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The Challenge of Replacing Organized Crime with Governance

By Nate Berg. Dec 16 2011

Largely dominated by drug gangs, the slums and favelas of cities like Medellin, Ciudad Juarez or Rio de Janeiro are often beyond the reach and control of the formal government. In efforts to relinquish power from these gangs, these cities are increasingly staging interventions, often in the form of militarized police invasions. But even after such actions, officials struggle to integrate slums into the formal city.

The trouble often lies in the fact that the government has never been a part of these areas. A recent report from the Brookings Institution explores how government entities have been ineffective at entering these informal parts of the city, and how they might be able to change their approach.

“Many of these urban spaces are growing up extremely quickly without any oversight management by the state — and often extremely problematically with the state not really being capable of delivering any public goods in vast segments of the city,” says Vanda Felbab-Brown, author of the report.

She’s been researching the role of governments in Latin American cities as they try to come up against the organized criminal groups that control slums. Her research has shown that normal government services are typically absent in these informal neighborhoods.

“Many cities in Latin America are in this shape, and often it is criminal groups that move into the void and start providing a variety of social and public goods,” Felbab-Brown says.

It’s a paradoxical situation in many of these areas. The drug lords and ruling gangs offer security and social goods to populations that are economically, socially and politically marginalized. Some of the gangs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro provide handouts to locals, and even help resolve disputes with informal court systems. But they also keep control of the neighborhood through violence and crime. This is less than optimal, says Felbab-Brown, but it’s in some ways better than nothing, which in many cases is what the governments have provided these areas.

“These groups have the capacity to outcompete the state in those marginalized urban spaces in the delivery of public goods,” she says, “and as a result they have the capacity to rule those areas, not only through force but also through social assistance.”

And because of this provision of services and social systems, the idea of the government coming in to replace these systems is not an especially easy sell. Felbab-Brown says that even if local residents want the drug gangs out, there’s been little historical evidence that the government will be able to provide the services and social goods currently offered by the gangs. And the methods governments have used to reintegrate themselves into these marginalized areas haven’t exactly been the smoothest.

“Often the experience that people will have in such areas with the state is solely of the state coming in to do raids and killing all the people,” Felbab-Brown says.”

Via: The Atlantic