[translation from original]
Let’s start by saying that “the only Paradise is Paradise Lost”. That is to say, the life of human beings, at least up to the present moment in our two million years of evolution since our forebears descended from the trees, has not exactly been “paradise”. And as things are going at present, there is nothing to assure us that any such paradise lies around the corner, either.
But without proposing anything so unreachable as “paradise”, on the contrary, a good part of the world’s population lives an experience closer to something like the opposite, ie, “hell”, sheer survival under conditions of physical violence, with all the rigors that implies, war and its effects on societies structured around the central axis of exercising brute force for maintaining power, with all the disasters that that brings along with it – these are the daily bread of a large part of humanity. Between paradise and hell, the great majority live far closer to the latter than the former.
In addition to the chronic poverty with which a very large part of humanity lives, violence in its distinct forms is another of the disfigurements that mark our lives. Violence, certainly, which assumes a wide variety of forms: but are not the aggravating socioeconomic disparities – the 20% of the richest who dispose of eighty times more wealth than the 20% of the poorest, for example – perhaps also forms of violence in themselves? In general, according to the (debatable) dominant criteria, violence implies direct aggression against another, physical attack, the transition to concrete action. In this sense, war, and criminality, are its models par excellence.
A wide range of factors enter in this equation: homicide, robbery, assault, rape, every damage to private property, kidnapping, fraud, trafficking of prohibited substances. There exists a certain tendency to equate “violence” with crime, which hides or normalizes other forms of violence: authoritarianism, sexism, racism, for example. Sophisticated measures exist for crime rates, but not for racism or vanity. Can one imagine a “vanity index”, or one to measure “arrogance”? And why not an index of “environmental irresponsibility”? When will the UN dare to measure injustice calling it by its name, and not falling back on technical subterfuge?
One thing’s for certain, criminality – understood as any crime that violates social norms – is something embedded in the human dynamic and, confusingly, with civic insecurity. It has always existed (the product of psychopathic personalities that transgress established norms without guilt), in every known society, but something has come about in our recent history to cause it to increase.
In recent decades, criminality has been a growing phenomenon in practically all regions of the planet. On a global basis recent years have seen a 150% percent increase in reports of criminal acts, which equates to a very high yearly rate of increase. Instead of happiness increasing, crime is. What’s happening?
In Latin America (with the second highest homicide rate in the world, doubling its levels from the previous decade) and in the so-called countries in transition – that is, a euphemism for those countries of the former Soviet Bloc – this increase coincides with the so-called “lost decade” on account of lack of economic growth in the former, and with the transition from a planned to a market economy in the latter, indicating that the crime increase in question has among its causes the deterioration in economic conditions experienced by said regions.
From class struggle to unbridled criminality
So understood, the problem of crime constitutes a politico-cultural one with unlimited horizons. Among others, it’s also a public health problem, and as such, studied by epidemiologists with alarm. For the World Health Organization, a “normal” homicide rate ranges between 0 to 5 per 100,000 population per year. When this rate rises to between 5 and 8, the situation is considered “delicate”. But when it rises above 8, it is classified as a criminal “epidemic”.
To a very great extent, what really counts in these phenomena is the perception of the affected public. Where is life better? In Beijing, China, or Zürich, Switzerland? In Stockholm, or a little village in the state of Totonicapán, Guatemala? In a Buddhist monastery in Tibet or Nepal, or in Mexico City (one of the most densely populated and polluted cities in the world)?
