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 16th February 08 - Raúl Zibechi, Nacla News
Urban peripheries in Third World countries have become war zones where states attempt to maintain order based on the establishment of a sort of “sanitary cordon” to keep the poor isolated from “normal” society.
“Army sources confirmed that techniques employed in the occupation of the Morro da Providéncia favela [slum] are the ones Brazilian soldiers use in the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Haiti.”1
This admission by Brazilian armed forces largely explains the interest
of Lula da Silva’s government in keeping that country’s troops on the
Caribbean island: to test, in the poor neighborhoods of Haiti’s
capital, Port-au-Prince, containment strategies designed for
application in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and other large
cities.
But the news published by the daily Estadão de São Paulo goes farther
in revealing the military’s modus operandi. The commander of the 9th
Motorized Infantry Brigade in Haiti, William Soares, directed the
occupation of Morro da Providéncia by 200 soldiers, who installed
machineguns on “the community’s only plaza, transformed into a military
base,” which were later withdrawn in order to facilitate a dialogue
with the population. In the meeting with the Residents Association
[Asociación de Pobladores], General Soares “promised projects, a
Christmas party with gifts for the children, a vacation camp, film
screenings, medical, and sanitation assistance.”
According to the newspaper, “in exchange, the Army is gathering
information on the slum and its inhabitants. Soldiers filmed and
photographed the meeting and the entire troop deployment.” General
Soares made all those promises in order to “diffuse the revolt by
community leaders against the social project programmed for the slum.”
Urban Poor as a Threat
Urban theorist Mike Davis analyzes urban peripheral areas in terms of a
commitment to social change. A single sentence synthesizes his
analysis: “It’s the slum peripheries of poor Third World cities that
have become a decisive geopolitical space.”2 He asserts that Pentagon
strategists are lending great importance to urban planning theory and
architecture, since the peripheries are “one of the most challenging
terrains for future wars and other imperialist projects.”
In fact, a study by the United Nations estimates that one billion
people live in peripheral neighborhoods outside Third World cities and
that the poor in the largest cities in the world number some two
billion, that is, a third of all human beings. These statistics will
double within the next 15 or 20 years, and “all future growth of the
world’s population will occur in cities, 95% of it in cities of the
Global South and the majority in slums.”3
The situation is much more serious than the numbers indicate:
urbanization, as Davis explains, has become disconnected and autonomous
from industrialization as well as from economic development, which
implies the “structural and permanent disconnection of so many city
dwellers from the formal world economy.” On the other hand, he notes
that, “over the last decade … the poor—and not just the poor in
classical urban neighborhoods [with high levels of organization]—but …
this new poor, on the fringes of the city, have begun organizing
themselves massively … whether that’s Sadr, in Iraq, or an equivalent
slum-based social movement in Buenos Aires.”4
In Latin America the main challenges to elite domination have arisen in
the heart of poor urban areas—from the 1989 “Caracazo” riots to the
Oaxaca Commune in 2006. Proof of this are the popular uprisings in
Asunción in March 1999, Quito in February 1997 and January 2000, Lima
and Cochabamba in April 2000, Buenos Aires in December 2001, and El
Alto in February and October 2003, just to name the most relevant cases.
Even more, urban peripheries are spaces from which subaltern groups
have launched the most formidable challenges to the system, becoming a
sort of popular counter-powers. Davis is right: control of the urban
poor is the most important objective planned by governments, global
financial organisms, and the armed forces of the most important
countries.
Many large Latin American cities seem to border at times on social
explosion, and several have erupted over the past two decades for
various reasons. Fear among the powerful appears to point in two
directions: postpone or make unviable the explosion or insurrection,
and, also, avoid the consolidation of those “black holes” outside state
control, where the main challenges to the elites occur.
New Military Strategies
In recent years, publications on military thought as well as analyses
by financial organisms have dedicated ample space to challenges
presented by gangs and to debates on new problems arising from urban
war. The concepts of “asymmetrical war” and “fourth generation war” are
responses to problems identical to those created by Third World urban
peripheries: the birth of a new type of warfare against non-state
enemies, in which military superiority does not play a decisive role.
