Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro by Enrique Desmond Arias (review)

The Latin Arnericanist, Fall 2007 Indians were using asua, a home-brewed beer, in religious and daily social rituals long before the arrival of the Spaniards. Throughout the book she outlines the myriad nuances of festivals that clearly have a purpose and fit into a “logical” pattern once one understands the traditions and history of a particular event. What appears to the outsider as drunken and violent revelry, as in the case of certain festivals know as Corazas, is, in fact, full of elaborate symbolism, fully understood by the participants. Butler’s extraordinary access to the daily lives of Otavalefio families allows her to provide vivid descriptions. She was often invited to live with families and to participate in many events. Because of this trust, Butler is able to present the humanity of the people she studied, thus overcoming the temptation to reduce them to subjects of a social science experiment. The problem with this book is that it attempts to accomplish too much. The most interesting component of the work is the narrative of Indian life and the author’s interaction with the people. But, the author also presents her scholarship, which the general reader may find disruptive to the rich story she presents. On the other hand, academics may find her narratives distracting. Despite this drawback, the book would be of value to a course on the Andean Nations or as a supplementary reading for Modern Latin America. George M. Lauderbaugh Department of History IacksonvilleState University D R U G S AND DEMOCRACY IN RIO DE JANEIRO. By Enrique Desmond Arias. Chapel Hill: U North Carolina P, 2006, p. 304, $59.95 cloth, $22.50 paper. In the last twenty years, the Latin American countries (and especially Brazil) have suffered a recrudescence in criminal violence. One of the major puzzles in the field of Latin American politics is to explain why democratization has been accompanied by an increase in internal violence. The classical argument made by scholars interested in this subject is that the weak institutions of the state are impotent to fight against the strong criminal organizations, arising as a result of drug and small arms trafficking. As a consequence, “brown areas” emerge in the Latin American countries, in which the state institutions almost do not intervene. In this pathbreaking book, Enrique Desmond Arias presents a more complex, but also more accurate, view of the current state of violence in the region. Focusing on the criminal violence in Rio de Janeiro, the author advances an explanation that sheds light on the links between the drug traffickers, the civil organizations in thefavelas, and state actors (politicians,police).He argues that the violence in thefavelas does not result from an absence of the state but rather “from the way that the state is present” (192). Book Reviews From an ontological point of view, the author challenges the prevalent state-society vision and draws a more complex picture. On the one hand, he unpacks these units and shows that inside both state and civil society the elements that seek to control violence can be counterbalanced by other actors interested in maintaining relations with illegal actors. On the other hand, he argues convincingly that the traffickers can be classified neither as state actors nor as members of civil society, yet they possess characteristics of both. The core of his argument is that it is necessary to study how these hybrid actors interact with the institutions of state and civil society seeking to create conditions favorable to the continuation of their criminal activities in thefuvelas. In order to do that, Desmond Arias adopts an ethnographicand micro-level approach. His book is the fruit of several trips to Brazil between 1997 and 2005 where he conducted participant observation and interview research in threefuvelas.The three central chapters of the book present with a host of details the functioning of the criminal networks in thesefuvelus. This qualitative approach is clearly appropriate to study urban violence in Rio de Janeiro and bring to light the existence of criminal networks. The author attempts a comparative analysis in one of the last chapters of the book but here he is not as convincing. He presents the cases...