The answer to these questions lies beyond any concrete indices, those cold statistics from the social sciences to which we are accustomed. The quality of life of a population implies certain cultural assumptions – even, if you like, philosophical ones. One thing follows for certain from this: it is a work in progress. Although Mexico City may be an urban hell, perhaps for a resident of a rural village, it may be a dream for all the bounties it offers in material terms, but not for a resident of Zürich, accustomed to calm and order. Undoubtedly, the evaluation of quality of life is always relative. In Stockholm (Sweden), measures of civic insecurity are low, among the lowest in the world, its “quality of life” among the highest… But this country, which awards the Nobel Prize, including the Peace Prize (to Henry Kissinger, for example, or Barack Obama – are the Swedes imbeciles?! most recently Donald Trump was nominated, sic) and where the country’s former prime minister, Olof Palme, was assassinated in the streets, just as can happen in a “dangerous” Third World city – is one of the world’s biggest arms producers. And Swedish banks are among the biggest members of the IMF, for example, which caused the financial collapse suffered in recent years by those ex-socialist countries “in transition”, to use the coinage in fashion these days – those like Ukraine, Hungary, and Lithuania. But nobody perceives the Swedes as violent. On the contrary, that population regards itself as among the foremost defenders of world peace. And in a certain sense, it is, undoubtedly, as the common Swedish citizen perceives the matter, but the violence in question lies beyond the beautiful streets of the country’s cities and the ban on child labor enshrined in its constitution. (In Central America, certainly, around 2% of the region’s entire Gross Regional Product is produced by child labor, that is, about 25% of average urban family income. Who is to blame? Are the parents of Central American children “violent” for sending their offspring to work?)
In some Mayan-Quiché communities in the state of Totonicapán – where the second largest reserve of tropical pine cloud forest is found – in the long suffering nation of Guatemala (with 245,000 deaths in its recent civil war), current crime rates are as low as the Scandinavian country mentioned, even while Guatemala as a whole exhibits a homicide rate of around 27 per 100,000, one of the highest in Latin America. Where is life better? Who is happier, a Totonicapaneco, or a Swede?
If in Argentina the city of Santa María de los Buenos Aires – which, despite “Buenos Aires” meaning "good air", does not seem to offer much “good” in that department, seeing as how that city has some of the worst urban air quality in the world – was, according to some measurements some years ago, rated as enjoying the highest urban quality of life in Latin America, it remains to be determined whether the inhabitants of the always expanding slums (the favelas, those precarious urban-margin neighborhoods whose residents number in the millions) entered into that calculation. In Buenos Aires, as sophisticated as Paris or as beautiful as Rome (?), does one live better than those humble villages of Totonicapán? It remains to determine to whom we should ask the question, of course. Not forgetting that, with the economic debacle affecting the country, which proceeds apace, among the highest rates of suicide and erectile dysfunction ever are being recorded (everything is on the downswing these past decades, the economy and the rest).
Of course today, in a thoroughly globalized world, proceeding from our Eurocentric overlords, the criteria for judging reality are already all established: all the world “understands” things with the triumphant logic of the established society proceeding from the free market entrenched in the prosperous North. Peace and respect for the environment as dominant values for a humble villager in Totonicapán of course don’t count; the “quality” of life is more closely associated with the number of vehicles circulating than the number of trees per person that a place can boast of. Does one live better in Zürich than a Tibetan monastery? Hard to say, without a doubt. According to the dominant class, without a doubt the Swiss city has the highest quality of life on the planet. Is it necessary to be banker to the world for that? Well, if so...it does not appear to be a very solid or sustainable idea of “quality of life”, because not everyone can be “banker to the world”. How many of the world’s countries can declare themselves “neutral” like this Swiss financial paradise does? And day by day we are convinced that using all the technological apparatus that the dominant capitalism has generated makes us all happier. But there is no doubt a lot of open debate to be entertained on these questions, which the hegemonic discourse can and must censor.
The one certainty is that criminality is growing, all over the planet. But as we mentioned above, those regions most depressed economically are the ones that have shown the most spectacular rates of growth of that scourge. And criminality combined with poverty is agonizing! One in every four Latin American youths is outside the education system as well as the formal job economy. Based on that, surely, it’s easy to expect more problems than solutions. Regarding which, an investigation by the National University of Mexico indicates, concerning that country, that “the base of social support for narcotrafficking includes more than 500,000 persons. So long as there are no economic or social policies for reducing poverty it will be difficult to mitigate the situation [of insecurity].”