William S. Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism of
the Free Congress Foundation, asserts that the state has lost its
monopoly on war and elites feel that “dangers” are multiplying. “Almost
everywhere, the state is losing.”5 Despite supporting pull-out from
Iraq as soon as possible, Lind defends “total war,” which engages
enemies on all fronts: economic, cultural, social, political,
communications, and also military.
A good example of this full-spectrum war is his belief that the dangers
for United States hegemony lie in all aspects of daily life, or, if you
prefer, in life itself. For example, he believes that “in Fourth
Generation War, invasion by immigration can be at least as dangerous as
invasion by a state army.” New problems rooted in the “universal crisis
of the legitimacy of the state” have “non-state enemies” at the center.
This leads him to conclude with a double warning to military leaders:
no state military has succeeded against a non-state enemy.
This problem is at the heart of new military modalities of thinking,
which must be completely reformulated to face challenges that used to
correspond to “civilian” areas of the state apparatus. Militarization
of society in order to regain control of urban peripheries is not
enough, as revealed in recent military experience in the Third World.
Military commanders deployed in Iraq seem to be clearly aware of the
problems they must face. Cavalry Division Commander General Peter W.
Chiarelli, based on his recent experience on the outskirts of Baghdad
in Sadr City, maintains that security is the long-term objective, but
it will not be achieved through military action alone. “Executing
traditionally focused combat operations … works, but only for the short
term. In the long term, doing so hinders true progress and, in reality,
promotes the growth of insurgent forces working against campaign
objectives.”6
This implies that the two traditional armed forces lines of
operation—combat and the training of local security forces—are
insufficient. Therefore, three “nontraditional” lines of operation
should be undertaken; ones that previously corresponded to the
government and civil society: essential services provided to the
population, building a legitimate government, and empowering “economic
pluralism,” that is, a market economy.
With infrastructure repair projects they attempt to improve the
situation of the poorest sector of the population and, at the same
time, create employment opportunities to send visible signs of
progress. In the second place, creating a “democratic” regime is
considered an essential point for legitimizing the whole process. For
United States commanders in Iraq, the “point of penetration” of their
troops occurred with the Jan. 30, 2005 elections. In strategic thought
democracy was reduced to producing a vote.
Finally, the recruitment ability of the insurgents can be reduced
through the expansion of market logic, “by ‘gentrifying’ city centers
and creating business parks,” that become a dynamic sector stimulating
the rest of society.7 From then on, the poor population in urban
peripheries becomes, in military jargon, “the strategic and operational
center of gravity.”
This combination of mechanisms is what the major global powers’ armed
forces today consider the means to achieve “true long-term security.”
In this way, “democracy,” expansion of services, and a market economy
will cease being citizens’ rights or morally desirable objectives and
become gears in a strategy of military control over a population or a
region of the world and, of course, its resources.
Security and Cooperation: Two Faces of a Strategy
Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States Agency
for International Development (USAID) “has played an increasingly
prominent role in the War on Terrorism.”8 U.S. development programs are
not directed toward the population that most needs them, but rather to
the most “at-risk populations and regions,” according to Pentagon
strategy.
For military strategists like U.S. Army Colonel (Ret.) Thomas Baltazar,
USAID programs “can play a crucial role in denying terrorists sanctuary
and financing by diminishing the underlying conditions that cause local
populations to become vulnerable to terrorist recruitment. Moreover,
USAID programs directed at strengthening effective and legitimate
governance are recognized as key tools with which to address
counterinsurgency.”
The Pentagon’s strategy is to assure security for the United States,
and to this end, it uses “democracy” and “development assistance” as
complements to military operations. The U.S. National Security Strategy
maintains that “development reinforces diplomacy and defense, reducing
long-term threats to our national security by helping to build stable,
prosperous, and peaceful societies.”9
It seems necessary to emphasize that international cooperation,
development aid, and the war against poverty—some of the favorite
slogans of the World Bank and other financial agencies—are merely
strategies to control and subordinate the population that is
“potentially” rebellious or resistant to the objectives of U.S.
multinationals. The Pentagon’s analysis of African reality, according
to Colonel Baltazar, identified “the causes of extremism,” highlighting
among others the existence of “large marginalized and/or
disenfranchised populations, and exclusion from political processes, as
key causes of instability in the region.”
