Chismosas y Alcahuetas: Being the mother of anempistoladowithin the everyday armed violence of a Caracas barrio[1]
Verónica Zubillaga[2], Manuel Llorens[3], and John Souto[4]
We met Doris after hearing about a group of women from historically marginalized sectors —La Quinta and Portillo— of a larger barrio known as Catuche, situated in the northern part of Caracas, not far from Miraflores, the Presidential Palace. These women had formed “peace commissions” and had negotiated a ceasefire pact with youth in their neighborhoods. Doris was the community coordinator placed by the religious educational organization Fe y Alegría to support and ensure the daily functioning of the Comisiones de Paz de Catuche.
We learned that the peace commissions were formed after a long night of shooting confrontations between the youths from La Quinta and Portillo. Hundreds of young men had already been killed in this historic confrontation and that night another young man was killed in Portillo. It was his mother, Ana, who took the initiative to call and gather her women neighbors to “do something to stop the killings.” Every time we spoke about that night, Ana was visibly moved and her retelling of the event was always accompanied by her tears: “It was horrible the death of my son. Because that night when he died, I saw the boys as they cried, shouted, and when we took him to the hospital, the boys were punching the wall. I stood, and seeing all this, being in all this pain, and seeing them around crying, screaming, I left. And then at the funeral, crying, I said: 'This cannot continue! We have to fight! We ourselves! We cannot let another death to happen over there!”.
When the word got around to the young men of La Quinta that Ana, the mother of the young man murdered in Portillo, had called upon the women of her sector and pleaded not for revenge but that they go up to La Quinta to talk, they answered: ‘they don’t need to talk to us, they need to talk to the viejas chismosas[5]. It is a phrase that carries different meanings, but in any case it was taken at face value and the petition to talk was delivered to the women of La Quinta and not to the men. It was then that the women, specifically the mothers, took on the challenge to listen, talk and negotiate a series of agreements that led to the creation of the peace commissions —Comisiones de Paz— or Comisiones de Convivencia[6] de Catuche.
Ana and her fellow women called upon Doris and Janeth, both from Fe y Alegría, to mediate between the two communities, and after they each got together with both groups of neighbors, they decided to take the risk and make a meeting. “We were very scared, it was a huge responsibility!” remembered Doris and continued: “That night, they said here, they said there, but what people from Portillo were saying, was the same as what the people from La Quinta were saying. The same needs: 'We are tired of putting mattresses on our heads! We are tired of running away! We are tired of not being able to be outside! We are tired of having to call our families whenever we get to our homes! Stop it! And at the end, they cried, they hugged each other, they talked. That meeting was overwhelmingly moving ”.
From this meeting on they decided to install the Comisiones de Convivencia —six women in Portillo and seven women in La Quinta— and they engaged in an agreement that was approved during an assembly. They summoned the young men, many of whom were their own sons and nephews, and they also committed to the pact, which obliged them to avoid challenges which triggered armed confrontations. For example, they swore not to provoke their rivals with signs (flashlights or laser lights)[7] and avoid mutual provocations such as crossing the borders of their barrio at night, all which normally ended in shootouts. Residents recovered freedom of movement across sectors. Women and young men agreed that all trouble among them should be channeled through the commissions, which would serve as containment groups. They also explicitly approved that no one should display or threaten others with a gun. Anyone who failed to comply with the pact agreements would be called upon and confronted in the commission, and ultimately would be denounced by both committees to the police. Each commission started to meet every week in their sector, and they met once a month with their neighbor commission. They could also convoke emergency get-togethers whenever the youth threatened to break the pact, as they did many times.
As residents ourselves of Caracas, a city whose homicide rate is one of the highest of the world,[8] we felt compelled to research and analyze the web of social processes that made the pact possible.[9] But as we advanced in our research we perceived among the women a constant state of uneasiness, a permanent grief, a subterraneous grudge. These women were in the Peace Commissions and they had, indeed, succeeded in ending this unrelenting chain of deaths. However, it started to become evident for us during our research that they were also key agents in stocking the hateful linkages that reproduced an ever present and contingent violence in the neighborhood. Thus, we began to ask ourselves: How can we understand this feminine participation in the cycle of violence in the barrio?
What we are going to report here is the experience of a group of women who live in a Caracas barrio that is characterized by a state of warfare. In particular, we will discuss the experiences of being mothers of armed youth in the context of Bolivarian Venezuela,[10] where 144,000 violent killings were officially registered as homicides between 1999 and 2012. Social alarm, thus, over the state of violence and the massive availability of handguns is high.
Through the daily experiences of these women, we want to highlight the contradictions of living in the current Bolivarian Venezuela. On the one hand, inequalities, poverty and political exclusion are issues that are constantly raised and attacked in Chavismo’s political discourses and policies. Yet, on the other hand, social suffering generated by the deaths of young men killed with handguns, either by their peers or by the police in their neighborhoods, and the mourning that follows have to be considered as tightly tied to the State’s dereliction of pacification.
Given this context, we are interested in understanding how these structural factors shape and impact barrio residents’ daily lives. We are especially interested in the lives of women; in comprehending their experiences and their roles, specifically as mothers, in the dynamics of violence in Catuche; and the ways they are capable of both reducing and reproducing violence. With a particular focus on the lives of women, we ask: How do these factors emerge in the daily experiences of barrio residents, reproducing violence and generating conflict between families? How do these women deal with chronic violence and the constant presence of guns in their neighborhoods?