In such a sense, the wave of civic insecurity which continues to expand on all sides, constitutes a sign of our times, the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the new millennium. But the perception that accompanies this phenomenon is what counts: the European country with the highest reported rates of automobile robbery, bicycle theft, home robberies, and theft of personal property in general, is Switzerland, which does not necessarily mean that it’s the place where the most such crimes are committed but [maybe] that: 1) it’s the country where the most confidence is placed in the security services for reporting such illicit activities and on the corresponding justice system entrusted with rectifying them; and 2) where the idea of private property has penetrated the deepest (Switzerland, banker to the world, could not be otherwise. Regarding which, as Bertold Brecht once said: “if it’s a crime to rob a bank, how much worse is it to own one?”). Meanwhile the Mexican capital is the urban center with the most security cameras in Latin America, with about 15,000, and at the same time 95,000 (badly paid) police agents, making it the largest urban police force in Latin America, despite all of which, the Aztec capital does not exactly enjoy an image of security (it’s the city with the dubious distinction of suffering the highest rate of kidnapping per capita). But if we speak of quality of life, Mexico is the city with the highest number of bookstores in Latin America. How to understand/measure the question “where is life best?”
Which is to say that insecurity, in great measure, depends on how one perceives it, on the collective imaginary of it. Which, in our day, and to an increasing degree, means: civic insecurity depends on how major mass media outlets construct it, being as they are the indispensable constructors of today’s “social reality”.
Is the democratically elected president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro a bloody narco-dictator? Dictators don’t typically win democratic election after election, of course, with a public that supports them. Nor are Moslems a bunch of “bloodthirsty fundamentalist fanatics” (and by chance both Venezuela and a large part of the Moslem Middle East by definition hold the largest petroleum reserves in the world), nor are narcotrafficking nor urban violence the true principal problems of Latin America. But this is nonetheless what the commercial media tirelessly repeat, day by day, minute by minute. “Narcotrafficking and other forms of association that generate social violence offer the perfect pretext to the United States for maintaining a constant presence in the region, a presence that is ever more militarized, in tune with its prevailing ‘iron fist’ and repressive policies”, as Rafael Cuevas incisively observed.
The last thing we need in the long-suffering countries of Latin America is the “iron fist”; but that is often what prevails as public policy for “combatting” criminality. (For the Ministry of Governance in Guatemala, Central American migrants – poor people fleeing their countries and headed towards the United States – are all “criminals”. But why always press such a punitive military-police policy?) This notion supports a basically repressive treatment of all social problems, emphasizing measures like providing ever more resources to the police or security forces, and in some cases the military itself – for assignments maintaining internal order (the “itchy trigger finger”), permitting incarceration even for minor infractions to set an example (“zero tolerance”), considering any signs of belonging to a gang as tantamount to a crime, lowering the age of incarceration, accelerating trials for these offenses – but not for prosecuting a businessman for evading taxes or a corrupt public official – imposing harsher sentences, asking for the death penalty, criminalizing “poor youth”, and by extension all impoverished urban areas. Concerning which, serious studies of Central American isthmus countries that have applied these “iron fist” policies in recent years demonstrate that statistics associated with insecurity have grown, along with gang membership and activity. Similar to what transpired in Colombia with the sadly celebrated “Plan Colombia” (later the “Patriot Plan”): with extreme militarization of the country, the production and trafficking of cocaine did not diminish but rather, to the contrary, grew, and Colombian society as a whole was not pacified, but rather became one of the most violent on Earth. (And US geopolitical strategy can now boast 7 bases in the region, controlling a large part of the Amazon basin.)
Treating these complex social problems is not easy work, undoubtedly; but a military-police solution does not exist. That much has been amply demonstrated.
