general failure of Latin American democracies to address the problem of ongoing official violence and impunity, there are a handful of instances in which governments have attempted to tackle some of these problems. At the UN World Conference on Human Rights, which took place in Vienna in 1993, several countries championed the idea of trying to ensure human rights protection through special laws and government-assistance programs. The Australian and the Phillipine governments were the first to unveil their national plans, followed by Brazil's promise to implement a national human rights charter. If implemented, the charter would generate new approaches to controlling state violence and help define new public-security policies. The human rights charter includes 168 proposals, ranging from guidelines for police training to directives for a witness-protection program and assistance to the victims of violent crime. The reforms proposed by the current government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, such as federally mandated investigations into human rights crimes, would radically change the status quo of arbitrary police violence and impunity. One of those reforms--transferring cases of intentional homicide committed by the military police from military to civilian courts--has already been approved by Congress.

Yet despite these positive developments, the poor continue to be the primary victims of violence, crime and human rights violations. Brazil and other new democracies in Latin America have not been capable of assuring liberty and justice for all. In this context, governments that attempt to promote reforms to address the multi-faceted problems of crime and impunty find often themselves in a no-win situation. The legitimacy of the newly democratized regimes has been seriously compromised by their failure to respect their own laws as well as their international obligations. As a result, these governments are likely to have difficulty mobilizing popular support for their reform efforts.

Even if governments were able to mobilize popular support for their reform efforts, the current international conjuncture is not the most propitious for implementing redistributive policies directed at reducing social polarization and instituting principles of social justice. Globalization pushes Latin American countries toward greater integration into the world economy, but the only countries that are likely to accrue any benefits from such integration are those that have laid the requisite foundations for industrialization and development--by investing in human resources, creating physical infrastructure, raising productivity in the agricultural sector, and promoting technological and managerial capacities at the micro-level. Since most Latin American countries are far from having promoted these preconditions, globalization will likely have disastrous consequences. "The countries which have not created these preconditions could end up globalizing prices without globalizing incomes," says economist Deepak Nayar. "In the process, a narrow segment of their population may be integrated with the world economy, in terms of consumption patterns or living styles, but a large proportion may be marginalized even further."22

This is exactly what has happened in Latin America during the "lost decade" of the 1980s and beyond. In addition to traditional unemployment, in which many are simply "left behind" even as the economy grows, Latin American democracies must grapple with the problem of the "new poor" generated by technological competition and increasing globalization. Such economic and social imbalances--which lie at the root of inequality and victimization--cannot be corrected by the market alone. The state--as defender and promoter of human rights--has a critical role to play if these societies are to tackle the growing problem of poverty and the associated problems of crime and impunity. Only the state can provide consistent national programs to promote health and education--the preconditions for a social order based on democracy and development, not the silence of official abuse and impunity.

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