The social accumulation of violence in brazil: some remarks
The social accumulation of violence in brazil: some remarks

Summary/Abstract: Since the 1980s, a long historic and social process has transformed Rio de Janeiro, the so-called “Marvelous City”that enchanted the world in the 1940s, ‘50s and’60s, into a city presented in the international media as one of the world’s most violent. How was this possible? What took place for this transformation to occur and produce effects that remain until today, more than thirty years later? The objective of this article is to examine some hypotheses for the advance of violence based on the use of firearms in Rio de Janeiro. These hypotheses are combined in the conception of a “social accumulationof violence,”which the author has been developing in his work.1–5 This process began in Rio de Janeiro and has spread to all large or medium Brazilian cities from the Brazilian South to Northeast, although recently there are important inflections in some Southeastern states. In the past twenty years, nearly one million people have been murdered in Brazil, most of them young. A diffuse violence accompanies these deaths, migrating from city to city, from one region of the country to another, with no significant decline in the national statistics.

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