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Drugs, Violence, Fear, and Death:

The Necro- and Narco-Geographies of

Contemporary Urban SpaceJeff Garmany

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a King's College LondonPublished online: 16 May 2013.

To cite this article: Jeff Garmany (2011) Drugs, Violence, Fear, and Death: The Necro- and

Narco-Geographies of Contemporary Urban Space, Urban Geography, 32:8, 1148-1166, DOI:

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DRUGS, VIOLENCE, FEAR, AND DEATH: THE NECRO- AND

NARCO-GEOGRAPHIES OF CONTEMPORARY URBAN SPACE1

Jeff Garmany2

King’s Brazil Institute

King’s College London

London, United Kingdom

Abstract : This study considers the ways that narcotics, violence, and death affect contem-

porary urban space. Though geographers have long investigated patterns of drug use and death

in cities, few have analyzed how drugs and homicide–with the capabilities to alter both bodies

and space—produce change and profoundly influence urban sociospatial contexts. By unpack-

ing multiple narratives of daily violence and drug use from the favela community of Pirambu

in Fortaleza, Brazil, the need is shown for nuanced spatial analytics that treat the relationships

between narcotics, homicide, and fear, and account for their roles in shaping everyday urbanlandscapes. Important for understanding the interconnected spatial relationships between past and

present (and future) events, necro- and narco-geographies also shed light on the ways that people

encounter and experience space in a growing number of urban contexts worldwide. [Key words:

death, drugs, homicide, fear, favela, Brazil.]

INTRODUCTION

When asked by reporters how she was able to save her youngest child, five-year-old

Roberto, and flee such a nightmarish home invasion, Maria was still so traumatized, sovisibly broken, she could offer only the briefest of explanations: “I ran,” she said vacantly,

tears still running down her face.3 “I hid the boy and I ran out the back.” Crowded near

the side entrance of a public hospital in the late evening, some of the reporters pushed

inward, questioning Maria for more details of her harrowing escape. Though residents in

the northeastern Brazilian city of Fortaleza have grown accustomed to increasing levels

of violence in recent years, the terror Maria had confronted was such that, for a few brief

days in May 2009, the city was sickened by the details of her story. With three people dead

1First and foremost, I wish to thank Oélito, Ceissa, and Melissa Brandão, along with many other wonderful friends

in the community of Pirambu. My sincerest thanks also go to Bill Calhoun with the School for Inter nationalTraining in Fortaleza, and John Paul Jones III at the University of Arizona. This paper was greatly benefitted fromthe comments of (in alphabetical order) Bert Barickman, Paula Decker, Jessica De La Ossa, Georgia Conover,Tim Finan, Sallie Marston, Katie Meehan, Sarah Moore, Suncana Laketa, Anne Ranek, Ian G. R. Shaw, andJeremy Slack. Funding for this research was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation’s divisionof Geography and Spatial Sciences and the Office of International Science and Engineering, as well as theUniversity of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute and the Tinker Foundation,in collaboration with the University of Arizona’s Center for Latin American Studies. This research was also as-sisted by the Andrew W. Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Completion FellowshipProgram. Finally, I also wish to thank the editors and the anonymous referees for their comments and constructiveinsights. All errors, of course, remain my own.2Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jeff Garmany, Room 2.22 Norfolk Building,King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS; telephone +44 (0)20 7848 2751; fax +44 (0)20 7848 7415;email: [email protected] purposes of confidentiality, the names of all those in Fortaleza have been changed throughout this article.

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NECRO- AND NARCO-GEOGRAPHIES OF URBAN SPACE 1149

and three others injured, local media outlets simply referred to the afternoon’s events as

the “massacre.”4

The year 2009 had already been a difficult one for Maria. A mother and housewifeliving in Pirambu,5 Fortaleza’s largest favela community, she had recently lost her hus-

band, Renato, in December 2008. Renato was a police officer, and by all local accounts

an honest and friendly one, who had been shot and killed while responding to a robbery

on Christmas Eve. Now widowed at age 33, Maria had three young boys to care for all on

her own. Still, few are the residents of Pirambu who are not close with members of their

extended family, and Maria’s mother-in-law, Dona Teresa, lived nearby and often helped

with the children. And the two women got along, and they supported one another in their

grief. By May, the family was beginning to recover, and Maria, eager to celebrate, orga-

nized a party at Dona Teresa’s house to surprise her mother-in-law on her birthday. She

brought her children, gathered relatives and friends, and baked a cake in the kitchen. Andshe invited Renato’s brother, Pedro, Dona Teresa’s other son.

Though close in age and appearance, Pedro and Renato shared little else in common.

They had never been especially friendly with one another, and their relationship only

soured as they grew older: while Renato pursued a career as a police officer, Pedro became

a crook. In fact, in a strange twist of irony, on the same day that Renato was gunned down,

Pedro was released from prison.6 Rumored to be a drug dealer and a snitch, Pedro knew he

had far more enemies than he did friends in Pirambu, and since his release, he spent most

of his time walled up inside his mother’s house. For Maria to have not invited Pedro would

not only have been rude, it would have been nearly impossible; he was almost always lin-

gering about at Dona Teresa’s.But at 6:30 in the evening, neither Pedro nor Dona Teresa had yet to arrive at the birth-

day party. Sitting in the living room waiting to surprise her were five of Dona Teresa’s

grandchildren (including Maria’s three sons), her nephew, a friend of the family, and

Maria. Tired of waiting, with kids anxious and hungry, Maria finally took the youngest

one, Roberto, into the kitchen for something to eat. As she later remembered, Maria was

peering into the refrigerator when she heard footsteps at the doorway, and presuming that

Dona Teresa had finally arrived she jumped quickly to surprise her.

