Crack, Chaos, and Massacres

Abstract

It discusses how crack cocaine makes its appearance in these conflicted areas and deals with the growth in massacres (multiple homicides) that begin to happen in the late 1990s. The expansion of the retail drug sale points across peripheral communities, especially starting in the 1990s, was associated with the arrival of crack cocaine to Sao Paulo, which happened at the end of the 1980s and began to be widely sold the following decade. In an environment that already violently affected the lives of residents, especially youths, the arrival and expansion of crack sales increased the violence of conflicts. Crack sales served, thereby, to increase the sense of disorder—including within the criminal world—and to multiply the conflicts in the neighborhoods and the network of illegal activities, consequently increasing the number of homicides. But, rather than being perpetrators of violence, addicts in the 1990s were the preferred victims of killers. In the accounts of killers in São Paulo, “addicts” were seen as a sort of “inferior race,” a kind of “scourge that contaminates the environment” and as a result should be exterminated to avoid propagation.