Taking Back the Land: Police Operations and Sport Megaevents in Rio de Janeiro

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Taking Back the Land: Police Operationsand Sport Megaevents in Rio de JaneiroJoão H. Costa VargasPublished online: 27 Mar 2014.

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Neoliberalism and Cultural Politics in Dubai and Brazil

Taking Back the LandPolice Operations and Sport Megaeventsin Rio de Janeiro

Joao H. Costa Vargas

As Brazil prepares for hosting the 2014 World Cup and the2016 Olympic Games—both of which will feature Rio deJaneiro prominently—what do patterns of social represen-tation and state repression of predominantly Afrodescendedcommunities say about the symbolic, political, and materialdimensions of current black experiences in Brazil? This arti-cle focuses on the November 2010 massive police–militaryoperations that targeted Vila Cruzeiro and the Complexo doAlemao in Rio. These operations are emblematic of a newpublic security paradigm inaugurated in 2008 that aimedat retaking urban areas from the control of drug dealers.How, if at all, does this new security paradigm representa rupture with relation to historical patterns of anti-blackviolence perpetrated by state and non-state actors andinstitutions?

Keywords: 2014 World Cup, 2016 Olympic Games, anti-Blackness, Blackness,Blacks, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, state violence, UPPs and Pacification, urban space

As Brazil prepares for hosting the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 OlympicGames—both of which will feature Rio de Janeiro prominently—what do patterns of social representation and state repression ofpredominantly Afrodescended communities say about the symbolic,political, and material dimensions of current black experiences in

Thank you to Barbara Ransby for critical commentaries that much improved the essay. Alex Emboabada Costa also had great insights, most of which will have to go in another piece.

Souls

Souls 15 (4): 275–303, 2013 / Copyright # 2013 University of Illinois at Chicago /1099-9949/02 / DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2013.884445

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Brazil? This article focuses on the November 2010 massive police–military operations that targeted Vila Cruzeiro and the Complexodo Alemao in Rio as a way to engage this question and givebackground and context for the current realities.

As much as the militarized conflict over historically impoverishedareas was indeed about signaling Brazil’s grand entrance into theworld stage as an economic powerhouse and showcasing a newpublic security paradigm just in time for the mega sport events,it was also about addressing perennial questions on the place ofblacks and blackness—as bodies, communities, and territories—inboth city geographies and the national imaginary. To addresspre-mega sport events police operations, then, is to focus on theembattled black presence in a city that, in the last century at least,officially and informally (long term and ongoing racial warfarenotwithstanding), has made concerted efforts to present itselfas racially harmonious (e.g., Alvito and Zaluar 1998; Amar 2013;Vargas 2010).

Based on news media, mostly newspaper and television clips,as well as an engagement with a specialized literature on urbaninequality, public security, and violence, this article analyzes the2010 joint operation according to the following approaches. First,it examines the ways in which the Globo news conglomerate—television programs and newspapers—portrayed the state’s raidsand the responses to them by the alleged criminals as well as thelocal populations. And second, it probes the ways in which majorityblack communities and their corresponding territories are implicatedin and provide meaning to such state actions.

The 2010 operations forcefully exemplify the attempt to put intopractice a new paradigm of public security. Inaugurated in 2008, thisparadigm aimed at retaking urban areas from the control of drugdealers and cartels. Social services and urban infrastructure wouldfollow the state’s takeover. The Pacifying Police Units (UPPs inPortuguese), the language of pacification, and their seeming broadpublic support, became the most evident aspects of this initiative.