Entering the house, however, were not Dona Teresa or even her son Pedro. Wearing

motorcycle helmets to disguise their identity, two men hurried through the doorway, both

armed with nine-millimeter pistols. And before Maria could realize that something wasamiss–even before she had time to shut the refrigerator door–they opened fire on everyone

in the living room. Not understanding what was happening, as she later recounted, Maria

looked around the corner from the kitchen into the living room. “All I could see were guns

and people and blood. I wanted to scream ‘Stop!’ but I couldn’t take a breath. I panicked

4Unless otherwise noted, accounts of events in this study come from first-hand interviews and the author’s per-sonal experience from living in the community of Pirambu.5The greater Pirambu area is actually made up of several smaller neighborhoods (see Fig. 1), and for reasonsof confidentiality, I withhold the specific location of events and of the neighborhood where I lived and worked

while in the field.6According to Brazilian federal law 4.904—more commonly referred to as indulto de Natal (the Christmaspardon)—incarcerated persons may be conditionally released, provided that they meet certain criteria laid out bythe law, for a short period over the Christmas holiday. Pedro was one among hundreds of prisoners released onChristmas Eve in 2008 in Fortaleza, and like several others, he never returned to resume his sentence.

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1150 JEFF GARMANY

and I looked down at Robertinho (little Roberto).” As she told her friends days after the

event, Maria felt suddenly compelled, “surely by the help of God,” and she grabbed her

youngest son and ran for the bedroom that split off from the entrance to the kitchen. Theymade it, and once inside, she knew it was only a matter of seconds before the gunman

would discover them both. So she bundled Roberto beneath the bed (the space was too

small for an adult, let alone both of them) and she looked towards the doorway, preparing

herself to see the killers walk in. And it was at that very moment, she said, that she noticed

the open window in the bedroom. The same force that had guided her and Roberto into the

bedroom now pushed her toward the window, over the ledge, and out into the little yard

behind the house. Once outside, she faced seven-foot high walls all around her, so she used

a plastic chair to climb upward, then rolled over the top of the wall, and collapsed into the

laundry basin of her neighbor’s house. The sound of gunfire let up, and her neighbors came

quickly to help her. All Maria could remember was asking for someone to call the police.And someone did, but before the call had even been completed, the gunmen left the house,

boarded their motorcycle, and sped away. Then, as Maria described it, everything became

very quiet.

Though no one can say with absolute certainty, it is believed that the gunman came

looking for Pedro because of his involvement with the local drug trade. They were never

caught, and in Pirambu, even if someone might have a tip for the police, they are unlikely

to report it. That would simply be too dangerous. But the brutality of the “massacre” that

afternoon was difficult for anyone to make sense of. When Maria reentered the house she

found four people still alive: her two nieces, ages seventeen and twelve (one shot in the

abdomen and the other the leg), Luís, a longtime family friend, age twenty-six (shot inthe chest), and Roberto, still hidden, untouched, beneath the bed where she had left him.

Her cousin, however, age twenty-four, and her other two sons, ages eleven and eight, were

dead. Each of them had been shot multiple times, and they died before receiving medi-

cal attention. As she faced reporters on the steps of the hospital much later that evening,

Maria’s agony seemed too cruel for anyone to endure: in a period of less than five months,

bullets had taken the lives of her husband and two of her young children. She seemed life-

less, her tears gleaming in the light of the television cameras. Two women, one of them

Dona Teresa, stood at her side, supporting her and holding her upright. Even the reporters

appeared shaken, and they soon backed off, leaving Maria and her family members in the

dim florescent light of the hospital’s side entrance. Though the “massacre” marked oneof the more truly heinous acts that anyone in Pirambu could remember, Maria, sadly, was

by no means alone in her tragedy: violence had been increasing rapidly since 2008, and

with crack cocaine on the rise in Fortaleza, drugs and homicides had already begun to

profoundly change and reformulate the community of Pirambu.

DEATH, VIOLENCE, AND DRUGS IN CONTEMPORARY URBAN SPACE

Death is a difficult subject for urban geographers to traverse. Though researchers

have regularly correlated death rates to differential patterns of urban growth (Holloway

and McNulty, 2003; Horvath, 2004), migration and population shifts (Woods, 2000;Harries, 2004), health indices (Harris and Mercier, 2005; Mercier, 2006) urban secu-

rity (Vanderschueren, 1996; Winton, 2004), and so forth, few geographers have begun

to unravel the ways that death (and in particular, acts of homicide) works to formulate

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and restructure space in urban environments. More specifically, urban geographers have

tended to focus on the influence that sociospatial structures and practices hold over pat-

terns of death, and not how homicide, as an event capable of producing visceral emotion-alities, fear, and a host of new behaviors, may induce change and profoundly alters urban

sociospatial contexts (i.e., the spaces of the living).7 Among those who have advanced

geographic debates by trying to understand the myriad spatial effects that acts of homicide

produce–and in particular, the ways that fear transforms communities (Smith, 1986, 1987;

Warf and Waddell, 2002; Wright, 2004, 2006)–Cathy McIlwaine and Caroline Moser

(2007; see also McIlwaine, 1999; Moser and McIlwaine, 2001, 2004) and Dennis Rodgers

(2004, 2006, 2007) stand out in their efforts to illustrate the ways that violence and death

are not only the result of certain sociospatial behaviors, but also play a pivotal role in con-

stituting new spaces and practices. The roles of urban violence and illegal drugs are central

to this debate, and the remaining paragraphs of this section consider a focused collectionof published works on these topics in order to orient the ensuing investigation into the

necro- and narco-geographies of urban space.

