Politics, Violence, and the Organization of Street Markets in Latin America
Jacinto Cuvi
Maria sells garments on a street near downtown São Paulo. One day a man approached her claiming
he had “bought” her spot, even though she holds a license with the address of her stall. As she resisted his
assaults, the man threatened to kill her. A few days later, he was killed by a truck.
Like Maria, workers in the informal economy lack both legal and social protection. They operate in
an environment in which their rights are ill-defined, selectively enforced by state authorities, and always
subject to contestation by competitors or regulators. These circumstances raise the potential for
interpersonal violence. Rival claimants whose livelihood is at stake are compelled to use force, sometimes
with fatal consequences (Venkatesh 2006). Because of their frequent interactions with other vendors and
authorities, street vendors like Maria are particularly exposed to clashes and confrontations. In fact,
peddlers are embedded in networks involving police officers, local bosses, and politicians, that is,
powerful actors who command various means of coercion. And all of them compete for control over the
resources and opportunities generated by the street trading economy. Last but not least, adverse economic
conditions and repressive government policies can further intensify social tensions among vendors by
increasing competitive pressures and depleting available resources. In Latin America, the economic
reforms of the 1990s combined with ongoing economic globalization have had such effect. Public and
private sector layoffs raised the share of the informal workforce to almost 60 percent of the total
workforce (ILO 2002) while austerity measures and cheap imports from Asia have reduced the
opportunities for survival in the informal sector (González de la Rocha 2001). Across the region, street
vendors have also been subject to evictions and coercive relocation programs inspired by new urban
governance models (Donovan 2008, Crossa 2009, Bromley and Mackie 2009).
Despite such trends, street markets thrive in many Latin American cities. In Buenos Aires, the street
market of La Salada, which began as a small gathering of Bolivian peddlers, is now the worksite of more
than 6000 people (Ossona 2010). In fact, relations in these markets tend to stabilize over time, leading to
a decline in violent confrontations (Girón 2011). Even in street markets undergoing large-scale
disruptions, as in São Paulo, acute conflicts of interests are not always conducive to interpersonal
violence. And, despite an aggressive eradication campaign by municipal authorities, street vendors in São
Paulo have managed to “hold” the streets. In fact, forms of cooperation emerge among market antagonists
and/or regulators that enable resistance to removal attempts (Cross 1998) and explain declining levels of
violence over time. But how is cooperation achieved in power-laden networks of competing, unequal
players unrestrained by legal norms? In other words, what mechanisms regulate the conflict-ridden street
market economy? And how do these mechanisms affect the allocation of resources? Finally, how is the
expansion of street trade linked to the organization and regulation of violence?
I hypothesize that cooperation is produced by informal arrangements between competing or
antagonistic parties. These arrangements define the relative entitlements and “shares” of market
participants. Drawing on in-depth interviewing, direct observation, document analysis, and descriptive
statistics, I inquire into the role that politics and violence play in the making of these arrangements. I also
examine the genesis and everyday practice of the key organizational actors involved. More specifically, in
a set of three informal street markets in São Paulo and Buenos Aires, I intend to (1) map out the
categories of actors whose interests and actions shape the workings of the marketplace, (2) analyze
sequentially the craft and breakdown of informal arrangements that shape market relations, (3) trace the
emergence of informal organizations that exert coercive regulatory powers, and (4) document and analyze
the relationships among these actors, paying special attention to the effects of power differentials and
conflicts of interests. The larger goal of this multi-site ethnography is to tease out the organizing
principles of informal street markets by means of case-oriented comparative analysis (Ragin 1987). Such
arrangement-making perspective offers an alternative explanation to traditional theories of informal
cooperation based on group-specific assets such as deep cultural codes or social capital/trust (Light 2005).
The analytic framework
In a context of loose law-enforcement, competition for market opportunities and resources is
pervaded by power struggles and coercive relations. It is the thick, conflictive interaction among
stakeholders that determines who sells what, where, when, to whom, and at what price (Venkatesh 2006).
