Drug Battles and School Achievement: Evidence from Rio de Janeiro’s

Favelas
In this paper Joana Monteiro and Rudi Rocha study and analyse the effects of the armed
conflicts between the drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas on student achievement. More
specifically, the purpose of this paper, is to study the negative spillovers of conflicts between
drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro by analysing how they affect the academic achievement of
children attending schools located in the proximities of conflict areas. For that, one of their
purpose is to find the causal effect of violence on education, for that they take into account
the fact that this kind of conflicts are often triggered by exogenous factors that are not
necessary involved with the socioeconomic conditions, as the released of a gang leader,
revenge, etc.

The violence effect of this conflicts, that have a direct negative effect on math scores of the
students involved, are intensified when the distance of the conflict is nearest, when the
duration and intensity is higher and when these conflicts occur before exams. Therefore, they
did not find out an empirical evidence that justifies a persistent effect of violence over time.

Another subject that they consider is the negative impact of violence on school resources as
these conflicts can lead to more teaching absenteeism, temporary school shutdown etc.

Before of talking more deeply about this subject it is necessary to say that this drug-related
violence is a phenomenon visible in most of developed and developing countries specifically in
the urban areas. This violence had the biggest peak in countries such as Mexico and Central
America, but it is also present in a high a preoccupant level in other more developed countries
such as in France (Marseille 2012) or US, in where this criminal threat lead to lethal violence
and disputes over control over drug territory. Therefore, the consequences are not only
involving the direct actors, but also the areas exposed to this conflict and the people in. This is
the reason why, this paper decided to study this subject in order to analyse a specific area (Rio
de Janeiro’s favelas) and some specific actors (the students living in there) to emphasise and
demonstrate how this phenomenon goes much more above and have causal effects that we
don’t necessarily think about.

It is now the moment to explain the area situation and history involving this problem, in this
case the favelas of Rio. During these last decades, favelas have continued to scatter across the
city but mostly dominated by drug gangs, in where they used this territory to sell drugs. The
violence in this area increases severally when the different gangs of the favelas are fighting
between each other. The violence is especially extreme in this context do to it is nature and
the kind of arms used in (weaponry, machine guns,) involving sometimes civil citizens caught in
crossfire. Most of this dispute are occurring to do the fact that gangs do not have access to
legal contracts or property rights and because of that they decide to rely on violence in order
to resolve disputes. As I explain before, one reason of the instability of the power of gangs is
the fact that the conflicts are mostly generated by exogenous local socioeconomic conditions.
This is available for Rio de Janeiro’s favelas but also for other countries such as US or Mexico
that I mentioned before.

The empirical strategy used in this paper to study the effect of violence on education allows to
discard the effects of violence from other socioeconomics effects that are correlated to
educational outcomes. This is because they estimate the causal effect of violence on education
through idiosyncratic variation instead of doing the cross-sectional differences of the different
neighbourhoods or studying the persistence of the drug gangs. Another challenge that they
faced was about the data availability, since the drug related conflicts varies sharply during the
time and the space. In order to overcome this problem, they collected dataset based on
anonymous reports of drug gang conflicts between 2003 and 2009 (from the police), then
selected only the ones at the favela area and finally match the information with the
educational data ( taking into account the distances between the schools and the favelas).
These steps allowed them to have a final data about the educational outcomes and the
exposure to the local violence over the time.

Fryer talks about the crack cocaine market in the US and how it created adverse consequences
that were not expected as first view, such as a higher homicide rate among the black people
after the introduction of the drug. Similar, Evans talked about the alteration of the behaviour
of young black males in the US by decreasing their expectancy lives. In both cases, these
authors had the opinion that the drug market was impacting the educational outcomes
through changes of the returns in educations while in this study they were more emphasizing
on the school resources channel. In this case the mechanisms are different for example, as the
average year is 11 years old, and choices regarding education are mostly decided by the
parents (the impact of Evans mechanism is not that strong). Other important papers such as
the one by Frischtak and Mandel talk about the Rio’s favela and most specifically that the
removal of the drug traffic in there lead to reduce the inequality among the residential prices.
It is also interesting to mention the fact that some literature talks about other kind of violence
such as civil wars and how it affects the educational achievement. The results show as it
decreases the school attainment, therefore other phenomenon’s are happening at the same
time such as political chaos or institutional disruption, this is why it is difficult to compare to
this kind of violence that operates in a different way.

