Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2022
The observation that redemocratization in Latin America is a fragile process has become a commonplace in the social science literature of the past few years. The social movements crucial to the return of procedural democracy have, we are told, lost their momentum to the very forces they helped to restore. Electoral democracy has returned in many places with neoclientelistic overtones that are eroding the gains in consciousness achieved in the nonelectoral years (Hagopian 1993). The absence of a common enemy, most often an authoritarian military regime, has tended to mask less visible but often equally pernicious enemies in the form of violence that is nonofficial but tolerated nonetheless (Pinheiro 1992). And although procedural democratic practices may have returned for the middle classes, nothing inherent in the transition to democracy guarantees either procedural or substantive democracy for the lower classes (Huggins, ed., 1991; O'Donnell 1992; Fox 1994a).
This article is part of a larger study on the relationship between squatters and the state in Brazil. Research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council in an Advanced Grant on Latin America and the Caribbean, the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in an institutional grant to the Center for International Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the office of the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at MIT. Interviews were carried out with government officials, community leaders in twenty-five favelas, and inmates in three prisons in Rio in 1987–1988, 1989, 1991, 1994, and 1995. I would like to thank my research assistant Maria Severa da Silva, community leaders, and especially those associated with the Centro de Direitos Humanos Bento Rubião for their many hours of sharing experiences and insights. For obvious reasons, they must remain anonymous. I would also like to thank Martha Huggins, Susan Eckstein, and Mick Moore as well as the anonymous LARR reviewers for perceptive comments on earlier drafts of this article.