Since the 1980s’ redemocratizing period, there have been a numberof similar official attempts at reintegrating historical black areas intothe city’s networks of sociability and infrastructure—even when themost visible aspects of such attempts were increased police presenceand repression, and the displacement of black communities to lessvalued areas. Yet, the emphasis on human rights and community-police training programs has reemerged with a renovated, vibranteven, political will and seeming broad public acceptance. Even thoughUPP officers are still recruited in the traditionally corrupt and

276 ^ Souls October^December 2013

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anti-black Military Police,1 itself a leftover of the military dictator-ship, they receive, at the most, two weeks of special training. Theyare instructed to become appeasers rather than repressors; torespect and interact with favela dwellers rather than fear and controlthem.2 Given Rio’s—and, for that matter, the police’s transgenera-tional anti-black and warring ethos (e.g., Holloway 1993; HumanRights Watch 2009, 31–40), this is a modest, undoubtedly insufficientprogram. Yet the enthusiasts point out that, together with thepositive results so far—principally in the radical diminution of lethalviolence in UPP communities—an unprecedented opportunity toactualize a new paradigm of public security has presented itself. Tofocus on the 2010 operations, then, is to investigate how the newpublic security paradigm is represented, supported, and challengedby social actors and institutions such as state agents (includingelected officials), mass news media, and favela and non-favelaresidents. What this article asks but is able to answer only partiallyis this: how, if at all, does this new security paradigm representa rupture with relation to historical patterns of anti-black violenceperpetrated by state and non-state actors and institutions?

Still, one may ponder, how relevant is race, and blackness in parti-cular, to the analysis of police operations and social geography in Rio?Are there racial patterns that correlate to urban space? And if suchpatterns and correlation exist, are they, in turn, associated to specificlevels of violence employed by the state? In what follows, by way ofproviding a context for the police operation’s media representation,I explore these questions. Specifically, I engage works on geographiesof social inequality, state violence, and social constructions andperformance of race, as angles from which to analyze current publicsecurity policy and the seemingly powerful consensus that the policyenjoys. To critically analyze the 2010 operations is to engage a linger-ing problem affecting Rio and indeed Brazilian society: what is theplace of blacks and blackness in the national imaginary, politicalarenas, and urban landscapes? Persistent levels of residentialsegregation, blocked access to public services, and more troubling,vulnerability to violent death (e.g., Paixao 2010; Waiselfisz 2012),pose serious challenges to the official pacification and integrationefforts. When centering aspects of the black condition, the questionthat comes to the fore is whether, and to what extent, can thesepublic security campaigns avert anti-black, structural, and perhapsfoundational elements of the Brazilian nation. The fact that thepacification program enjoys a seeming unprecedented broad anddiverse public support makes this question all the more urgent, ifnot unusually complicated.

Neoliberalism and Cultural Politics in Dubai and Brazil ^ 277

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Rio’s Racial Geographies: Urban and Symbolic Spaces

In order to understand the patterns of state repression in disadvan-taged black communities, it is helpful to examine how the politics ofspace and race work in general. Henri Lefebvre (1991) allows for anappreciation of urban space as a product of historical power struggles.The social relations implicated in and derived from power strugglesbecome arranged in urban space according to hegemonic politicalunderstanding and practice. ‘‘Every mode of production,’’ specifiesLefebvre (1991, 53), ‘‘. . .produces a space, its own space.’’ The result-ing human distribution in urban space—social groups differentiatedby income, levels of formal education, insertion in the labor force,and vulnerability to state violence, for example—expresses degreesof subordination and privilege, and is maintained by an unstablebalance of consensus and coercion. Police presence and distributionof violence are crucial components of the coercive apparatus thatenacts a dominant understanding about those who are less or morevulnerable to the forces of the state. Vulnerability to police violence,thus, can be modeled as a continuum. According to the reigningideologies of market liberal (and in Brazil’s case, racial) democracy,in theory at least, one’s place in the continuum shifts according toone’s movement across and effective insertion in differentiated socialgroups: while some social groups experience identification with andprotection by the police, others experience estrangement from andrepression by the police. If we utilize Lefebvre’s formulations togenerate a snapshot of a historically particular yet dynamic socialfield, can we detect spatial patterns related to one’s position in thestructure of privilege and exclusion? In the case of contemporaryRio de Janeiro, can we draw correlations between urban space, socialdifference, and vulnerability to police violence?