Studies of violence and its relationship to urban landscapes have a long history in the

social sciences (Rose and Deskins, 1980; Davis, 1990; Vanderschueren, 1996; Caldeira,

2000; Holloway and McNulty, 2003; Harries, 2004; Winton, 2004; Koonings and Kruijt,

2007). In recent years, researchers have come to offer increasingly nuanced investiga-

tions of urban violence, questioning how, for example, women are affected differently

from threats of daily violence than men are (Smith, 1986, 1987; Valentine, 1989, 1992;

Pain, 1992, 2001; Pain and Townshend, 2002; Wright, 2004, 2006), and the often over-

looked ways that violence (dis)organizes space in cities of the developing world (Walton,1977; Gaviria and Pages, 1999; Rodgers, 2004, 2006, 2007; Leeds, 2007). In the case

of Brazil, explorations of urban violence often highlight the extremely uneven patterns

of urban growth that characterize so many Brazilian cities (e.g., Caldeira and Holston,

1999; Huggins, 2000; Ceccato et al., 2007; see also Koonings and Kruijt, 2007), but as

McIlwaine and Moser (2007) note, such accounts also tend to focus overwhelmingly upon

the experiences of elites, privileging their perceptions over those of the millions who live

in poor communities.

The experiences of poor people, according to McIlwaine and Moser, though they are

often central to narratives of urban violence and insecurity, are regularly ignored in analy-

ses of crime and urban safety. Crucial for understanding the specifics of uneven urbandevelopment, violence and insecurity in poor communities “has important spatial implica-

tions for the poor both in terms of how they conduct their daily lives and in their physi-

cal marginalization in purportedly violent communities. Again, this challenges existing

research, which tends to focus exclusively on how the elite manage and manipulate public

space in cities” (2007, p. 118). Such perspectives are important not only for considering the

relationships between the urban poor and public space, they argue, but also for recognizing

changing processes of urban growth in regions like Latin America. As cities in countries like

Brazil come to be characterized more and more by sprawling urban impoverishment–for

instance, Mike Davis notes that nearly 40 percent of Brazil’s urban population now resides

7Though situated in rural Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil, Nancy Scheper-Hughes (1992) provides a heart-breaking case study of the ways that death can alter (and even shatter) the deeply emotional, everyday practicesof mothering and child-care.

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1152 JEFF GARMANY

in favelas (2006, pp. 24-25)–understanding the antecedents and effects of violence (e.g.,

fear) in communities like Pirambu is becoming increasingly important for urban geogra-

phers concerned with space and social change in cities around the world.In addition to seeing how the unequal integration of poor people into patterns of urban

development are highly important for understanding growing levels of violent crime, so

too are the “perversely integrative” (Zaluar, 2004) tendencies that drug economies pro-

voke in communities like Pirambu. According to Alba Zaluar (2004; see also 1994), drug

trafficking and other illegal activities offer many favela dwellers the greatest potential for

material gain, and thus the urban poor throughout Latin America become “perversely”

integrated into broader capitalist markets. Beyond simply offering a descriptive account of

narco-trafficking and drug use in impoverished neighborhoods, Zaluar and other research-

ers (e.g., Bourgois, 1995; Bromley and Nelson, 2002; Dowdney, 2003; Standing, 2003;

Arias, 2004; Clarke, 2006; Lum, 2008) have in recent years helped to complicate moretraditional narratives concerning the ways poverty, crime, and drugs intersect in urban

space. By questioning the spatial relationships between drug use, drug transport, and drug

enforcement strategies, geographers have also begun to contribute to these debates (Corva,

2008; McDonald, 2005; Punch, 2005; Del Casino, 2007; Vilalta, 2010), showing the inter-

related effects that drugs and drug users can have on space and place contexts (and vice

versa).

Building upon the work of Zaluar and others, the ethnographic accounts of several

researchers (Leeds, 1996; Mafra, 1998; Goldstein, 2003; Gay, 2005; Arias, 2006; Penglase,

2010) illustrate how drug economies may actually bind favela communities together in

certain instances. Far from serving as a purely disintegrating force, drugs and drug dealerscan, in some cases, facilitate sociospatial cohesion. And although few would argue that

in the long term the positive effects of drug markets outweigh the negative ones in com-

munities such as Pirambu, with the exception of crack cocaine homicide figures in urban

areas do not show any “direct correlation to the presence of drug markets” (Stevens et al.,

2009, p. 2). Though heightened levels of crime (theft in particular) are likely to accom-

pany increasing drug use, most drugs cannot be linked directly to murder. Most drugs,

however, are not to blame for growing trends of violent crime in Pirambu and similarly

impoverished areas: the prevalence of crack cocaine in Latin American cities has exploded

in recent years, and with it have come new landscapes of fractured, still-evolving urban

geographies.