It is important no mention that in the literature available before the paper there was no clear
evidence yet about the negative effect of violence on students’ achievements, only about the
impact on school resources such as teachers and principals’ behaviour. The literature also
relies mostly on cross-sectional data and by hence can be biased due to other socioeconomic
factors not considering, such as domestic violence, parental education…

Rio de Janeiro is especially concerned about the violence issue, it had more than 2155 people
murdered during 2009. It is considered a city with a high homicide rate in which we can
compare to most violent areas of United States such as Detroit. It is important to highly the
contrast between the northest and southest zone of Rio de Janeiro as the North area is the
one which suffer most of the violence and homicides. During the 80’s started to increase the
violence in Rio de Janeiro with the foundation of the well known Comando Vermello, the first
organized major drug gang of Rio de Janeiro who is nowadays also operating. In this decade
they started selling cocaine with the already existing network of marihuana inside the favelas,
which was a strategic place to hide from police. From that moment, the control of the favela
territory started to become more pronounced. Because of the high profitability of the cocaine
trade, new drug gangs started to rise, such as Terceiro Comando (created by old members of
Comando Vermelho), Amigos de los Amigos… This new competition for this drug market
increased the armed conflicts inside the favelas using heavy weaponry.

A characteristic about Rio’s gangs is that they do not have a hierarchical structure leaded by
one boss like we haven already seen in Colombia with Pablo Escobar or In the Italian Mafia. We
could characterise this kind of gangs like Dowdney sayed, a “network of affiliated independent
actors”. For example, every favela is controlled by a boss how take most of the important
decisions such as to attack other gangs. Therefore, even if the boss of the favela tries to
maintain the peace and control the territory, problems arise when events like a release of a
gang leader, assassinations of gang members, etc…, occurs. This creates an unstable
equilibrium of forces that often leads to important disputes when this idiosyncratic event
occurs. It is difficult to determine the duration of this conflicts. It is also important to consider
that this gangs are very often controlled by a group of young and not experienced leaders.

All this violence affects directly citizens that lives near those conflicts as their freedom of
movement is more restricted do to the fear of chancing a bullet. The main fears are the stray
bullet, being caught in the crossfire and robberies. As if that were not enough, there is a long
history of corruption among policeman and do not always act when a gang conflicts occurs,
only at the end of it when the damage has already been done. It has been just recently that
policeman have started to act against removing drug dealers because in the past their task was
only to stop the conflicts.

Even if most of these conflicts as I explained before occurs inside the favelas, there are also
that are pacified and are not in controlled of a drug gang, such as Vidigal. To know a little bit
more about the favelas it is interesting to know that it represents almost 20% of the
population of Rio de Janeiro and we can find more than 979 of it. It has specific characteristic
on its appearance as we found out irregular streets, poor urban services and traditional or
legal constructions. However, most of favelas had an improvement on the acces to basic
needs such as water or electricity because of this it is sometimes difficult to determine it as a
different area from the rest of the city. But one thing is sure about them, the social inequalities
are very present, especially around the earnings (they earn 50% less than rest of the city) and
education (3,5 less years of education than rest of the city) .

The municipal system of Rio (one of the biggest in Brazil) is the main elementary school in
there and students can attend any school they want no matter their district. That implies that
good or reputed schools are more demanded and because of this some students finish to
accept the only choice that they have. One important fact to take into account is that only
2,5% of the favela inhabitants are going to a private school compared to the 12,7% of the rest
of inhabitants. Since few years ago, teachers are allowed to choose the region in which they
want to work, therefore the specific school is not over their control. It is only after three years
that teachers can transfer to another school and it is very common that teachers living in
violent areas shift their placement after these years. Therefore, before passing these years,
during the violence episodes they can only avoid it through absenteeism. Rio de Janeiro is not
really concerned about school attendance and coverage as the data says that 98% of them
attend school, therefore the school quality is a bigger problem. This quality problem can be
seen for example with the 15% of students that are illiterate in 2009 even if the data says that
most of them goes to school. The inequality across the city can be seen through the higher
percentage of dropout rates, absenteeism and lower school load that results in a difference of
1 hour and 15 minutes of difference of weekly study compared to favelas students and the rest
of inhabitants.

It is now important to talk about the areas and the time of conflicts through the data on
violence in order to better understand Rio’s conflicts. The authors collected criminal data
provided by the ISP. Therefore, this data was not totally useful for the paper as it aggregates
the entire data into the 18 major city areas, because of this, it is difficult to track the
differences in violence exposures. Besides it had another limitation that has to due with the
fact that it only takes into account homicides and didn’t talk about the place and the time of
the crime. For these reasons, the authors took other anonymous data reports in Disque-
denuncia (DD) between 2003 and 2009. This dataset is an NGO open to all the public and
serves to report problems of security. The calls made in this system that works anytime are
always tracked and the dataset contains the location data and the description of the events,
which was useful for their paper. Inside these reports we could find conflicts such as assaults,
location of criminals, or simpler things such as noise complains. Once they get this dataset,
through the description of the event, they collected the ones that were involved with violence,
such as gunfight and aggregate the data per favela and year. They found out 4365 reports
registered of gunfights between drug gangs between this time, but they had to exclude some
of these reports as they were not associated with the favela of were not describing gun fights.
Once all these steps are done, they found out the evidence that 92% of these reports were
matching with the favela, this highlights the assumption that the favela was the main conflict
battlefield, even if not always they are involved in armed conflicts as not every favela is violent.
However, inside the violent favelas, the average reports were of 10 during these 7 years but
considering that the violence peak vary depending on the favela during the years.

