Islands of peace in a sea of blood: technology, policing, and middle-class drug markets in Recife, Brazil

• In Event: Illegal markets and violence, from Port-au-Prince to São Paulo

Abstract

The drug trade doesn’t always kill. Europe’s huge cocaine consumption makes very few victims there. In Canada, prescription opioid overdoses kill many more people than drug violence. Not so in Latin America, where drug production, transit and local consumption are associated with huge numbers of homicides. It is not always the case, however: some markets are in fact just as peaceful as those of Europe and Canada and changes in the way in which they operate could soon make them even more placid.

This paper examines drug markets in Recife, Brazil, for decades one of Latin America's most violent metropolis. Building on extensive interviews with the police, expert informants and participants in drug markets, it compares the whole commercialization process that puts cannabis, cocaine hydrochloride and synthetic drugs (LSD, meth, MDMA) in the hands of middle class customers, to the process that provides crack cocaine and cannabis to their lower-class counterparts.

Peaceful middle-class access is tied to the deterritorialization of the trade, as a result of the use of communication technology, and to the absence of significante disturbance of those markets by the police. By contrast, the access of poor people to cannabis and crack cocaine remains heavily territorialized and is constantly and fiercely disturbed by police interventions, leading to much higher levels of violence.

Author

• José Luiz A Ratton, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco