Globalisation and urban violence: the case of São Paulo

São Paulo has many traits of a global city and presents high rates of criminal violence. The two do phenomena do not seem to bear a causal relation. Violence was growing before the economy was made more open to external markets and even during high economic growth periods. The continued growth of violence seems to be more related to the deeply ingrained inequalities in the access to rights than to a certain model of economic relations. Inequalities so deep that the improvements that took place in the last ten years do not seem to reach the most needy ones. The data presented here repeatedly pointed to the imperviousness of this inequality: some groups seem to be excluded and so excluded that only doses of benefits that reach other areas of the city arrive, improvements are trickling down when they should be arriving massively. But if globalisation cannot be blamed it cannot be totally exculpated either. The models of production, the emphasis on competitiveness and in high profit margins, in short periods of time, that seem to guide international capital at present, show no commiseration with the ones that cannot keep pace with the expectations of profit in the central economies. International capital, and its fluctuations in assigning who is the champion and who is the loser at a moment in time, gains an image of lacking in commitment with the culture and societies to which is directed, and in this s ense the notion of globalisation as something positive, as more than colonialism with a new face (and without its share of responsibility for the natives), is threatened. If capital is to be so volatile as to flee at the first sign of reduced profits, where does the notion of interrelations of mutual gains, of shared interests go?