VIOLENCE

Using a focus on the ways that Covid-19 has impacted everyday life in urban Latin America, this article examines the shifting activities of organized criminal groups in the context of a global pandemic. Using grounded ethnographic fieldwork drawn from Brazil, it asks whether a health crisis with direct life and death consequences has empowered illicit actors, and by so doing changed longstanding relationships between illicit actors and citizens on one hand, and/or illicit actors and local authorities on the other. Its larger aim is to understand whether and how the global pandemic has impacted governance by producing new scalar and sovereignty tensions between state and non-state actors at the scale of the city, and with what implications for the legitimacy of national authorities and democratic governance more generally.

This article analyses the repertoire of individual strategies utilised by domestic workers to resist routinised workplace violence in the cities of São Paulo and Ilhéus, Brazil. Findings suggest that domestic workers favour two strategies of resistance: exit (quitting work without prior notice) and voice (negotiating workplace conditions). The latter strategy is divided into two subtypes: voice-pleading (appealing to decency) and voice-confrontation (warning and rights-claiming). Voice strategies appear more effective than exit in ameliorating patterns of chronic workplace violence, particularly when they incorporate labour rights claims and when emotional ties exist between workers and employers.

This Special Issue results from two panels organised for the 2018 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in Barcelona: ‘Informal and Precarious Labour After the Pink Tide: New Challenges and Emerging Responses’ and ‘Exploring the Repertoire of Everyday Forms of Resistance to Routinised Violence in Informal Workplaces’.

In 2018, the world knew about the story of Marielle Franco, the Brazilian city councillor brutally murdered in Rio de Janeiro. On March 14, the car in which Marielle was travelling received 14 shots, killing the councillor (with four bullets in the head) and Anderson Gomes, who was driving the car. Investigations to date indicate that the projectiles with which Marielle and Anderson were shot were purchased by the Brazilian Federal Police.

Discussion on feminist philosopher Judith Butler s trip to Brazil in a conservative context

Late one night in Quito, Ecuador, two women were held in the office of a jail. One, a pregnant local woman with dark hair and skin, had been found in possession of a drawer full of watches.

Este livro é resultado do workshop “Clientelismo e Violência na América Latina e no Caribe”, realizado em dezembro de 2013, na Universidade de Carleton, Ottawa, Canadá.