Tropic of Chaos_ Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence - Christian Parenti [81]
Academic analyses of Rio’s gangs often note the absence or failure of state institutions. Others, most notably Enrique Desmond Arias, argue that the criminal structures in the favelas bring together gangsters, police, community leaders, and mainstream politicians in a matrix of mutually beneficial relations. Such an arraignment, essentially the criminalization of the local state, has evolved out of the crisis of neoliberalism.37 To the extent that Arias is correct, criminality in the favelas becomes a matter less of state withdrawal and more of societal rot—a whole society infected by the gangrene of sub-rosa economics, corruption and violence.
Nordeste
The red flag of revolution whips in the hot wind atop a roughhewn pole. Below it sits a small squatter camp where poor farmers occupy land belonging to a distant and wealthy rancher. Welcome to the hot scrublands of the Nordeste and the tiny village of Boqueirão in Brazil’s Ceará Province. The village sits on a dusty one-lane track at the bottom of a long valley, hemmed in on either side by looming mountains of dark, barren rock. If you look on Google Maps, Boqueirão is, roughly, due north of Iracuba, which sits on the road BR 222. The long valley shows up like a pale scar amidst the dark hills.
On one side of the road is the village of solid little whitewashed homes, with smooth cement floors and red-tile roofs. On the other side is the camp of peasant activists, members of the landless people’s movement Movimento dos Trabalhadore Rurais Sem Terra (MST). The MST is a social movement of some 370,000 people organized in more than 1,000 communities across Brazil. Their objective is simple: redistribute land to hungry farmers. And in the last twenty years they’ve had remarkable success. Their methods are also simple: move in and start using the land. That is what is happening here. The MST cadres have used heavy black plastic and wood to build two long, collective shacks called barracos, or “barracks.” One is for cooking, eating, and meeting; the other, strung with hammocks, is for sleeping. The camp is never left unoccupied.
Drought Land
The Nordeste is semiarid, receiving very little rain. Severe floods punctuate its frequent droughts. In 1877 to 1879, a catastrophic drought killed more than five hundred thousand people and sent the rural Northeast into political crisis. 38 Now, fear of drought is etched in the region’s culture. For example, in parts of Ceará, the year traditionally ended with drought-prediction rituals. On December 13, the eve of St. Luzia’s Day, an old man would set six pieces of rock salt out on a banana leaf, each piece representing a month of the upcoming rainy season. The following morning, the salt pieces that had melted away in the dew symbolized the months of the coming season that would receive rain. The farmer who explained this tradition to me also said, “It doesn’t seem to work well anymore.” In any event, research indicates that the drought cycle “has become more frequent over the last century, with five droughts recorded during the current decade.”39
The rainy season in Ceará runs from January to June, with much variability in duration, timing, and intensity and between localities. The rain is delivered as the Intertropical Convergence Zone moves to its southernmost position.40 A study in the Journal of Applied Meteorology finds that sea surface temperatures are the primary factor responsible for “the interannual variability of rainfall in northeast Brazil,” meaning among other things that droughts “tend to coincide with the warm phase of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) episodes.”41
More broadly, regional studies of temperature trends in the region “show changes that are in line with expected warming, most notably warmer nights.” The majority of climate models find that northeast Brazil “is expected to experience more rapid warming than the global average during the 21st century.” Depending on the model and the potential