According to Sharon Boles and Karen Miotto (2003, p. 167), whereas “large doses of

[regular] cocaine [are necessary to] produce violent outbursts in certain individuals,” crack

cocaine is much more potent, and even in small doses the “rapid onset and offset of its

effects” causes “greater levels of irritability and aggressiveness.” Frequently linked to inci-

dents of violent crime, “crack-related violence is also systemic, relating to battles among

crack dealers for turf and market share as well as disputes between crack dealers and users”

(ibid.). Such problems are especially pronounced in poor areas, where state resources

are thin and communities are ill prepared to combat rising crack epidemics.8 Whereas

few ethnographic studies exist to document how crack alters the environments of poor

neighborhoods in cities of the Global South, the work of Dennis Rodgers is an exception,

8As, for example, the research of Phillipe Bourgois (1995) shows, the experiences of countless poor communitiesin American cities during the 1980s bare witness to this.

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providing a revealing analysis of the effects of crack on an impoverished community in

urban Nicaragua. Throughout the course of his fieldwork in Barrio Luis Fanor Hernández,

a poor neighborhood in Managua, Rodgers noted a strong connection between growinglevels of community-level violence and “the neurological effects of crack consumption.”

“Crack enhances aggressiveness,” he writes, “and makes individuals less predictable.” In

fact, Rodgers notes, “everybody I talked to in Barrio Luis Fanor Hernández told me with-

out exception that insecurity had worsened since the emergence of crack, and in particular

that there had been an increase in brutal robberies, assaults and common delinquency”

(2007, pp. 80–81).

Returning to Pirambu, the effects of unequal urban development and the growing preva-

lence of crack cocaine within the community may, indeed, help to untangle some of the

causes leading up to the “massacre” of 2009. Nevertheless, this approach still queries the

ways that space and social practice culminate in acts of violence rather than investigatinghow violence and fear reconfigure spatial contexts by informing, altering, and reformulat-

ing social practices. Violence and death, quite sadly, are becoming increasingly significant

to the “production” of space (Lefebvre, 1991) in communities like Pirambu. For geogra-

phers, recognizing how such acts are immanent to urban socio-spatial contexts is critical

for examining community change and interconnected processes of urban growth. Drawing

once again from McIlwaine and Moser (2007, p. 118):

Beyond some in-depth ethnographic accounts of violence in low-income communi-

ties (Auyero 2000, on Argentina), statistical analyses based on homicide figures that

show concentrations in poor areas (Barata et al. 1998, on Brazil), or media repotsthat consistently misrepresent the incidence of violence everywhere (Dammert and

Malone 2003, on Chile), however, little is known about the actual nature of violence

among the poor in cities. It is this ignorance which has led to the stereotyping of the

urban poor as harbingers of violence, and their communities as hotbeds of conflict.

In an attempt to address this ignorance, multiple narratives of daily violence in Pirambu

are unpacked in this article in order to interrogate the relationships between death, drugs,

violence, and urban space. Clearly, not all drugs affect bodies or space in the same way,

and to better understand processes of urban violence in poor communities I argue that

greater nuance is needed for the study of “drug economies.” Homicide, unfortunately, isalso central to this debate, and by exploring how events such as the “massacre” alter and

reconstitute space in places like Pirambu, my aim is to show the necessity for a spatial

approach that can explain the dynamics of fear, violence, and death in impoverished urban

areas. If geographers are to continue to make sense of emerging cityscapes around the

world, then urban geographic analyses must be adapted in order to capture new complexi-

ties within contemporary urban space.

FORTALEZA AND THE COMMUNITY OF PIRAMBU

Situated along the Atlantic shore at the northwest periphery of Fortaleza (see Fig. 1),Pirambu’s attractive geographic location has for decades been both a blessing and burden

for community residents. Long inhabited by families of fisherfolk, Pirambu’s population

increased significantly during the 1930s and 1940s as squatter settlements of lower-income

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1154 JEFF GARMANY

families sprouted throughout the area. Combined with Pirambu’s oceanside location was

its proximity to the city’s CBD, and the community expanded rapidly over the ensuing

decades as squatter migrants from the drought-stricken Northeast as well as other parts of

the metropolitan area continued to pour in. Though the neighborhoods that make up greater

Pirambu were formally incorporated into the municipality of Fortaleza in 1962 (Costa,

1999), many residents still live in extreme poverty and the area has never lost its stigma of

destitution.9 Moreover, in a blatant display of environmental discrimination, the Atlantic’s

tidal currents sweep much of the city’s sewage and marine pollution northwestwardly,

imperiling fisher families and would-be beachgoers all along Pirambu’s coastline.

With a total population of well over 100,000, Pirambu today is one of Latin America’s

largest favela communities. Known for its deep-rooted history of collective mobilization,

Pirambu shares in a tradition of political activism and cultural expression that characterizes

9Unless otherwise noted, data pertaining to Pirambu and the metropolitan region of Fortaleza come from a collec-tion of field notes and semi-structured interviews collected as part of field work between 2005 and 2010.

Fig. 1. Map of Fortaleza highlighting the greater community of Pirambu (adapted from Garmany, 2011).

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several of Fortaleza’s more established favela neighborhoods (Barreira, 1998; Matos,

1998; Cabanes, 2002; Gondim, 2004). When compared to favelas studied by scholarly

researchers elsewhere in Brazil, however, Pirambu is historically distinguished by twoimportant factors: rates of community level violence are decidedly lower in comparison

to oft-cited examples from Rio de Janeiro, and Pirambu is not under the total command

of drug dealers and/or organized crime (e.g., Gay, 1994; Mafra, 1998; Dowdney, 2003;

Arias, 2006; Penglase, 2010). In contrast to the favelas that capture headlines in Rio, the

state does have a recognizable (though low-key) presence (e.g., in the form of emergency

response personnel) within the neighborhoods of Pirambu (Garmany, 2009). Questions of

personal safety and criminal activity are understandably concerning to many pirambuen-

ses (residents of Pirambu), but the community, like an overwhelming majority of Brazilian

favelas (e.g., Braga and Barreira, 1991; Fernandes, 2005; Holston, 2008), is not devoid of

state actors or resources (i.e., police officers, schools, public works, etc.).This research took place between 2005 and 2010 as part of the author’s field work.

