A Latin View of American-Style Violence

After a gunman with a semiautomatic pistol opened fire in a Sao Paulo movie theater this month, killing three people and wounding six, a police official said, “We are not used to this type of crime because it’s the kind that happens in the United States.”

His words might seem ironic. While crime hits historic lows in the United States, it has risen across Latin America. Each day brings a catalog of mayhem: assassinations in Colombia, chainsaw-wielding death squads in Brazil, hostage standoffs in Argentina.

Latin Americans look north for solutions. Civic leaders from Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo in Brazil and elsewhere make pilgrimages to New York and other U.S. cities and return singing the praises of “zero tolerance” and community policing.

Yet the Sao Paulo police official shared his nation’s shock at the theater shooting because, in one respect, Latin Americans look north with alarm rather than admiration. Though its streets are generally more dangerous, Latin America has largely been spared a singular form of U.S. violence: the troubled gunman who for little apparent reason shoots up a workplace, school, church or some other unlikely locale, leaving terror and trauma in his wake.

As exemplified by recent rampages that left seven workers dead at a Xerox office in Honolulu and two slain at a Seattle shipyard, these crimes are starting to seem commonplace in the United States.

The Latin American media devote considerable coverage to the killing sprees, attempting to understand how a society seen as a model of prosperity and democracy can breed barbarity.

The randomness and senselessness of tragedies such as the April massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, where one of the teenage shooters drove a BMW, appall and perplex Latin Americans.

“There is some social psychopathology that expresses itself in an openly hostile and aggressive manner against the society itself,” said Orlando D’Adamo, a psychologist at the University of Buenos Aires. “In a place with such a strong message that you are the master of your fate and success depends exclusively on you, when for some reason you don’t succeed there is enormous pressure. In Latin American countries, we blame failure on the social context.”

To gain a foreign perspective on the spate of random violence in the United States, The Times interviewed academics and ordinary citizens in two South American nations: Brazil, which has Latin America’s biggest and most diversified population and one of the hemisphere’s highest crime rates, and Argentina, which suffered state terrorism in the 1970s and ‘80s. Brazil’s murder rate is more than twice that of the United States, and crime in Argentine cities is fast approaching U.S. levels.

Hyper-Individualism in the U.S. Is Blamed

Those interviewed saw distinct cultures of violence in the United States and Latin America. They saw a disturbing hyper-individualism at the root of the U.S. phenomenon, a cultural force that seems capable of generating destructive rage even at a time when crime rates and socioeconomic deprivation are shrinking.

“These crimes occur in the richest society on the planet,” said Roberto DaMatta, a Brazilian anthropologist at Notre Dame University in Indiana who divides his time between the U.S. and his homeland.

“They have a lot to do with the fragmentation and pulverization of social relations in the American world,” he said, “a universe in which people follow schedules and live in bubbles, communicating little, even with relatives. In a society of individuals, confrontations are daily, the solitude is immense and virtual realities become more basic than others.”

In contrast, violence in Latin America grows out of a classic landscape of social crisis: brutal inequality, weak institutions and powerful criminal networks.

“Crime in Latin America is more strictly connected to socioeconomic conditions and police corruption,” D’Adamo said. “Most criminals come from marginalized classes, which are growing. You have more poor people and more crime.”

Violence here seems more organized, perversely logical and rooted in group conflict. In Brazil and Argentina, police and governmental corruption functions like an invisible skeleton that connects and controls street crime. High-profile murders in Latin America inevitably lead into labyrinths of organized crime and political skulduggery.

On the other hand, in Latin America the strength of traditional family and friendship networks shields against loneliness, alienation and, according to those interviewed, berserk shooting sprees.

“Everybody wants to succeed, but perhaps we don’t seek the American dream as they do,” said Bibianna Cabale, 28, an Argentine nurse. “Perhaps we settle for other things--family, friends. We still have certain values that make us different than the Yanquis. They are very cold, individualist, every man for himself.”

This is the prism through which Latin Americans view the United States: They see a society in which police, the courts and other institutions generally function with admirable openness and effectiveness. But they also see a rigid mentality and severe expectations that can cause people to snap; a culture that confirms the stereotype of the individual as solitary gunslinger and society as a hostile frontier.

“In Brazil, anonymity is profoundly rejected,” said DaMatta. In contrast, he asserted, U.S. culture encourages the “ideological illusion that we are each of us an autonomous unit capable of living like Robinson Crusoe, without a society.”

Even seemingly political acts of violence in the United States--such as the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the August shootings at a Jewish day camp in Granada Hills--tend to be committed by one or two people with loose ties to a marginal extremist ideology.

Some of those interviewed also believe, as do many Americans, that the ready availability of guns plays a role in the frequency of the shooting sprees by seemingly unremarkable members of the middle class. Guns are ubiquitous among criminals in Brazil and Argentina, but not as much among law-abiding people. And the U.S. reverence for guns, with the accompanying ideological trappings of the gunslinger myth and the 2nd Amendment, is not embedded in the mainstream cultures of Latin America.

“The United States is a nation with 300 million inhabitants with easy access to heavy-caliber weapons,” said Nancy Cordia, an academic at a University of Sao Paulo think tank that studies violence. “And you have disturbed people with easy access to arms. Here, the access is not that easy, except in the world of crime.”

The large population and ethnic diversity of the United States also may contribute to violence, according to those interviewed.

Interestingly, none of them saw a connection between the gun rampages in the United States and violence portrayed by Hollywood. Nonetheless, Brazilians made much of the fact that the Nov. 3 shooting at an upscale Sao Paulo mall occurred during a showing of “Fight Club,” a Brad Pitt film with violent subject matter. The gunman, who wielded a U.S.-made 9-millimeter and paused between volleys to watch the screen, appears to have patterned his attack on the scenario in a video game, according to police.

Mateus da Costa, a 23-year-old medical student, was arrested in connection with the shooting.

Modernization Causes Some Worry

Especially in South America, citizens have looked askance at free-market modernization and democracy accompanied by the kind of pervasive street crime they once associated with Los Angeles and New York, though they recognize that those U.S. cities are increasingly safe and orderly.

Latin Americans hope that as modernization takes hold, they can preserve whatever it is about their culture that has enabled them to avoid the grim U.S. trend of marauding gunmen. But Argentine lawyer Javier Martedi was not optimistic.

“I think the Latin American nations are just as violent as the United States,” he said. “Here, there is a lot of danger, though it’s true we don’t have these mass shootings. That would be all we need. . . . If things don’t change here, those kinds of things might start happening.”

*

Paula Gobbi in The Times’ Rio de Janeiro Bureau and Vanessa Petit in the Buenos Aires Bureau contributed to this report.