Street vendors vie for market opportunities (e.g. selling spots, selling permits, product niches) on a space
that is public, scarce, and highly coveted by state and non-state actors alike (Bromley 1978). Indeed,
while competing against each other, vendors must deal with an array of pressures and demands from more
powerful players – e.g. police officers, local bosses, tax controllers, policy-makers (Fernández-Kelly and
Shefner 2006). How these relations are managed and how their inherent conflicts are solved (or not
solved) shapes the life of the marketplace, in particular the forms and the magnitude of violence.
Preliminary fieldwork in São Paulo and secondary sources (e.g. Girón 2011, Hacher 2010) suggest
that informal arrangements – known locally as arreglos or acordos – lay the basis for (highly unequal)
cooperation in these competitive settings characterized by contested property rights and lack of thirdparty adjudication or enforcement. Arreglos are verbal agreements which establish the reciprocal
acceptance, by competing parties, of each other’s claim to a given “market share” (e.g. a spot, a type of
merchandise, etc.). Arrangements intervene at different levels, from a popcorn-seller sharing a corner
with a cell-phone peddler to a state congressman striking a deal with the mayor to allow peddlers in one
of his electoral districts. The above sources suggest, however, that street-level arrangements seldom stem
from a consensual divvying up of rights and obligations. Instead, they arise from a process of coercive
bargaining, that is, a power struggle in which the actors involved mobilize the resources available –
including means of coercion – to compel their rivals to agree to their terms. Violence may intervene at
various points in the process, either as a means to force a rival to bow to certain terms, as a reaction to the
breaching of an existing arrangement, or as a symptom of the parties’ failure to establish one (Blok 2001,
Tilly 2003, on network-based violence in the drug market, see Goldstein et al. 1997, Papachristos 2009).
Once in place, however, arrangements provide a (precarious) framework for non-violent transactions.
I want to test, refine, and extend (Burawoy 1991) this analytic framework through ethnographic
research by examining empirically (1) how arrangements come about, (2) how they shape the allocation
of resources, and (3) under what conditions they hold or break down. I expect wider power differentials
and more violent arrangement-making processes to increase the resilience of arrangements by raising the
physical and symbolic costs of defiance. To a large extent, however, my research will proceed
inductively. I will classify existing arrangements – based on the violence used in their forging, the types
of actors involved, the obligations they entail, the interests they serve, and their impact on the run of
market transactions – in search of patterns, which I will then verify using ethnographic tools.
I will also trace the long-term effects of past landmark arrangements. This retrospective inquiry will
shed light on how some key players come into being. Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that, over time,
collective actors emerge from underground and/or policy arrangements. In São Paulo, the granting by the
city of street selling licenses to the elderly and the disabled in the early 1980s encouraged their coalescing
into an association called the UNADEF, which founded the SINPESP – the most powerful street vendors’
organization in the city. In Buenos Aires, a deal between the police and the improvised leadership of a
handful of peddlers led to the creation of a large marketplace in which the same leadership now exerts
regulatory powers as “managers” of informal organizations. Like the leaders of SINPESP, they broker
deals with politicians, collect dues, provide security, and oversee the spatial organization of trade.
The theoretical toolkit of historical institutionalism illuminates the emergence of these actors. In the
examples above, arrangements made at critical junctures – i.e. periods of contingency when small events
shape long-term outcomes (Mahoney 2000) – set a “path” that framed subsequent interactions among the
players and defined their collective interests, thus breeding organizational structures (Thelen and Steinmo
1992, Pierson 2004). Tilly’s (1985) analysis of the emergence of modern states through the concentration
of capital and coercion by security brokers also illuminates, by analogy, key aspects of the advent of
informal market organizations. Indeed, “managers” at SINPESP and La Salada have been accused of
protection rackets, the illegal trading of selling spots, and the violent deterrence of market entrants – i.e.
characteristic mafia practices (Gambetta 1993). As Mahoney and Thelen (2009) point out, moreover,
institutional structures have “distributional properties” – i.e. they allocate power and resources – into
which actors tap to consolidate their positions or shape the rules of the game. The SINPESP, for example,
has used its longstanding political connections to prevent the expansion of licensing quotas for the ablebodied. Thus, by focusing on the arrangement mechanisms and the collective actors who operate them,
this project unravels the (interconnected) ways in which regulation and cooperation are produced in street
markets, as well as the conditions under which violence is used or curbed.
