Gangues na perifería: necropolítica, cultura do terror e violência no Caribe Colombiano

Abstract

The purpose of this text is to explore the emergence of gangs and the dynamics of their violence in the peripheries of Petrópolis. Through an ethnography that lasted about three years of field work, I describe in-depth the different ways in which this violence manifests itself, its scope and the development of what I affirm it contributes to create: the social bases of criminality in the Colombian Caribbean. To achieve this purpose, I analyze the life trajectories of gang members, ex-gang members, community leaders and common people, who have directly or indirectly been involved in this urban vio-lence. Having ever been a victim or perpetrators of that dynamic, I describe the latent validity of a culture of post-colonial terror; cultural capital (criminal capital) inherited or/& incorporated by young people through direct experience with street culture and the contemporary crime world of the periphery. Moreover, I describe the way in which forms of resistance against that terror are self-managed; illegitimate collective actions, but legitimized by the community as it has been the case of the Cívica, a security or-ganization that simulates on a smaller scale the mechanics of intervention of the para-military armies in Colombia, acting in parallel or behind the State institutions. This re-search is located in a small area (La Villa) of one of the poorest neighborhoods (Ar-rabal), violent and with a greater proportion of Afro-Caribbean population. My hypothe-sis tries to establish a relationship between the emergence of gangs, their forms of vio-lence and the historical effects of a sociopolitical marginalization (structural violence) that is reflected sociologically; in an asymmetric social distribution of space, labor pre-cariousness and ethnic/racial segregation, especially damaging the lives of young-sters, increasing their uncontrolled fury against the community and the rest of Petrópo-lis. All of the above, I sustain it is based on the assembly of a system of necropolitical power that crosses socioanthropologically the daily life of a marginally advanced population.