José Luiz Ratton

Islands of Peace: Middle-Class Drug Markets

Recife’s drug markets are heavily segregated. Middle-class consumers and sellers rarely mix with poor ones. Consumption of high-quality cannabis, LSD, ecstasy, and cocaine hydrochloride is quite high among artists and intellectuals, the social movement crowd, “cool” baby boomers who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as middle-class upper high-school and university students. Markets for those drugs are active and profitable. Remarkably, given its exceptionally violent surroundings, Recife’s middle-class drug trade is largely devoid of violent confrontations or even of tensions. The paradox appears to lie in those markets’ closed and covert nature, combined with the limited extent of problematic consumption and a policing that heavily sanctions violence but leaves trafficking largely undisturbed.

Crack: Micromechanics of a Dysfunctional Illegal Market

Recife’s crack market is intensely competitive, particularly at the retail level. The challenges involved in governing the market in that context are made worse by heavy police disruption of the trade. In addition, the high prevalence of compulsive and dependent use makes debt and petty crime common among poor users. The tensions and conflict that result often turn violent as assaults and homicides among “traffickers” are rarely punished by authorities. Policing complicates the tricky governance of the crack market and fails to deter the violence that results from its breakdown. Unsurprisingly, much of Recife’s drug violence is tied to the crack trade.

Introduction: Drug Markets and Violence in Recife, Brazil

In a country already ravaged by violence, Recife has stood out, for a generation, as a champion of homicides. The share of harm contributed by drug markets to this tragedy must be approached without assuming that violence is inherent to their functioning. The analysis must focus instead on the governance of those markets and on the extent to which their participants are deterred, or not, from resorting to violence. In Recife, inequality structures the scope and limits of that deterrence and the challenges of drug markets governance. Exploring these problems, in such a context, poses in turn peculiar methodological problems whose imperfect solution implies significant trade-offs.

Inequality and Deterrence in Recife: The Rise and Fall of the “Pact for Life”

Between 2007 and 2013, homicide rates in Recife declined by 55%. Over that period, an innovative public security policy was implemented by the Pernambuco government. The “Pact for Life” focused on the prevention and repression of violent crime. It involved enhanced resources, effective integration of investigative and ostensive policing, and the careful monitoring of crime trends and police action. A priority for Governor Eduardo Campos, it quickly lost steam when Campos left the Pernambuco government to run in the 2014 presidential election, just as the state government’s fiscal space was curtailed by the end of Brazil’s resource-led boom. The challenge to unequal deterrence that the Pact represented proved short-lived and the discriminatory logic that prevailed in the policing of local drug markets reasserted itself, with deadly consequences.