During this six-year period I made five extended visits to Pirambu, the longest of which

lasted for six months in 2009. The primary purpose of this field work was to examine

processes of governance and urban development in Pirambu and I might never have inves-

tigated drugs, violence, fear, and death had it not been for my qualitatively-based and

anthropologically-suited research design. In order to more fully embed myself within the

community, I lived with a local family directly in the heart of Pirambu. Round-the-clock

participatory observation techniques were crucial to my study, as were bibliographic and

archival resources available in Fortaleza. My primary dataset for this research includes

several semi- and unstructured interviews (n = 130), focus groups (n = 8), and personalobservations documented in my field notes. Investigating the spatial dimensions of vio-

lence, drugs, and death were never intended as part of my analysis, but by early 2009 their

growing presence within the community could not be ignored. I began to note the changes

I had seen across several years in Pirambu, and I compared those findings to my nota-

tions and observations from earlier years. Moreover, in both my interviews and day-to-day

conversations with pirambuenses, issues of violence and drug trafficking were quick to

surface from 2009 onward. In fact, that issue came to beleaguer my research, and to ignore

it would have been to turn a blind eye to significant events at my field site. In this article,

by considering a series of economic and social changes that have reshaped metropolitan

Fortaleza over the past two decades, and reflecting upon the spatial relationships betweenthose changes and shifting patterns of violence within Pirambu, I offer a glimpse into the

underlying roles of drugs, violence, and death in the production of everyday urban space.

CRACK COCAINE AND THE CITY OF FORTALEZA

Unlike in U.S. cities, where crack cocaine contributed to rising levels of violent crime

most prominently during the 1980s (Grogger and Willis, 2000), it was not until fairly

recently that Fortaleza and several other Latin American cities confronted this narcotic

on an epidemic scale. With meager levels of economic growth and a notoriously drought-

ridden agricultural setting, Fortaleza historically has had neither the market nor the envi-ronment for producing a lucrative illicit drug trade (Garmany, 2011). Moreover, under the

authoritative rule of Brazil’s military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, state security

forces were modestly effective in discouraging the growth of drug economies in cities

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1156 JEFF GARMANY

such as Fortaleza. Rather than serving as a base for organized drug cartels or large-scale

illegal commodity chain networks, Fortaleza, like many cities in northeastern Brazil,

became a wellspring of cheap labor for the country’s rapidly industrializing Southeastregion. For decades, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast grew on the backs of

Northeasterners. While the Northeast remained severely underdeveloped during the latter

half of the twentieth century, a large and increasingly destitute workforce scrambled for

low-paying jobs in the Southeast (Page, 1995; Roett, 2010). By the 1990s, unionized labor

was severely weakened, chronically underemployed families occupied favelas in cities all

over Brazil, and in the Southeast–where capital had become decidedly concentrated–orga-

nized crime grew to unprecedented levels. Cocaine found large domestic and international

markets in Brazil’s two biggest cities, most heavily impacting the urban underclass (Leeds,

1996; Arias, 2006).

Cities in the Brazilian Northeast, however, did not confront the cocaine trade and drugtrafficking on nearly the same level as cities in the Southeast. Indeed, unlike Bogotá,

Medellín, Rio, and other Latin American cities regularly identified with global trafficking,

northeastern Brazilian cities have rarely been included in academic debates regarding the

drug trade. With a less affluent consumer market base and scant networks of organized

crime, Fortaleza, Recife, Salvador, and other cities, until quite recently, offered only minor

opportunities for cocaine distributors. For the most part this drug remained too expensive

to create a broad market in the Northeast, and without sophisticated cartel networks the

region lacked the labor infrastructure required for large-scale drug trafficking (Garmany,

2011).

By the late 1990s, however, Fortaleza’s political economic setting began to change.Although the Real economic plan introduced by President Cardoso was indeed reason-

ably successful in stabilizing inflation, it also adopted a series of free-market policies that

did little to incentivize domestic investment in Brazil’s underdeveloped Northeast (Saad-

Filho, 2010). Faced with few opportunities for long-term growth and equally underwhelm-

ing federal infrastructure and industrial development programs, city and state officials in

Fortaleza increasingly turned to tourism to provide an economic boost (Gondim, 2004).

By 2000, with little governmental oversight, tourists, foreign money, and investors began

to spill into the area, bringing with them a host of interrelated consequences. Fortaleza

headed a list of northeastern cities that, known for beaches, corrupt law enforcement, and

high levels of poverty, experienced a spike in juvenile prostitution. Consumers of this mar-ket also drove an increased demand for illegal drugs, and hand-in-hand with the tourism

industry came an expanding consumer base for cocaine in Fortaleza. Though tourism has

clearly propelled Fortaleza’s economy into the 21st century, many residents now lament

how venues that cater to an overwhelmingly foreign male clientele have significantly

altered the city’s entertainment landscape.