Cases and Methodology
My research employs ethnographic techniques within a cross-case comparative framework. Its units
of analysis are informal street markets. I have selected three case studies located in two sharply
contrasting sociopolitical environments at the opposite ends of the stable/volatile continuum. At one end
is the city of São Paulo, where two of my three cases are located. This is a tumultuous environment for
street vending, one in which alliances are continuously being made and unmade at all levels. At the
opposite end stands the street market of La Salada, in the outskirts of Buenos Aires, where basic
hierarchical structures are well established and relations have become routinized. Within São Paulo, I
have chosen two street markets that differ in terms of their internal structure. In one of them, called the
Rua 25 de Março, organizational actors were consolidated before the recent wave of disruptions and
realignments; in the other, known as Brás, the organizational landscape is fluid, with individual players
competing for leadership and political allegiances. I expect the extreme volatility of the São Paulo context
to yield fresh insights into the actual making and breaking of arrangements, while La Salada offers a
vantage point from which to study the long-term outcomes of such “politics” once they stabilize. On the
other hand, variation within São Paulo provides increased analytic leverage by throwing into relief the
differences in the arrangement-making process and the informal regulation of trade where organizational
actors are consolidated and where they are incipient and fragmented, as detailed in the following lines.
The administration of Luiza Erundina, mayor of São Paulo from 1989 to 1992, witnessed a boom in
street vending – theretofore restricted to the elderly and the disabled – followed by timid attempts at
reorganization by subsequent mayors. In 2005, the election of a right-leaning party committed to law-andorder values marked a paradigm shift from loose regulation to eradication. In 2009, the city of São Paulo
signed an agreement with the state government, which commands the Military Police, to have off-duty
officers patrol commercial activity on the streets. Massive suspensions of licenses and numerous reports
of police abuse ensued. Finally, in May 2012, all licenses were abruptly revoked by municipal decree.
A series of court rulings later reinstated and revoked street vending licenses multiple times. Along
the way, numerous stalls were torn down by authorities. Moreover, only those licenses that were revoked
in 2012 were restored by the latest provisional court ruling. While the recent election of a mayor from the
left-leaning Workers Party (PT) on October 28th is expected to ease the pressure on street vendors as a
whole, it is likely to exacerbate competition and power struggles among their different constituencies. The
political allegiances of street vendors’ organizations are personal, not party-based, and different factions
within the PT are tied to different (and rival) leaderships among vendors. Furthermore, the upcoming
2014 World Cup is bound to put more strains on street markets citywide as urban planners try to create
the image of a clean, “modern,” and tourist-friendly city, as large-scale infrastructure works accelerate,
and as restrictions on trade imposed by FIFA (e.g. a ban on unofficial vending within 2 km of stadiums)
are carried into effect. These factors have begun and will continue to increase the concentration of
displaced peddlers – and with it the competitive pressures – in my two sites of inquiry.
In the Brás, where all licenses were suspended before 2012, vendors have gone back to work by
virtue of a political arrangement between their “padrinho politico” (political godfather) and the local
alderman. This arrangement was achieved thanks to the intervention of a new leader named Vania, who
emerged in the wake of the license suspensions crisis. As the struggle drags on, however, she has seen her
authority challenged both inside and outside the association she leads. In a context of entrenched
clientelistic politics (Gay 1998), her gains have prompted political brokers to forge alliances with other
members of her association and attempt to unseat her, while other would-be leaders try to build a base of
their own. Moreover, in the last elections, she failed to support the official now in charge of supervising
street vending for the entire city. By contrast, the SINPESP has long exerted tight control over street trade
in the Rua 25 de Março. Using longstanding ties to an influential councilman from the PT, the
organization tried but failed to counter the 2012 licenses revocation decree. However, after the latter was
overturned by a provisional ruling, the SINPESP took advantage of the legal limbo by illegally trading
selling spots and increasing exactions on vendors threatened with eviction.
On the streets of La Salada, in Buenos Aires, vendors face a far more settled environment.