Electoral democracy and development are necessary to prevent terrorism,
but they are not objectives in and of themselves. In countries with
weak states and high concentrations of urban poor, the armed forces
move to take the place of the sovereign government, reconstruct the
state, and in a totally vertical and authoritarian manner, initiate
mechanisms to assure the continuation of domination.
In Iraq, these policies have their obverse and complement in the
building of large walls to separate neighborhoods in Baghdad. According
to writer and Arab expert Santiago Alba Rico, the construction of walls
in 10 neighborhoods in the Iraq capital is intended to turn each into
“an armored closet whose inhabitants are filed away or abandoned in
locked drawers and sealed enclosures.”10
The logic is simple: “Neighborhoods that have not been crushed
militarily are walled, enclosed, and abandoned to their luck. Complete
areas of the city have been demarcated and segregated with inhabitants
confined inside, subjected to entry and exit controls so ironclad that
we can speak without hesitation of a ghetto policy.”
Other parts of the world are not lacking in cement walls to isolate and
separate peripheral neighborhoods. Symbolic walls are fabricated
according to differences in color, dress, and ways of occupying space.
But the results and objectives are identical. Control
mechanisms—whether dressed in military garb, or as NGOs for
development, or promoting market economy and electoral democracy—are
interlaced and, in extreme cases like the suburbs of Baghdad, the slums
of Rio de Janeiro, or the shanty towns of Port-au-Prince, they are
subordinated to military planning.
In Brazil, to give just one example, different forms of control are
simultaneously applied: the “Zero Hunger” government plan is compatible
with the militarization of the slums.
In his reflection on Nazism in “On the Concept of History,” German
writer Walter Benjamin declared that “the tradition of the oppressed
teaches us that the state of exception in which we live is the rule.”
United States policy since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, fits the
concept of a “state of permanent exception.” The “state of exception,”
which suspends civil rights and militarizes areas and complete nations,
is applied in an indiscriminate way to different situations and for
different reasons, from internal political problems to external
threats, from an economic emergency to a natural disaster.
In effect, the state of exception was applied in situations such as the
Argentine economic-financial crisis that burst into a broad social
movement in December 2001, the response to Hurricane Katrina in New
Orleans, and the containment of the rebellion by poor immigrants in the
peripheries of French cities in 2005. The common thread, beyond
circumstances and countries, is that in every case it is applied in
order to contain the urban poor.
Raúl Zibechi is an international analyst for Brecha, a weekly journal
in Montevideo, Uruguay, professor and researcher on social movements at
the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to social
groups. Translated for the Americas Program by Maria Roof. He is a
monthly contributor to the Americas Policy Program
(www.americaspolicy.org), where this article was first published.
Link to original source
Notes:
1. Pedro Dantas, “Exército admite uso de tática do Haiti em favela do
Rio,” Estadão de Hoje (São Paulo), 15 Dec. 2007, www.estado.com.br.
2. Mike Davis, interview with Geoff Manaugh, posted May 22, 2006,
bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/interview-with-mike-davis-part-1.html.
“Los suburbios de las ciudades del tercer mundo son el nuevo escenario
geopolítico decisivo,” posted 2 Mar. 2007, www.rebelion.org.
3. Mike Davis, “Mike Davis on a Planet of Slums,” interview posted 24
June 2006, www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=9073. “La
pobreza urbana y la lucha contra el capitalismo,” trans. Camila
Vollenweider, posted 25 June 2006, www.sinpermiso.info.
4. Davis, interview.
5. William S. Lind, “Understanding Fourth Generation War,” Military Review, Sept.-Oct. 2004, pp. 12-16, p. 13.
6. Peter W. Chiarelli (Major General, U.S. Army) and Patrick R.
Michaelis (Major, U.S. Army), “Winning the Peace: The Requirement for
Full-Spectrum Operations,” Military Review, July-Aug. 2005, pp. 4-17,
p. 15.
7. Chiarelli and Michaelis, 13.
8. Cited in homas Baltazar (Colonel, U.S. Army, Retired) and Elisabeth
Kvitashvili, “The Role of USAID and Development Assistance in Combating
Terrorism,” Military Review, Mar.-Apr. 2007, pp. 38-40, p. 38.
9. Baltazar and Kvitashvili, 38.
10. Santiago Alba Rico, “Emparedar a la resistencia,” Diagonal, Madrid,
16 May 2007, www.diagonalperiodico.net/article3854.html.
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