According to local law enforcement, however, the surge that Fortaleza is currently

experiencing in crack cocaine’s sale and production is tied most directly to other, more

recent developments in the global drug trade: Nigerian cartels now control a large share of

the cocaine exported from this part of South America, and within the past few years they

have made Fortaleza one of their primary hubs in a commodity chain that links growersin Bolivia and Colombia to sellers in Africa and Europe. Much of this cocaine flow that

exits Brazil now ships directly to Lisbon, where it is then redirected to routes leading

to Amsterdam or Johannesburg. With its (relatively) proximate location to Portugal and

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limited narcotics enforcement personnel (in comparison to Rio and São Paulo), Fortaleza

has grown more attractive to international drug traffickers. This linkage has produced a

growing surplus of cocaine on the streets of Fortaleza, and local traffickers, faced with lim-ited demand for a relatively expensive commodity, have adapted by dealing crack rather

than cocaine (a much cheaper, more highly addictive form of the drug) and selling it to

a large lower-class consumer base (Ribeiro, 2009). This trend grew noticeably worse in

2008 when the U.S. and the global economy began to slump, and foreign tourism dipped

markedly. To compensate for declining cocaine markets, dealers in Fortaleza increased

their supply and sales of crack in the city. In communities like Pirambu, where crack was

not especially common due to trafficker discretion (e.g., higher market prices for cocaine

in more affluent areas and a reluctance to sell crack in their own neighborhoods [Phillips,

2011]), bocas de crack (spaces of crack sale and consumption) have mushroomed in recent

years. According to local investigators, this emergent crack economy has fueled the surgeof violence in Fortaleza, where homicide numbers nearly doubled in just three years (766

murders in 2006 compared to 1,417 murders in 2009 [Ribeiro, 2010a]).

Today, nowhere are the effects of crack more obvious than in Pirambu and other impov-

erished communities along Fortaleza’s periphery (e.g., Garmany, 2010). Whereas gangs,

drug dealers, and drug users have long inhabited communities like Pirambu, crack exem-

plifies how different drugs produce varying effects across space. To say that drugs are

more of a problem today than ever before in Pirambu would be, at best, to overly general-

ize the situation. Pirambu has for a long time struggled with problems related to drugs and

illegal activity, yet with crack the community has undergone a profound transformation.

To begin with, crack is both physically debilitating and intensely addictive, often leavingusers highly dependent on the drug yet with little means to support their addiction. 10 When

compared to users of other drugs, such as marijuana, crack addicts are far more likely to

commit violent acts in order to support their drug habit, thereby increasing levels of fear

and insecurity in the communities they inhabit (Stevens et al., 2009). In fact, crack is so

addictive that not only will users sometimes engage in acts of theft and prostitution in

order to obtain it, they will go in debt with sellers even when they have no foreseeable

means to pay for their drugs. Dozens of crack addicts are murdered each month by dealers

in Fortaleza who have grown tired of waiting for overdue payments, and their bodies are

often mutilated to intimidate would-be delinquent buyers. With few public rehabilitation

centers available to the poorest addicts and law enforcement personnel who are largelyindifferent to the fates of underclass drug users, homicides in communities like Pirambu

have soared due to the retaliatory acts of unpaid crack dealers.

In addition to these pathological acts, conflicts between traffickers competing for

territory and market share in favelas have also escalated. Assassinations involving rival

groups are common, and neighborhood residents are often caught in the crossfire of these

battles. Today in Pirambu, innocent bystanders (in particular children and the elderly)

are wounded and sometimes killed on nearly a weekly basis by stray gunfire. These inci-

dents significantly alter perceptions of space within the community, affecting how people

move about their neighborhoods, what time of day they will or will not leave their homes,

the spaces they frequent, certain streets or landmarks they tend to avoid, and so forth.

10According to Soalheiro (2009), well over half of Brazil’s crack addicts are unemployed.

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1158 JEFF GARMANY

According to Rachel Pain (2009, p. 467), such fears produce intense emotional reactions

that “always have social meaning” and constitute “a range of positive and negative effects

on social and spatial relations.” In the places where someone has been killed, for exam-ple, it is not uncommon for residents to leave behind informal memorials or shrines to

remember the victim(s), the event, and the danger in that space. The places where crack is

sold in Pirambu are also especially troubling for those who live nearby, as they and their

families confront the effects of the drug trade on a daily basis. Owing to a dark sense of

humor, some pirambuenses refer to crack addicts as “the living dead” (“os mortos-vivos”)

because of the zombie-like appearance they affect as they slog about the favela during all

hours of the day. So acknowledged are the changes that crack has brought to the social

geography of Pirambu that in 2009, when authorities seized more that three kilos (nearly

seven pounds) of crack from two community residents (Vasquez, 2009), the news gener-

ated almost no response from those living in the area. Three kilos, with an estimated streetvalue of roughly $20,000 reais (equal to approximately $8,500), was only a small part of a

much larger problem still present in the community.