This unbridled civic insecurity (in Latin America in particular, with the highest crime rates on the planet) has costs for the whole of society, in terms of health systems, security, and justice. It’s estimated that 14% of the gross regional product of Latin America is lost to violence, almost three times higher than countries of the North where these losses are less than 5%. In many countries of the region, these losses far exceed the total invested in all social areas. Aside from this there are many other costs more difficult to measure, yet still concrete: intangible costs, invisible costs despite having severe effects, like the sensation of fear, terror, and deterioration of the quality of daily life. One can definitely ask the question whether this entire epidemic of violence in which we are embroiled is not part of a political project, one with a directionality to it.
To quickly sidestep accusations of “conspiracy theorizing” that could attend such an assertion, it’s important not to lose sight of two considerations:
1) It’s dificult to support the notion that there could be some Macchiavellian plan that somehow gives marching orders to every “Mara” or football hooligan, every massacre of rival gangs of narcotraffickers, or every stolen cellphone that occurs in every corner of these afflicted societies. But there is a level at which a more macro-intentionality reveals itself behind all these phenomena. Something along the lines of, “the churning river rewards the fisherman” (“a río revuelto ganancia de pescadores”). Certainly the gains do not go to the popular masses. Can we really believe that the heart of the problem with the most impoverished societies of the region consists of bands of criminals, or do they only constitute the visible tip of a vastly larger iceberg? In any case, this surge in crime has various factors at its base: poverty and social exclusion above all. And politically, in the aftermath of the dirty wars that they lived through in the decade of the 80s of the past century and the neoliberal austerity plans imposed on their national governments, this climate of perpetual insecurity serves the great powers for purposes of controlling the masses. The notable surge in growth of new evangelical churches that now saturate the region also harmonizes with the same objective. Put in other terms – and although this is supposed to be out of fashion in the sphere of social sciences nowadays – for understanding this explosion of criminality and violence it is necessary to revert to the concept of class struggle. The latter has not disappeared, although its theoretical formulation has today been obscured. How else can one understand these complex phenomena if not in the light of these deadly struggles around maintaining power? Or are we really supposed to believe that there are just more and more “bad hearted people” out and about nowadays who, for sport, dedicate themselves to gang mayhem?
2. There’s a society just as Latin American as any of the region (drinking their rum and dancing their Caribbean “Sabrosona”, and differing as far as possible from the physiognomy of a Nordic country – which afterall is what we all take as an obligatory model of “security”) which nevertheless does not present the slightest signs of these high levels of criminality: Cuba.
Cuba: Dictatorship or paradise?
Nobody said that there are never any expressions of civic violence in the island, even having increased somewhat in recent times, as even official media acknowledge. But although in the press that systematically attacks their revolution there is no mention of it, it’s indisputable that the level of criminality in Cuba is lower than even those countries considered safest on the planet, which is to say, those of Scandinavia.
Taking up again what was said above: politico-cultural reality is, more and more, that which is constructed by the mass media. Cuba has a homicide rate less than 5 per 100,000, but commercial media never say anything about it.
In Cuba there are endless problems, no doubt (as there are everywhere else, certainly. Does Sweden not also have them?) Again, then, the question presents itself: Where is life better? It’s worth a reminder that in the prosperous and developed North one speaks of “quality of life”; in the poor and oppressed South, in any case, one speaks of its mere possibility. Cuba, with enormous structural problems, blockaded, continuously attacked, has a number of quality of life measures similar to the most developed countries (those that manage the biggest banks, decide the wars, and impose the fashions we are obliged to follow). Civic security is one of those.
Just to graphically illustrate with a comparative example: the commercial press all over the world relentlessly repeats that people keep fleeing Cuba, escaping this “dictatorship”. On average, eleven Cubans leave daily, out of a population of twelve million. Whereas Guatemala, with 16 million, sees 300 persons leave per day, fleeing poverty, headed towards the United States, and risking an ever more perilous journey. So where is life better, then?