Traditionally social science research on urban violence has largely relied upon a male-centered reading (Gay, 2005; Koonings, and Veenstra, 2007). Robert Gay (2005), who provided a rare testimony of a woman linked with the drug world in Río de Janeiro, precisely underscores the need to understand the complexity of violence and inequality in Latin American cities, emerging from a point of view that is sensitive to female perspectives and experiences. Indeed, young males are not the only subjects of violence. There are also the mothers, sisters and partners who are forced to live through the whirlwinds of violence with them. This female participation, nevertheless, is a topic that is not taken into account and is scarcely treated in the literature. Understanding the complexities of violence implies being sensitive and understanding other logics of action that are associated with female’s participation. Understanding how violence operates requires that we pay attention to how women both contribute to and challenge violence in their daily contexts.
First, we will argue that the Bolivarian government’s social investments and social programs have undoubtedly helped improve people’s life conditions considerably, improving Venezuela’s life quality indicators such as poverty and health. Yet, a close look at the barrios from an ethnographic perspective reveals that in Bolivarian Venezuela the barrios, like in other poor urban conglomerations in Latin America, continue to represent urban spaces where residents experience the accumulation of structural disadvantages and conditions that generate tensions and social unrest among neighbors. In the second and third part we will discuss the everyday state of warfare that is perpetuated by a profusion of arms and a chronic lack of justice. In the fourth part, we focus on women’s experience of being mothers and how they deal with the helplessness and the general blame they carry with them. And finally, in the fifth part we will discuss how families, and especially mothers, participate in the transmission of hatred, unwittingly compelling their sons and nephews to take revenge, thus preventing an end to the armed conflicts.
The research on which this text is based was carried out between November 2009 and July 2012. In this period, we went every week to the two neighboring La Quinta y Portillo in the Catuche barrio. We also performed 11 sessions of group discussions (five sessions in one barrio neighborhood and six sessions in the other neighborhood) with the 13 women of the Comisiones de Paz; 2 sessions of group discussions were also held with the youth of one neighborhood, where on a weekly basis we discussed the events that took place in their community. Additionally, one of the researchers was permanently working in the community as a psychologist with Doris. We also carried out in-depth interviews with each of the 13 women of the Commissions. We conducted in-depth interviews with nine young men from one barrio and one interview with a young man from the other community. During this period we had frequent conversations with Doris, who accompanied us in our reflections and with whom we were forging and validating our interpretive insights. Also, we had several sessions of "sharings" —compartires— where we partook in meals together with the women. Finally, as we were preparing our interpretations we also carried out validation sessions with each group of women, in which we presented our understandings and we read together what we were producing to incorporate their concerns and suggestions.
Still searching for a place to live: How the structural disadvantages in the Barrio generate social unrest among families
Even though the social programs known as Misiones Sociales[11] have helped improve people’s life conditions considerably—mainly by increasing their income, consumption capacity and health condition— the barrios, like other poor urban conglomerations in Latin-America, continue to represent urban spaces whose residents experience the accumulation of structural disadvantages and dereliction (Auyero, Burbano de Lara and Berti, 2014). The right to be part of the city in terms of proper housing remains a social debt that the Bolivarian state holds with its citizens, implicating the State in the permanent tension and social unrest that permeates social relations in Catuche (Auyero, 2007; Wacquant, 2007). Caracas, like many other Latin American cities, arose with notorious divisions between the urban areas where the middle and upper class sectors are settled in the “urbanizaciones” and the poor in the “barrios.” The latter represent spaces of self-construction and silent struggles where those excluded from wealthier areas attempt to improve life conditions in the midst of relegation (Bayat, 2000) and where self-help strategies and favor exchanges among family groups continue to be paramount tools to deal with adversity vis-a-vis the lack of support of private and public institutions (Adler de Lomnitz, 1975; Gonzáles de la Rocha, 1999). By 1990 barrio residents in Caracas made up 40% of the city’s population; the current estimation puts this number at 50% (Cilento, 2008).[12]
During the two and a half years that we visited these communities, regular tension and disputes related to lack of housing were particularly salient. Families continue to grow and facing the pressing need for housing, invasions and self-constructed homes continue to expand. In Catuche, a well-established barrio, invasions still bring about a lot of agitation and anxiety for older residents. In a context with widespread use of guns this can generate explosive situations.
Virginia, one of the women who took part in the peace commissions and the mother of one of the respected drug dealers in the barrio, was particularly frustrated while we worked there: a grouping of land invasions were built next to her house and hindered the entrance of the garbage disposal trucks. We had a conversation with her and her sister Maritza about this issue. During the conversation they were talkative as usual but exhausted by the issue:
Maritza: “15 days ago, more or less, the issue of the garbage. We had an ugly quarrel down there, and we almost punched each other —nos torteamos— because we are not going to leave either. We had a meeting; everything was on hold because one of the women that was in the peace commission, was invading up here in this area. They were invading everywhere, and then we had the problem of garbage, then we said, the boys here said: if they keep the garbage truck from coming in, we will throw the containers into the creek, and everything will explode! And we were in the peace commision meeting, and she [the woman that was part of the invasion] was saying that she felt attacked! And then Virginia said: Well, look, I'm going to say one thing, if this mess cannot be solved, if the truck cannot go by, this is going to blow up!”