Perhaps no group is more plagued in their relationship with crack than the young people

in impoverished urban areas. Speaking about the problems the drug has created in Brazil

on a nationwide scale, Cid Gomes, the governor of the state of Ceará, noted that children

are especially vulnerable because traffickers frequently target them in order to expand

their consumer base. Homicide totals in Fortaleza during 2009 clearly reflected this trend,

where the murder rate for adolescents increased more dramatically than any other age

group in the Fortaleza metropolitan region (Ribeiro, 2010b). Indeed, police data collected

in Pirambu show that young people are heavily involved in both the use and transport ofcrack, and according to arrest reports those most often apprehended with the drug are chil-

dren between the ages of 11 and 20. By February 2009, the effects of crack on bodies and

space in Pirambu had grown to the extent that Barbosa Filho, a municipal administrator in

Fortaleza, pleaded to officials in City Hall that crack was threatening to destroy the youth

of Pirambu (Neto, 2009). Capable of significantly altering sociospatial contexts, crack

has become a central element in changing community landscapes: for millions around

the world who live in areas like Pirambu, the role of crack cocaine is pivotal to the daily

practices and (under)development of urban space. To be sure, the global drug trade is a

phenomenon marked by rapid change, and since 2005, when I first lived in Pirambu, the

neighborhood has already undergone a profound metamorphosis. The substantial dimin-ishment of space and pathways where people feel safe reflect this change, as do increased

incidences of personal assault and violent crime (this, according to residents and local

police), the closure and/or disbandment of local health clinics, youth centers, community

associations, and resident collectives, and also in recent trends of resident flight, where

many families have left the community out of frustration and fear. The drug has affected

nearly everyone in Pirambu, and the penultimate section of this article illustrates how

crack, with its physiological and far-reaching contingent effects, is at the core of spatial

change in dozens (if not hundreds) of cities throughout the world.

COMMUNITY CHANGE IN THE WAKE OF DRUGS, VIOLENCE, AND DEATH

According to Barney Warf and Cynthia Waddell (2002), recognizing the role that fear

plays in spatial transformation is crucial for understanding community change. Under

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conditions in which acts of violence appear to be random and unpredictable, they write,

individuals “frequently alter their time-space behavior and ‘performativity’” to avoid

becoming the next unlucky victim (2002, p. 340). With the diurnal engagements of thosewho live in communities like Pirambu altered by fear, new social practices also arise to

reconfigure existing boundaries within urban space. Concerned with robberies and the

personal safety of their staff, municipal authorities in 2009 shut down five of the six public

health facilities in Pirambu because of “insufficient security” (Peixoto, 2009). The sounds

of fireworks, common in the evenings and during soccer games, began to startle many

residents who mistook the noise for gunfire. As people walked about the community,

they stayed close to the walls and houses on the sides of streets so that, in case a gun-

fight erupted, they could find cover more quickly. Emergency response personnel were

instructed to use extra caution when responding to calls from certain areas, and fewer chil-

dren played outside in the streets. The “rhythms” (Lefebvre, 1996) of everyday life brokedown, and from the remnants came new patterns of social activity dominated by fear and

perfidious spaces. “When cities come to feel under siege,” write Warf and Waddell, “a loss

of social cohesion marked by suspicion of strangers, even neighbors, often mounts” (2002,

p. 340). As fear persisted at different intensities across space in Pirambu, the community,

as both a perceived (e.g., Tuan, 1977) and lived space (Lefebvre, 1991), grew increasingly

fractured.

In early 2009, pirambuenses were shocked when a baby boy of only eight months

was killed by drug-related gunfire. Many hoped that the tragedy might lead to municipal

action, but in the month that followed the murder, at least one person was killed each week

within one mile of where the baby had been shot. Space within that area became perceptu-ally divided into “less safe” and “unsafe” zones,11 and many residents chose to restrict their

movement throughout the neighborhood based on where shootings and homicides took

place. Social networks became truncated throughout the community, and assemblages of

neighborhood cohesion (e.g., evening church gatherings, Sunday afternoon soccer games,

holiday celebrations) were rearranged as space was unofficially cordoned off in the wake

of violent activity. As both something to be feared and an event capable of haunting space

(e.g., Chevalier, 2001; Maddern and Adey, 2008), the places where death occurred became

central to the fragmentation and reordering of Pirambu’s landscape.

Local residents, outraged by the infant’s death and increasing acts of everyday violence,

organized an event to protest the lack of response from municipal authorities. Two localpoliticians and the news media did, indeed, show up, but they promised nothing in the way

of assistance and, for the most part, they used the opportunity to criticize their political

adversaries. Frustrated by how the event had turned into a political platform for a couple

of politicians with little vested in the neighborhood, I began to ask the event organizers

why no one from the community had addressed the crowd. The reasons, I was told, were

twofold: (1) without the politicians, the news media would not have come, and without

them, the gathering would never have attracted so many people; and (2) people in the

neighborhood were afraid to publicly denounce the gangs and drug traffickers responsible

for the baby’s death. In a place where grassroots leadership and collective action were

11No one I spoke with considered his or her neighborhood to be completely “safe.” To reflect this, here I referto zones as “less safe” (i.e., areas where one should be cautious) and “unsafe” (i.e., areas one should avoidaltogether).

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1160 JEFF GARMANY

foundational to the original occupation and organization of urban space (Costa, 1999;

Cabanes, 2002), community leaders were now afraid to speak publicly against the prob-

lems confronting their neighborhoods. So dangerous, in fact, did some residents perceivetheir community to be that they had avoided the event altogether. With the increasing

presence of crack cocaine, violence, and homicide, pirambuenses were not only reticent to

publicly condemn the changes that had come to their community; some had even grown

fearful of leaving their homes when it was not absolutely necessary. Throughout the com-

munity, several residents began to contemplate moving elsewhere, but particularly in those

areas where drugs were sold or someone was recently shot, no one could sell their house.

