A new geography of conflict: slum wars of Nicaragua

Despite the end of civil wars that plagued Central America in previous decades, violence continues to affect the region. Some reports highlight the fact that violence now occurs as crime rather than ideologically-motivated political violence. Others emphasise the shift from countryside to city: the ‘slum wars’ of Nicaragua demonstrate a continuation of past struggles throughout Central America.

The region’s conflicts may have been resolved formally, but violence in Central America is, in many ways, much worse than before. People are, however, arguably subject to violence of a more social than political nature. This is often related to a crisis of governance.

A paper from the Crisis States Research Centre, in the UK, uses the example of Nicaragua to conceptualise this shift in Central America in terms of a changed geography of brutality.

Nicaragua’s Sandinistas came to power in 1979 after two decades of a primarily rural guerrilla struggle. The Contra war that broke out in the early 1980s was also largely rural. The end of war in 1990, however, shifted the geography of conflict. Demobilised guerrillas became active in both countryside and city, causing many civilian casualties.

These groups declined in importance by the mid-1990s but urban crime increased greatly. According to official statistics, the number of crimes between 1990 and 2004 quadrupled. Crimes against persons (including murders, rapes and assaults) rose by over 460 percent.

Most people identified youth gangs as the problem, particularly in the capital Managua. They link the emergence of these gangs to factors such as urbanisation and the weaker social relations that are considered characteristic of cities.

The author explains the shift differently, as a movement from ‘peasant wars’ to ‘urban wars’:

• The rural foundations of the Sandinista revolution were characteristic of the peasant revolts of the twentieth century, as reactions to social dislocations driven by the market.
• Although urbanisation and weaker social relations in cities influenced the movement of post-revolutionary brutality to the city, contemporary urban violence is mainly a function of unequal economic and political relations.
• Urban violence is centred on the slums, which can be seen as volatile sites of exclusion rather than a reserve of labour for a formal economy that is increasingly trans-national.

Despite the negative effects of youth gang violence in the Managua slums, up to the mid-1990s, gangs also bonded local communities. Most of their violence was directed externally. But their very existence had critical consequences for the city. In response, elites sponsored the building of networks of ‘safe havens’, protected by high walls and private security, connected by high-speed roads, in order to isolate themselves from widespread crime. The cityscape and social relations within it have been fundamentally altered.

To this extent, current violence in Nicaragua is arguably a continuation of the rural-based social warfare of the country’s past, but simply in a new geographical context:

• Elites have isolated themselves from the slum dwellers for whom they have no economic use; state security deals with the latter in increasingly violent ways to maintain segregation between rich and poor people.
• The elites’ strategic neglect has led to a worsening of gang violence in the slums, now overtaken by the drug economy and separated from any sense of local identification, as gangs deploy violence exclusively for their own benefit.
• The notion of ‘urbicide’, defined as ‘the deliberate wrecking or killing of the city’, is an apt reflection of the process of social warfare between rich and poor that characterises twenty-first century urban Nicaragua.

Source(s):
‘Slum Wars of the 21st Century: the New Geography of Conflict in Central America’, Crisis States Research Centre Working Paper No.10, LSE: London, by Dennis Rodgers, 2007 (PDF) Full document.
‘A symptom called Managua’, New Left Review, 49 (January-February), pages 103-120, by Dennis Rodgers, 2008 Full document.
‘Disembedding the city: Crime, insecurity, and spatial organisation in Managua, Nicaragua’, Environment and Urbanization, 16 (2), pages 113-124, by Dennis Rodgers, 2004 Full document.

Funded by: UK Department for International Development (R8488)

id21 Research Highlight: 27 April 2008

Further Information:
Dennis Rodgers
Brooks World Poverty Institute
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester, M13 9PL
UK

Tel: +44 161 3066694
Fax: +44 161 3066428
Contact the contributor: dennis.rodgers@manchester.ac.uk

Brooks World Poverty Institute, University of Manchester, UK

Crisis States Research Centre
London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street, London
London WC2A 2AE
UK

Tel: +44 20 7844631
Fax: +44 20 79556421
Contact the contributor: d.w.rodgers@lse.ac.uk

Crisis States Programme, London School of Economics, UK

Further details about this research project ‘Crisis States Research Centre - Phase 2’ can be found on the DFID Research for Development website

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