Planejamento turístico em Santa Cruz/RN: um olhar nas fragilidades socioeconômicas e na criminalidade municipal

Abstract

The debate about public security linked to tourism has gained prominence in recent decades, currently configuring one of the main points of social demand. Violence, as it eminently affects collective relationships, can interfere with the development of tourist activity in the destination location. As it is a broad and multicausal phenomenon, to mitigate it requires a collective effort from different areas of knowledge. In Brazil, in the last decades, although this circumstance is present in the human reality, its manifestation did not happen equally throughout the national territory: while there was a residual decrease in the South, Southeast and Center-West regions, the Northeast showed a significant increase, mainly between 2009 and 2019. Rio Grande do Norte (RN), in this period, was one of the states that most suffered from the incidence of crimes against life. In addition, the aforementioned Federative Unit had one of the highest rates of violence against young people, women and black people in the country. Santa Cruz/RN – a tourist destination much sought after by pilgrims in the state –, is among the twenty cities with the highest occurrence of Lethal and Intentional Violent Conduct (LIVC) in RN. In addition, the city had the highest number of LIVCs in the Borborema Potiguar Microregion (33.5%) and in the Agreste/Trairi tourist hub (30.4%) between 2011 and 2018. Based on the analysis of the records provided by the city's Police Department, the most frequent crimes in the municipality are, respectively, domestic violence, robberies, thefts and homicides. However, these crimes have little or no connection with the tourist activity that takes place in the city. Finally, this work did not seek to correlate the growth of violence with tourism in Santa Cruz, but rather to investigate how the planning of the municipal government was taking place in relation to this sector.