Violence in the Barrios of Caracas

High urban violence rates have been one of the leading development challenges in Caracas, Venezuela, as its homicide rates have been higher than most other Latin American cities. However, most violence occurs in its barrios or socioeconomically marginalized urban neighborhoods. This book aims to examine the structural causes of high violence rates in the barrios of Caracas while socioeconomic indicators improved through qualitative comparative analysis and a political economy approach. The outcome of high violence rates under improving socioeconomic conditions counters the established literature on urban violence, which shows the significance of this book. The introductory chapter discusses the structural parameter under which violence in the barrios of Caracas took place, which also frames the study’s qualitative comparative analysis. It discusses Venezuela’s dependence on oil exports since the 1920s, which generated economic rent, reduced the productivity of non-oil sectors, and increased the urbanization rate. However, the chapter shows that in the early twenty-first century, socioeconomic indicators improved, thus reducing marginality or economic deprivation. A reduction of marginality should have theoretically also led to lower urban violence rates, as lower marginality should reduce the incentives of committing homicide to achieve economic and cultural goals such as accumulating economic resources. This book forwards social capital as a possible intervening substructural variable that can explain the politico-economic structural conditions—or “causes of causes”—for high violence rates in the barrios of Caracas to occur. The analysis of social capital’s intervening role can explain the theoretical puzzle of increased violence rates under improving socioeconomic conditions.

This chapter discusses a nonlinear theoretical framework to explain high violence in the barrios of Caracas. Zinecker’s (Gewalt im Frieden: Formen und Ursachen der Gewaltkriminalität in Zentralamerika, 2014, 42–43) structural model of violence frames the theoretical model proposed in this chapter to explain high violence rates. Her structural model states that macrostructural variables can explain susceptibility to high violence rates, but only substructural variables, like social capital, can explain the actual appearance of high violence rates. Such theoretical framework helps explain why violence in the barrios of Caracas remained high while socioeconomic conditions improved. Hence, it helps to interpret why violence rates behaved pro-cyclically in Venezuela’s capital. In addition, this chapter reviews the critical shortcomings of competing theories of urban violence such as oil-rent windfalls, economic deprivation, and subcultural factors. Discussing these theoretical approaches to urban violence shows how the moderating role of social capital can help explain the “causes of causes” of urban violence. After that, this chapter elaborates on a theoretical model developed where social capital in the barrios of Caracas moderates violence rates in these urban spaces. The model developed in this chapter identifies and discusses two factors of social capital’s moderating effects: Social network density and collective efficacy. The former factor refers to the connectedness of an urban neighborhood, and the latter refers to two sub-factors, which are social disorganization and collective action within the institutional context.

Venezuela’s macrostructure of rent-cum-marginality did not increase the susceptibility to violence in the barrios of Caracas during the twenty-first century. However, during this time violence in the barrios of Caracas was significantly high, and thus this undesirable social outcome behaved pro-cyclically (see Chap. 1). This chapter begins the analyses of social capital’s moderating effect between the politico-economic macrostructure and urban violence to explain this pro-cyclical behavior of urban violence rates in relation to the macroeconomic indicators. To this end, this chapter focuses on analyzing social network density in the three studied barrios of Caracas: Catia/23 de Enero (henceforth, Catia) located in the east, Petare in the west, and Santa Cruz del Este and Minas de Baruta (henceforth, Baruta) in the center-south of Caracas. After a qualitative comparative analysis of barrio inhabitants’ relational data in the barrios mentioned above, this chapter explains that in these barrios social network density was high in all of them. High social network density means that overall barrio inhabitants possessed multiple social connections beyond nuclear family and close friends. This finding points to a particular composition of social capital, as this factor is a necessary one for such substructural variable to be present.

Chapter 3 analyzed social network density in three barrios of Caracas: Catia/23 de Enero (henceforth, Catia), Petare, and Santa Cruz del Este/Minas de Baruta (henceforth, Baruta). It found that social network density was high in all three studied barrios. Such findings point toward some structural composition of social capital present in all the studied barrios. This factor of social capital is necessary for social capital to exist, as it lowers transaction costs of organization-building toward goals like imparting informal social control. The present chapter contributes to the discussion on social capital’s structural composition, and its moderating role of urban violence, by analyzing its second structural factor, collective efficacy, in these three studied barrios. However, two sub-factors compose collective efficacy: Social disorganization and collective action within the institutional context. This chapter shows that high social disorganization does not correspond with high violence rates. Hence, it is an irrelevant sub-factor of social capital. Regarding collective action within the institutional context, the chapter shows that in all the barrios attempts at collective action were not sustainable, likely because of rent-seeking organizations’ presence. This chapter found that only in the barrio of Baruta was there evidence of sustainable collective action. However, the evidence presented has some limitations.

This chapter aims to overcome the analytical limitations of Chap. 4. Specifically, it aims to trace the institutional factors external to the barrios, which contribute to impeding sustainable collective action in the barrios of Catia (henceforth, Catia), Petare, and Santa Cruz del Este/Minas de Baruta (henceforth, Baruta). The structuration of collective action is what allows for collective efficacy at the urban neighborhood level. It helps to explain social capital’s moderating effect between the politico-economic macrostructure and urban violence. To this end, it provides a longitudinal and cross-sectional analysis of urban security policies and its effects on the factor of collective efficacy. Urban security policies led to a practice of “conditional impunity” since at least the late 2000s, as the criminal justice system severely enforced the law on some crimes, like drug crimes, but not on others like violence between gangs in the barrios. After analyzing the impact of urban security policies on the studied barrios, the low violence barrio of Baruta shows that inhabitants view tough law enforcement favorably, and it positively impacted collective efficacy when there is the possibility of social relations between barrio inhabitants and security forces. However, one did not find the conditions allowing for relatively positive state-barrio relations in the high violence barrios of Catia and Petare. Hence, urban security policies helped create perverse social capital by reducing collective efficacy.

Venezuela’s politico-economic macrostructure puzzled the explanation of violence—measured through annual homicide rates per 100,000 inhabitants—in the barrios of Caracas because this outcome behaved pro-cyclically from the early 2000s until 2011. Urban violence rates behaved pro-cyclically during this time because homicide rates rose or remained extremely high, while socioeconomic indicators improved. High urban violence rates under improving socioeconomic conditions created a theoretical puzzle for the structural analysis of violence rates in the barrios of Caracas, as its behavior countered the mechanism established by the relevant literature (Cook and Zarkin 1985; Florence and Barnett 2013, 307–309; Rosenfeld et al. 2013, 2–3; Zubillaga 2013, 108–109). To explain this puzzle, the theoretical model proposed by this book followed Heidrun Zinecker’s distinction between the macrostructures making cases like the barrios of Caracas susceptible to high urban violence and the substructures leading to actual high urban violence rates (Zinecker 2014, 42–43). Therefore, this book abductively analyzed the moderating role of social capital between the politico-economic predictor variable of institutional-anomie created by rent-cum-marginality and the outcome of urban violence (see Chaps. 1 and 2). The main conclusion of this book is that a perverse composition of social capital—due to high social network density in all studied barrios and low collective efficacy in the high violence barrios—explained high urban violence rates while socioeconomic indicators behaved pro-cyclically.