Political Geography 82 (2020) 102221 Available online 13 July 2020 0962-6298/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Violence and territorial order in Caracas, Venezuela ☆ Andr� es Antillano a , Enrique Desmond Arias b, * , Ver� onica Zubillaga c a Universidad Central de Venezuela, Venezuela b Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, United States c Universidad Sim� on Bolívar, Venezuela ABSTRACT In 2015, Caracas, Venezuela, had a homicide rate of 75 per 100,000 inhabitants, which made it one of the most violent cities in the world that year. Despite these high rates of violence, the international community knows relatively little about the dynamics underlying confict in the city. Through a systematic comparison of three poor and working-class neighborhoods in the Caracas metropolitan area, this article analyzes the factors that have driven these remarkably high rates of violence, as well as those factors that have confgured the heterogeneous violent conditions that operate across the city. Building on extensive interviews in these neighborhoods, we argue that the levels of violence in particular locales derive from the ways in which the Bolivarian political regime failed in its efforts to incorporate the poor and working-class inhabitants of different parts of the metropolitan area into the political, social, and economic systems that dominate the country today. We also argue that variation in violence results from the way in which certain neighborhoods are geographically inserted into local illicit economies and the political and social dynamics of an increasingly violent and unstable political system. In January 2019, Caracas erupted in protests after National Assembly leader Juan Guaid� o challenged Nicol� as Maduro’s claim to the presi- dency. These rallies, as has occurred over the years, left scores dead and hundreds injured. While the international community focused on the demonstrations and the economic crisis that led millions to emigrate, relatively little attention has been paid to the problem of violence. In 2016, Venezuela’s Attorney General reported that violence led nation- ally to 70 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, leaving 21,752 dead with police accounting for 4,667 of those killings. 1 The violence affecting Venezuela and Caracas, with 75 homicides per 100,000 in 2015, 2 is part of the wider crisis affecting the Bolivarian Revolution but also refects Venezuela’s place in a region with excep- tional criminal violence. Despite global condemnation of state abuses, the dramatic violence Venezuela suffers at the hands of state forces and illicit actors is reminiscent of the violence that underlies public life in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Jamaica, and Central America. Simply replacing the Maduro government with a putatively liberal democratic one will not address the perilous violence Venezuelans face. This article, which focuses on three impoverished neighborhoods, argues that the violence affecting Caracas is historically grounded in these neighborhoods’ geographically specifc experiences and how they evolved within Venezuela’s wider political system prior to and during the Bolivarian regime. 3 We emphasize the importance of urban geog- raphy in understanding crime and argue that the location of these neighborhoods connects each community to particular economic, social, and political contexts that shape the violence that occurs in those neighborhoods. These experiences of violence point to complex dy- namics through which the government engages with social actors to undertake repression and sheds light on political practices in a region riven by social and criminal violence. As such, they point to lessons for scholars of a region where countries such as Nicaragua (Rodgers, 2006), Guatemala (Fontes, 2018), Mexico (Trejo & Ley, 2018) and Brazil (Arias, 2017; Arias 2006; Leeds 1996) face criminal violence and growing po- litical contention based, in part, on brutal militarized policing and paramilitary violence in an environment of rampant, and, often, off- cially sanctioned lawlessness. The nature of violence in Venezuela points ☆ This project was generously funded by the Latin American Project of the Open Society Foundations and CAF-Banco de Desarrollo de Am� erica Latina. The authors would like to thank Eduardo Moncada and Philip Johnson as well as the anonymous reviewers at Political Geography for their detailed comments. The article also recieved helpful comments form the City University of New York Comparative Politics Workshop. This article also benefted from Ver� onica Zubillaga’s stay as a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Notre Dame University. Francisco Javier S� anchez and Daniel P� erez-Mena provided much appreciated support during feldwork. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: desmond.arias@baruch.cuny.edu (E.D. Arias). 1 https://www.aporrea.org/ddhh/n306387.html. 2 According to data from Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científcas Penales y Criminalísticas. 3 For a discussion about Caracas urban process see: Barrios (2001); Cariola and Lacabana (2003); Cilento and Fossi (1998). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2020.102221 Received 18 October 2019; Received in revised form 9 March 2020; Accepted 29 April 2020