Of course there are violent acts on the island, aggressive youth, criminal offenses. There is disguised production of pornography also, undoubtedly. In fact, official media acknowledge that the economic crisis in which the country was submerged from the start of the 90s of the 20th century with the “Special Period” following the Soviet collapse and the measures that were implemented to exit this ordeal, opened the way to manifestations of “individualism, egoism, incivility, marginalization, and everyday violence”. But the measures of civic insecurity continue to be low, very low, equal to or lower than the countries of Scandinavia. Cuba is a safe place.
It’s very important to emphasize this, because day by day, as a result of media manipulation from which nobody can escape, the dominant “reality” of the world, not even to speak of Latin America, is unbridled violence, suffocating criminality, organized crime that appears to be more powerful than states themselves. In the face of this it’s indispensable to point out that there are many fallacies, since a country like Cuba, without any “zero tolerance” nor "iron fist” against crime, presents a climate of security light years distant from any neighboring country (some with homicide rates above 50 per 100,000 in more than one case, and even exceeding 100 per 100,000 at times, in Tijuana or Acapulco, or Natal in Brazil).
On the island there are no signs of youth gangs, the terrible “Maras” that have reached the point of paralyzing an entire country, as occur in Honduras, or that have obliged authorities to militarize the favelas of Rio de Janeiro in 2007, practically paralyzing the entire city, nor bloodbath horror stories offering a media spectacle – and profitable business – for sensationalist yellow journalism, with tales of gore, since if a crime does reach the newspapers [in Cuba], the report is redacted with didactic prose as part of a policy of harm minimization. The consumption of illegal drugs is very low (it is truly regarded there as a problem of public health, as determined by national policy, to be attacked with intelligence, and not by falling upon every peasant in the producing countries in order to burn their fields). If one really desires to attack the entire supply chain of distribution and trafficking of prohibited substances, all the military paraphernalia with which the powers-that-be “pursue” mafia interests in the region does not appear to be yielding results (surprisingly?). At least, it does not shut the business down. Assuming that that really is the result sought after, as opposed to controlling societies.
Cuba, it must be said, is not “in the hands of narcotraffickers”, as happens with so many other states that have been “decertified” by the White House (since when did the World Health Organization ever “decertify” the United States from the list of “healthy countries” on account of being the principal drug-addicted country in the world?) Confronted once by a notorious instance of narcotrafficking activity on the island, Havana did act immediately by stopping it, and executing the criminal responsible, General Arnaldo Ochoa in 1989. In fact there is no illegal drug trafficking on the island, at least insofar as it pertains to gangs dedicated to the business. Neither are there – was that really what was hoped for, at the end of the day? – military plans like those of Colombia or Mérida to confront this “apocalypse”.
Cuba is full of problems, of contradictions; if we want to be even harsher: of meanness and moral weaknesses. But if the impossibility of peacefully walking (without risking sexual assault) is the great deficit of current societies (in Latin America, in particular, but not exclusively, since this phenomenon is expanding worldwide), if walking around at night has reached the point of being a gigantic drama given the reigning insecurity, if at every corner we run the risk of being assaulted or we know we must not enter “red zones” (red not on account of being socialist, it’s worth clarifying), because a Mara will not leave us be, if we spend so many resources on security (barbwire, private security, alarm systems, maximum security prisons, armored vehicles, closed circuit cameras, guard dogs, etc, etc), if all this is the principal problem of our times, the Cuban “dictatorship” does not present it. A dictatorship that cares for its people… Long live dictatorship! No? And to say that the people wish to flee the dictatorship does not offer a good argument, because the impoverished populations of all the countries of Latin America continue fleeing daily towards the (paradise?) of the North, despite a veritable Calvary along the way to the “American Dream”.
Cuba assuredly may not be a paradise, but at least it’s further from hell than all the rest of its sister countries of the region. It’s crime indices tell the story.