The next step of these study was about the educational data, for that they use three different
educational dataset providing different kind of information of students (the school, the
teachers, the level) in order to study the impact of drug related violence on education. To see
the level of the students, they used student-level scores of the Prova Brasil,( provided by data
of INEP) in which they test your math and Portuguese level. It is also complemented with
characteristic socioeconomic of the students and teachers experiences in school (also related
to violence). Through this data the authors get a sample of more than 76000 students that
were located within 250 meters of one favela during 2005 to 2009. The schools that were at
less of 250 meters from the favela and experienced more than two day of conflict during the
year were categorized as exposed to violence. In the sample chosen it was affecting 45% of the
schools. Those ones presented a worst performance in the scores; therefore, we could have a
biased since we assume it is due to the violence, however other possible causes like the
illiterate mothers of students of this kind of favelas will not be taking into account In here. All
this data was also complemented with data about the student mobility within the system
(through the secretaria municipal de educaçao). It is also important of considering the
students that leave the school (which represent 17% in this sample). They also discovered that
in the violent schools the mobility rates were higher than the rest. One of the possible reasons
that explains why the children are going to the low-performing schools is that, this violent
schools have a high proportion of students that study near of them and by hence the proximity
to the school is a major factor to decide the school in where the children will study. Through
the SME data, they had also studied the teacher’s absenteeism and medical leaves. They found
out that 16% of teachers were absent to the work at least one day during the year, but not
because of medical reasons. As a surprise they found out that this rate was lower for the
violent schools. The data of INEP helped them to know more on the school infrastructure and
the quality of it in the different schools. As they expected, the schools with violence had worse
infrastructure conditions, such as the nonexistence of science lab, computer lab and free
lunch.

In this work, the borders of the favelas were a key point and were based on the satellite
pictures provided by IPP. It is through it that they could define the violent favelas that were
localized at less than 250 meters. They also get additional information on the favelas, such as
the population density of the different neighbourhoods, the distances from the favelas to
schools, the main s roads, the income per capita, the gini index, information about favelas
areas, favelas steepness (thanks to the NASA website), favelas alternative names. All this extra
information was done to better understand these conflicts.

It is now time to talk about the empirical model that they used to due their analyse. As the
study is focused on a specific and very violent area with armed conflicts involving the rest of
the near population through the danger of their lives, before the analyse they were expecting
two results. The impact of the violence on the school’s human resources (attrition,
absenteeism, workplace stress, principal turnover) caused for example with school shutdown.
Secondly, the impact of violence on the student learning, through different kind of processes
such psychological problems or mental health diseases.

The authors mention the theory of compensating differentials made by Grogger in 1997, in
which he explains that the teachers who are thinking of working in risky school will accept if
they have a premium wage in order to compensate this decrease in their utility by decreasing
their expected life. Grogger find out that in the case for US, this was a reality, the violent
schools were accompanied with higher salaries. But in the case of the favelas it is different
since the salaries are fixed, as a result of that we have this high attrition levels. This affects
directly student achievement due to the discontinued classes that it is intensified through the
violence that doesn’t allow to take a school routine. Other consequences can occur through
this violence, as the expected cost of managing the schools are high, the number of turnover
principals also are affected. There are a lot of possible consequences of this violence that we
may not think about at the first moment and that go far beyond the school resources (such as
the mental health of children). Fowler in 2009 talked about the effects of children on children
and their high propensity to develop traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression when they
are exposed to it. This disorder can be attenuated thanks to the family support, however if the
parents have also been exposed to the violence and by hence traumatized are more propense
to have children that fell unsafe and can develop these problems as they transmit to them. We
must consider that in some cases, parents are going to invest more on the human capital of
the children if they perceive that it has occurred a shift on the school inputs, this is done in
order to compensate the violence negative consequences. This investment can be through
teaching them more at home or changing the school but also trying to decrease the possible
mental health consequences. However, at the time of this paper there was no clear study that
attributes to violence the negative effect on the student achievement. We have to take into
account the neighbourhood violence is not an isolated event and it is correlated to other facts
and socioeconomic disadvantages such as parental education, domestic violence that may
influence children results, because of that the estimated violence effect can be biased and
overestimated if we don’t take into account all these other variables. Till this paper, no other
study had succesufully separate the violence from those other factors as Aizer sayed. The
other limitation of this work and this problematic has to do with the measurement error, more
specifically, to the difficulty of characterise and categorize the neighbourhood violence.