Myriad in their spatial and corporeal effects, the alterations brought on by drugs and death

in communities like Pirambu exemplify how daily life is, increasingly, changing for mil-

lions of urban dwellers worldwide.

A few weeks after the neighborhood gathering, yet another young man was killed inPirambu. The ninth homicide in as many weeks within the same square mile, what ulti-

mately came to distinguish this murder from others was that, for nearly two months after-

ward, violence ebbed in the community. Explanations from police and local residents were

purely speculative, but most everyone agreed that with so many murders, coupled with a

surge in police arrests, a significant number of would-be assassins had been removed from

the streets. Though the same trend did not extend to other neighborhoods in Fortaleza, the

small area within Pirambu that had experienced so much violence in such a short period

of time grew unexpectedly more peaceful. Residents continued to restrict their movements

and actions throughout the neighborhood, monitoring and policing their neighbors with a

watchful and suspicious gaze, staying indoors in the evening when gunfights were mostlikely to break out, concealing valuables in order to avoid the attention of thieves and drug

addicts, and speaking only with great caution about events and suspected perpetrators of

violent acts. But unlike several other favela communities around Fortaleza where local

“militias” arose to combat escalating levels of violence (governing space through violent

means of their own [Rodrigues, 2009]), in Pirambu an uneasy cease-fire abruptly settled

over the community. Though the traces of drugs and death were thoroughly etched onto

local space–from bullet hole scars on the homes where shootings had occurred to the graf-

fiti left by adolescents referencing crack and drug traffickers–for several weeks killings

within the neighborhood stopped. But on May 14, at the birthday party of Dona Teresa,

that fragile calm came to a sudden and terrifying end.

CONCLUSIONS

It was not until two days after the “massacre” that I finally visited Dona Teresa’s house.

There were no barricades or police tape cordoning off the premises, but the house and the

street seemed eerily abandoned. The doors and windows of the house were all shut, and

there in front, covered in deep, dark bloodstains, sat a small couch. Blood from the couch

had collected on the cement below and hardened into a dry and blackening crust. Blood

was even smeared along the outer walls of neighboring houses, indicating the desperate

path where one of the victims had fled. What had been a lively and bustling street, full ofchildren and activity and barking dogs, now felt haunted. Life carried on as usual else-

where in the community, but in this place the memory of death and tragedy still lingered

in the air.

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For pirambuenses and millions of others who live in similar circumstances, these sorts

of experiences and memories constitute important changes and understandings of space

within (and outside of) their communities. And difficult as they may be to rationalize,

such spectro-geographies are profoundly capable of influencing both the social and spatial

relationships of contemporary urban landscapes (Maddern and Adey, 2008). In much the

same way that death affects a broad and interconnected network of still living people, so

too does it affect a multitude of spaces and events (Warf and Waddell, 2002). For urban

geographers, recognizing these changes and the fears they produce is important not only

for understanding the formation and reordering of space within cities, but also for making

sense of shifting urban sociospatial environments (see Hubbard and Sanders, 2003; Sin,

2003, Pain, 2009). Moreover, as cities like Fortaleza continue to expand, analytical frame-

works that account for events like the “massacre” will become increasingly urgent.

In this article, I have attempted to show the importance of geographic research that can

account for fear and the ways that violence and illicit drugs are embodied and experienced

in everyday urban space. I have tried also to explore how this research might proceed, what

it might look like, and the groundwork that has been laid by others. My findings suggest

that qualitative research is needed to compliment and flesh out existing quantitative stud-

ies, and that, much like Desmond Arias recounts (2006), relationship building, time in the

field, and trust are crucial for investigations of this sort. But I have stopped short of offer-

ing a framework, either analytic or theoretical, that might be transferable or mapped upon

other contexts. Thinking through events that entangle drugs, violence, fear, and death are

critical and emotional processes still to be grappled with, and as such remain blind spots

in urban geography.

Connected to this are questions pertaining to drugs and the differing effects that mind-

altering substances produce within bodies and space. From the physiological impacts that

users experience to larger economic, social, and political shifts that accompany changes in

the drug trade, the geographies of narcotics require much nuance and subtlety in order to

see the multitudinous relationships that exist between drugs and space. For social science

researchers, accounting for these specificities and recognizing the ways that narcotics

shape daily life in communities like Pirambu are central to understanding broader patterns

of violence and death that increasingly collide with processes of urban change. Whether

in metropolitan, rural, or transnational border regions, the geographies of drugs provide a

unique perspective into the changing practices of everyday urban space.

As urbanization steadily encompasses ever more people throughout the developing

world, geographic approaches must adapt in order to explain new and emerging contexts

of space and place. Important for understanding how urban growth and development pro-

ceeds in Western and non-Western cities, necro and narco-geographies shed light on the

ways that people encounter and experience space, and the relationships between past and

present (as well as future) spatio-temporal milieus. From London to Kabul, and from the

war-torn cities of the former Yugoslavia to the El Paso/Ciudad Juárez border zone of the

United States and Mexico, death and drugs weigh heavily upon the social geographies of

urban settings. By accounting for these factors, and working to incorporate their signifi-cance into frameworks of urban and social change, urban geographers are provided better

traction for unraveling site-specific events and explaining the ever-changing landscapes of

cities in the 21st century.

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Documents

Urban Geography Volume 32 Issue 8 2011 [Doi 10.2747%2F0272-3638.32.8.1148] Garmany, Jeff -- Drugs, Violence, Fear, And Death- The Necro- And Narco-Geographies of Contemporary Urban