Journalistic accounts trace the birthdate of La Salada to the previously mentioned arreglo between a
handful of Bolivian peddlers and the local police chief in 1988 (Girón 2011). At the time, it was agreed
that the police would halt pursuits and apprehensions in exchange for weekly under-the-table handouts.
From then on, the population of vendors grew steadily, but not peacefully. As new entrepreneurs bid for
commercial venues, violent confrontations broke out. Competing groups of vendors used any means
available – from broken bottles to police connections – to assert their control over specific areas,
distribution chains, or retail sectors. In the process, some leaders became “managers.” As established
power-holders (also dubbed “caudillos” or “lords”), they have a strong say over what goes on in their
precincts. Thus, territorial “lords” can decide to raise dues, give or take the right to sell on a given street,
ban merchandise, and practice various forms of extortion. In the past, managers have waged fierce battles
against each other and against other “intruders” to protect their territorial holdings. Nowadays, in the
wake of a peace deal and enduring space-sharing arrangements, relationships among the main players
have stabilized and become pacified. The streets of La Salada thus form a consolidated informal
marketplace; as some vendors there boast, “not even the Army could kick us out” (Girón 2011, 279).
In pursuing my research, I will use a combination of tools and data sources, including in-depth
interviews, direct observation, document analysis, and analysis of government statistics. Semi-structured
in-depth interviews form the centerpiece of my research design. I will interview as many subjects as
possible (with a minimum target of 30 interviewees per case) across all relevant categories of actors – i.e.
vendors, leaders, police officers, officials in charge of issuing licenses, policy-makers, city council
members, store-owners, etc. I will begin by interviewing vendors and their leaders and, on that basis,
identify and reach out to other agents in their networks. With street vendors, interview questions will bear
on two broad topics: (1) their personal trajectories and (2) the daily practice of their trade. The first refers
to their entrance into street commerce, the acquisition of their selling spots, other jobs that they have held,
associations they have participated in (and reasons to do so), etc. The second covers their current incomemaking activities: the obstacles they face, the pressures they are subject to, the relationships they rely on,
the obligations/commitments entailed by those relationships, etc. Since most vendors have either fixed
spots or well-delimited areas of operation, interviews can be conducted reiteratively, an approach with
trust-building effects that allows for follow-ups on ongoing political developments. Concurrently, I will
construct a detailed chronology of events based on all documentary sources available – i.e. newspaper
articles (some of which have been stored by the vendors themselves), footage and audio recordings from
major events, and legal/administrative documents (e.g. municipal bills, decrees, court rulings) available
online and at public institutions. I will use this tool as data and to frame my interviews.
While grounded in personal experience, interviews with other actors will also bear on the formal and
informal activities of the organizations to which they belong. Again, I will inquire into past and current
relationships to other market and nonmarket actors, material and non-material exchanges channeled
through those relationships, pivotal agreements/events in the making of the marketplace, and so on. By
interviewing as wide a range of actors as possible, I want to counter the tendency of organizational actors
to provide “official stories.” As an additional check, I will contrast interview statements with evidence
from official documents (e.g. public hearings and court rulings) and other revealing sources. In São Paulo,
for instance, I have a close research relationship to an NGO that provides legal counseling to street
vendors. Testimonies from those seeking assistance reveal coercive practices committed by association
leaders and other informal power-holders.
Finally, statistics from various government sources will allow me to map aggregate trends of market
configuration. Data on the size of police contingents patrolling informal market areas, the frequency and
value of seizures of merchandise over time, the number and locations of the street-vending licenses issued
or renewed each year, as well as the sites and frequency of police raids can be found at the police
department or with the city administration. Given the “underground” nature of the object, these data must
be handled with caution. Yet a decline in confiscations is a possible indication of informal market
consolidation, as arrangements are made to limit apprehensions. I will thus interpret these statistics
against the data emerging from the interviews. Using these methods, I will be able to (1) map the actors
and power-laden networks shaping the workings of each marketplace, and (2) reconstruct their historical
formation with the conceptual tools laid out in the previous section.
