Book Chapter
Urban Violence, Quality of Life, and the Future of Latin American Cities

The depressing fact of growing violence across major cities in Latin America is hardly news to scholars and practitioners in the region. In recent years, the number of reports and publications devoted to violence or insecurity and their impact on urban quality of life has grown exponentially. Most of this work is hugely pessimistic, if not outright despairing, about the near intolerable urban conditions for large swathes of the urban population in Latin American cities. Even those whose scholarship is directed towards remedying these conditions are considerably humbled by the task at hand, given the interrelationships between violence, insecurity, un- and underemployment, and deteriorating quality of urban life, none of which can be easily reversed with conventional policy tools. This is not to say that efforts at reform have been entirely absent, or that scholars and policymakers in Latin America have not devoted considerable energy to formulating and/or implementing reform policies to reverse the problems of crime and insecurity. Recent work has highlighted the importance of concerted efforts to reform policing and the judicial system, as well as the importance of relying on financial or legal support from multilateral agencies and international human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) fighting impunity and insecurity. Calls for reforms or policy changes to accelerate the arrest capacities or crime-fighting activities of federal agents and the local police have been equally popular. Finally, the crafting and advocacy of community-level programmes that build local capacities to hold police and governments responsible, that educate citizens about their rights and responsibilities, and that offer new forms of citizen monitoring of criminal behaviour have also garnered widespread policy attention and support in recent years (Moser 2004; Arias and Rodrigues 2006).