in Latin America

Over the past decade, accelerating rates of violence and crime in Latin American cities have transformed the problem of individual criminal pathology into a serious development constraint. The problem is not lim-ited to urban areas—the region is one of the most violent of the world— but it is particularly problematic in urban areas, where the relationship be-tween violence and poverty is neither unidirectional nor straightforward. In urban areas in Latin America and the Caribbean, the poor are the most likely to both be seriously affected by crime violence and be held respon-sible for the crime and violence committed. This presents challenges for identifying successful urban-focused violence reduction interventions. This chapter first looks at categories of violence, introducing an urban violence roadmap. It then discusses the measurement, trends, and charac-teristics of urban violence. The third section examines the causes, costs, and consequences of the phenomenon, particularly among the urban poor. The last section reviews a range of current national and sector-level violence-reduction interventions, particularly those focusing on the urban poor. A Roadmap of Categories and Manifestations of Urban Crime and Violence The sheer scale of violence in the barrios (slums) of Latin American cities means that violence has become “routinized ” or “normalized ” into th