From Colonialism to Clientelism: Urban Inequality in the Latin American City
In 2009, after Rio de Janeiro won its bid to host the Olympics for Summer 2016, the city commenced the arduous process of tearing down the informal and illegal squatter settlements — known as favelas — that stood in the way of the future Olympic Park. During this upheaval, an estimated 60,000 residents were forcibly removed from their homes and relocated. Similar settlements have been destroyed in Bogotá, Buenos Aires, and São Paulo, leaving residents of favelas and shantytowns under the constant threat of eviction. More often than not, such residents are forced by necessity to spend their lives in these informal settlements, and, if evicted, will have no opportunity for legal recourse.
In Brazil, the total number of people living in favelas is greater than the entire population of Portugal (roughly 11 million people), thus making the prospect of mass eviction not just a local problem, but a national one. The average population density of Rio’s favelas is 22,940 residents per square mile. To put that number in perspective, if a typical favela in Rio were in the United States, it would be the second most densely populated city behind New York. Overcrowding, poor sanitation, and a lack of access to proper healthcare result in a life expectancy in the favelas nearly 20 years below the national average. The informality of squatter settlements deprives inhabitants of political representation or formal power, making upward mobility nearly impossible, and creating a ceaseless cycle of impoverishment and disenfranchisement.
For those who doubt the importance of history in shaping modernity, one need only examine the ubiquity of these types of settlements in Latin America, which can be traced directly back to colonial administration in the 16th and 17th century. Today, 400-year-old systems of inequality and corruption first implemented by Spanish and Portuguese colonizers plague inhabitants of the modern shantytowns and favelas. Despite recent political reforms and increased economic opportunities, these inhabitants continue to suffer from the consequences of their colonial past.
Although the burden of physical occupation and foreign rule has long since gone by, institutions implemented in Latin America during the colonial era — specifically those regarding urban land ownership — are directly responsible for the continued inequality seen in the favelas.
The rapid construction of cities as centers of power in Latin America in the 16th century confined resources and wealth to a relatively small area, thus placing wealthy landowners and the political elite at the center of the city, and indigenous populations and the poor on the periphery. The centrist urbanization seen throughout the region was intended to maximize agricultural exports back to Europe by concentrating resources and labor around colonial outposts. Latin American cities as they are now, unlike many other modern cities, are not products of the industrial revolution. Rather, they are the fruit of colonialism, with all of the largest Latin American cities (with the exception of Montevideo) having been established in or before the 16th century.
Designed deliberately as centers of commerce, trade, and governance, early Latin American cities placed the elite landowners, or vecinos, at the center of the city along with the church, and therefore closest to the center of power. Vecinos were tasked with the control and allotment of urban land, subsequently relegating those without land titles to an immediate position of inferiority. The proximity of the urban elite in Latin American cities to the center of governance and commerce (and the literal center of the city) fostered an environment ideal for the formation of a periphery.
As a result of this centrist design, the indigenous population, those without land titles, and the poor all formed concentric circles increasing in political disenfranchisement and poverty around the elite-dominated city center. The formation of an urban periphery was exacerbated in Latin America by the omnipresence of cities, with 225 towns and cities established by the Spanish before 1580.
The growth of the periphery was further compounded by the economic dominance of cities. As a result of this preeminence, urban areas attracted increasing numbers of opportunity-seeking immigrants from the countryside for whom the elite dominated city centers had no place. The role of the periphery in the Latin American city was solidified in 1703 when, as a means of counteracting the “growing incidence of vagrancy and delinquency in frontier zones,” a royal decree relocated rural inhabitants to established Spanish cities and towns, increasing the size of what would become the modern favela.
The colonial focus on centralized urban planning carried well into the 20th century, when Latin America saw a faster rate of urbanization than anywhere else on the planet. In 1950, 41 percent of the population in Latin America lived in cities. By 2000, that number had grown to 75 percent, an increase that took twice as long on the North American continent. During this period of urban growth, the tradition of spatial segregation persisted.
While physical alienation has its own social consequences, the political ramifications of this urban organization are far more pernicious. As James Holston recognizes in his 2008 exploration of squatter settlements in São Paolo, citizenship and spatial segregation are coterminous, with authentic ownership of land being a prerequisite for legal and political legitimacy. Because of their illegal position in the periphery, inhabitants of the favelas are unable to obtain political representation and the vital resources such representation entails. The marginalization of favela dwellers has contributed to a cycle of poverty and political exclusion that has forced inhabitants of the periphery to seek representation through other informal institutions. Though they are excluded from the formal political process as a result of vestigial colonial institutions, favela dwellers have nonetheless managed to engage in the realm of informal politics.
Without recognized land titles and therefore formal channels by which to obtain basic necessities, favela inhabitants have utilized clientelist relationships with local officials to gain access to resources they are unable to obtain through official channels. Reminiscent of the colonial system of encomiendas—in which landowners provided protection to natives in return for tributes in gold—local power brokers in modern Latin America have begun to provide resources for favela dwellers in return for votes. This favor por votos political relationship is supremely logical for favela inhabitants who, in the words of the scholar Javier Auyero, suffer from “material deprivation” and “unmerciful economic pressure.” In the absence of individual liberties, a communal citizenship has emerged among many favelados by which effective collective action provides the resources they have been unjustly denied.
The trouble with clientelist political relationships in the past has been that, upon being elected, politicians fail to produce the service they promised to their economically dependent constituents. In Latin America, however, leaders within the favelas have changed the rules of the game to ensure that their votes produce the promised resources. As the scholar Robert Gay articulates, “Instead of encouraging residents to vote in the hope of a reward, [local leaders] let it be known that the favela’s support would go to the individual (regardless of party affiliation) who bid and delivered the most prior to each election.” Subsequently, if a candidate falls short of a promise, the entire favela would simply refuse to vote. As the favelas continue to increase in size, politicians are forced to take this threat more and more seriously.
Thus, far from being victims of clientelism, inhabitants of the urban periphery have utilized the corrupt nature of urban politics — the same system that has relegated them to a position of sub-citizenship — to the best of their advantage. Favela inhabitants use their collective votes and modified form of citizenship to obtain necessities like milk and food, but also to gain access to larger infrastructural additions like plumbing and paved roads. Despite their lack of autonomy, favelados have nonetheless managed to gain leverage over the corrupt system in such a way as to create the auspices of formal political legitimacy.
While their occupation of peripheral land is technically against the law, favela dwellers use their vote-selling as a means of asserting their political importance, and have done so to the extent that urban governments do little to deter them. Ironically, they have become too important to the political machine to be removed. This transition from “patrimonial patronage to mass political machines,” in the words of the scholar Jonathon Fox, has given favelados the political power otherwise denied to them in the Latin American city.
While the institutional dynamic between those in the core and those on the margins of society has remained largely the same since the colonial era, as broader contexts have shifted, so too have the relationships favelados have with their government. Although a political dynamic defined by clienetelist practices is by no means democratic or egalitarian, it is a vast improvement from what has historically been total political exclusion. Despite their position in the periphery, favela dwellers have asserted themselves to obtain the political ends their lack of legitimacy otherwise denies. What remains to be seen is whether the trend towards increased political involvement eventually results in the complete incorporation of Latin America’s favelas into the larger political realm. Such a transition would allow Latin America to shed one of the last vestiges of its colonial past, and would mark a new era of liberalization and progress for the region’s 639 million inhabitants.
