Interfaces da vida loka: Um estudo sobre jovens, tráfico de drogas e violência em São Paulo

Abstract

Drug trafficking is recognized by the Public Health as one of the main factors of risk and vulnerability that young Brazilians are exposed to, at least since the 1980s. This study aims to describe and analyze the daily lives of young people (15-29 years) living in the urban periphery – the poor neighborhoods – of Sao Paulo City, where there is coincidence between the retail trade of illicit drugs on their streets next to neighborhood relations, and on the other hand the intensive forces of repression combined with care and attention of the government. A neighborhood in Sao Paulo City and another in a city surrounding the metropolis were thus identified and chosen in order that the study was conducted. Altogether twenty-seven young persons participated in the study based on ethnographic method. The researcher stayed for two years (2009 and 2010) following the daily lives of young people in two poor neighborhoods conducting in-depth interviews with study participants. In the field research, the environment of drug trafficking was characterized by the juxtaposition of three levels of knowledge and power: a territorial dimension, symbolic and existential – a ‘quebrada (urban ghetto)’; a market environment – drug trafficking – that practices trigger and also inserted in a ‘discursive parameter’ – the ‘criminal world’, and a political system designed to meet adolescents ‘offenders’, organizer of discourses and technologies of crime and drugs – the social-educational system. The paper aims the manifestations of power in the action of a diversity of young people, in the reiterated action and in the language that outline ways of life made in the ‘dobraduras’ (folds) of the drug trafficking. These ‘youths from the periphery’ navigate in a complex social dynamic, fluid and porous and, in the anonymity of the (non) political space they occupy, they relate themselves to ‘laws’ variety – from state, from crime, from streets. The ‘vida loka’ (crazy life) comes from the ‘dialect from quebradas’ (urban ghettos) as a concept capable of unifying the different experiences of young people, demarcating the field of everyday communication and action between them – ‘it’ targets interpretations of their lifes. In areas of contact between the ‘quebrada’ (urban ghetto), the crime and socio-educacional unfold relationships and dynamics, interstitials, which act in the process of construction of the subjectivity of young people and focus on the problems of ‘life’ and ‘death’ that permeates drug trafficking.