In São Paulo, access to the field will be facilitated by pre-existing ties built over the course of two
summer research trips. In 2012, I met Dr. Luciana Itikawa, whose dissertation research focused on
informal street trade in the city of São Paulo (Itikawa 2006). She currently works for an NGO, the Centro
Gaspar Garcia, specialized in human rights. As part of a three-year project funded by the European
Union, the center organizes weekly meetings with informal vendors and their leaders to discuss collective
problems. At these meetings, I became acquainted with more than a dozen leaders of different street
vending associations. I grew particularly close to Vania, the emerging (and contested) leader in the Brás. I
also met representatives of the UNADEF and SINPESP. The presidents of both organizations granted me
lengthy interviews and offered to introduce me to other key actors. Separately, I made contacts with
police officers, political brokers for state- and city-level officials, and the public attorney who brought the
case against the revocation of licenses. On the streets, I conducted interviews with 23 vendors.
My entrance plans to La Salada rely on another network. My advisor, Dr. Javier Auyero, has been
conducting research for three years, with three research assistants, in the district of Ingeniero Budge
where La Salada is located. Dr. Auyero’s research hinges on the propagation of violence and most of the
people he and his assistants maintain relations with make their living at the market. Agustín, one of his
research assistants, embedded himself in a community center – the Centro Reinaldo Conforti – run by a
former street vendor who attempted to set up her own fair but was rebuffed by local strongmen. Through
the center, which I will regularly visit, I expect to form ties with a large number of vendors. Another key
informant with close ties to Agustín is the head of a local NGO fighting crack consumption among
adolescents. She employs some of this youth in street trading activities and has, in the past, embarked on
other informal ventures while working as a collector of dues for market “managers.” Finally, through my
advisor’s personal connections within the state Secretary of Culture, I will gain access to Jorge Castillo,
arguably the most powerful manager in La Salada. I will build on these ties to expand my interview
sample as I have successfully done in past fieldwork. I plan to spend six months in São Paulo, dedicating
roughly half of my time to each case, and four months in Buenos Aires.
Contribution to the literature
This research will make a contribution to our understanding of economic relations among the urban
poor and provide input for more sensitive strategies to police street trade. For long, the analysis of the
informal economy, following the coining of the concept by Keith Hart (1973), centered on production
issues (Roberts 1976, Tokman 1978, Castells and Portes 1989). Informal market relations were left
largely unexplored. In fact, the scholarship that paid attention to the economic functions of social
relations among the poor emphasized the nonmarket character of these relations (Lomnitz 1977).
De Soto (1989) established the “free market” perspective by recasting the problem as one of
constraints and incentives facing individual entrepreneurs. Yet his explicit political agenda led him to
simplify the dynamics of the informal marketplace – e.g. by idealizing the democratic functioning of
informal organizations. Subsequent research did unveil the politics pervading the street vending economy.
Thus, John Cross’s (1998) concept of “informal politics” captures the efforts by street vendors to thwart
repressive state policies. However, by focusing on the ways in which vendors resist the state or shape its
interventions (Clark 1988, Cross 1998, Crossa 2009), this literature ignores or downplays the conflicts
and the multiple forms of abuse and extortion existing among vendors. It also fails to capture the uses
made by vendors of their ties to state officials as a means to shape market dynamics or restrict market
competition. My research builds on this scholarship while examining how state actors participate in
cooperative arrangements between market rivals and/or help dominant players capture market resources.
In so doing, it connects the “external” to the “internal” politics of the marketplace and contributes to a
more comprehensive understanding of how informal market economies are regulated.
This issue has direct policy implications. Between 5 and 10 percent of Latin America’s urban
dwellers make a living in street trade according to WIEGO (2012). At the same time, the street vending
economy is rife with conflict and abuse. The forcible relocation policies that have become the norm
among urban planners tend to deprive vendors of their means of subsistence while often reproducing
patterns of extortion (Donovan 2008, Bromley and Mackie 2009). A new approach is needed to preserve
this source of livelihood but prevent violence and abuse. By studying the mechanisms of state
intervention and informal conflict settlement in street markets, this research lays the basis for an approach
that protects and enhances the rights of informal vendors, in line with the International Labor
Organization’s “decent work” agenda (ILO 2002) for the ever-expanding informal economy.
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