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Violence, Spatial Segregation, and the Limits of Local Empowerment in Urban Latin America
Butler, Edgar W., James B. Pick, and W. James Hettrick. Mexico and Mexico City in the World Economy. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001. Photographs, tables, maps, figures, bibliography, index, 406 pp.; paperback $39.95.
Caldeira, Teresa P. R. City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in Sao Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Photographs, tables, maps, figures, appendix, acronyms, bibliography, index, 504 pp.; hardcover $60, paperback $24.95.
Myers, David J., and Henry A. Dietz, eds. Capital City Politics in Latin America: Democratization and Empowerment. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2002. Tables, maps, figures, bibliography, index, 408 pp.; hardcover $65.
Rotker, Susana, eel. Citizens of Fear. Urban Violence in Latin America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Tables, figure, bibliography, 265 pp.; hardcover $59, paperback $23.
Sheriff, Robin E. Dreaming Equality: Color, Race, and Racism in Urban Brazil. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001. Bibliography, index, 288 pp.; hardcover $60, paperback $22.
In Brazil's 2002 elections, former Sao Paulo mayor and governor Paulo Maluf tried to unseat incumbent Sao Paulo governor Geralclo Alckmin with promises that explicitly violent law enforcement would stem the tide of violence that had pushed the metropolitan murder rate to one thousand per month. Maluf was a conservative populist; his pledge of extrajudicial violence easily won the votes of the affluent sectors he had served so well by delivering expensive infrastructure, characterized by gated residential communities and fortified enclaves for work and recreation. But Maluf also captured the votes of many poor and working-class Paulistas whose interests he had arguably weakened when he rolled back the participatory reforms and expansion of social services to the poor enacted by Workers' Party (PT) mayor Luiza Erundina (1989-92). Alckmin held on to his seat, but only through "even tougher on crime" promises of more prisons and boasts of extrajudicial executions of gang leaders (Economist 2002).1
From an electoral perspective, Sao Paulo's election of five consecutive mayors points to the success of clemocratization at the local level; but the electorate's embrace of violence as a routine tool for law enforcement troubles observers of a city where the police force continues to evade reform while committing human rights violations in record numbers. Yet in 2002, for many...