The Rio police’s use of Auto de Resistencia—which I translate as‘‘Resistance Act’’ (RA) offers important insight into violence vis-a-visblack urban communities in the years leading up to the 2010 stateattacks.3 First formalized in 1969 during the military-imposeddictatorship—therefore a juridical instrument in the midst of a stateof exception—the RA is how police officers register injuries anddeaths occurred in the line of duty. Because police officers write theRAs, they reflect the officers’ version of the facts. As Misse (2011:39, 40) shows, routine police investigations of the RAs build fromthe premise that police officers shoot in legitimate self-defense;furthermore, there is a generalized assumption, among the rank andfile, and administrators, that ‘‘bandits deserve to die.’’ Not surprisingly,in almost all police documents describing deaths, the fatalities areregistered as ‘‘homicide following an act of resistance.’’ Homicide RAs


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became more prevalent in the 1990s, and peaked in 2007 when theyreached 902 for the city, according to the Public Security Institute ofthe State of Rio de Janeiro (ISP-RJ 2013).

Human Rights Watch found substantial proof that, in at least 35RAs in the state of Rio since 2006—RAs that were closely scrutinizedand researched, and thus rendered indicative of possible patternsbeyond the sample—the deaths reported as resulting from confronta-tions with agents of the law were in fact police executions. Forexample, even though RAs state that the victims were killed in gun-fire exchange, gunpowder residue on the victims’ skin reveals theywere shot at close range. Moreover, lethal wounds on the back ofthe head strongly suggest executions (Human Rights Watch 2009:24, 25). Such ‘‘Resistance Acts,’’ as part of a ‘‘police culture’’ thatincludes the arbitrary extermination of deemed ‘‘suspects,’’ in turntacitly supported by the attending unwillingness (and=or inability)of state watchdog bureaucracies to investigate such killings (Misse2011: 128, 129), effectively routinize, and thus institutionalize, policehomicide.4

On June 27, 2007, such patterns of state homicide renderedjuridically acceptable ex post facto (via the RAs) reached a perturbingmilestone. At the Complexo do Alemao, impoverished and working-class neighborhoods in the city’s northern zone, 19 people were killedduring a police operation designed to guarantee the security of thePan-American Games scheduled to happen the following month.According to the RAs, the deaths followed armed confrontationwith the police. Post-mortem examinations, however, revealed mostvictims were summarily executed: the bodies showed close-rangeshots to the nape and back (Human Rights Watch 2009: 27); 14 ofthe victims were killed by a shot in the upper body; six of them inthe face (see Figure 1).

Police killings frequently happen in places and against personsdeemed less-than-respectable, if not always already suspect (Misse2011: 131). Specifically, over 70 percent of all the state of Rio’s RAsin 2008 occurred in 10 of the 40 Public Security Integrated Areas,which are neighborhoods that fall under the jurisdiction of a numberof police departments (delegacias).5 In common these areas have thefollowing: they are poor and working class neighborhoods either innorthern and western parts of Rio’s city limits or in near-suburbanmunicipalities.6

While police lethality is a constitutive and constituting web ofpower and territory—how the state maintains control over and repro-duces human geographies (i.e., Foucault 1977)—it is interesting tonote the variations in how violence is employed in different locations.As much as state power is a product of formal legal and bureaucratic


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rules, it emerges, quite forcefully, in the ‘‘Resistance Acts’’ filings, asrepeated, almost expected processes and decisions by which sociallyshared beliefs—informal norms according to which the more or lessrespectable are defined—become themselves routinized and thusinstitutionalized.

Police lethality is indicative of how formal and informal normsoperate to create and reproduce unequal urban spaces. Still, insofaras deaths by the police enact socially shared understandings aboutthose who are deemed most in need of state intervention, it is partof a broader pattern of violence that victimizes people according toidentifiable urban geographies. For the greater Rio metropolitanconglomerate, which specialists have described as a fractured socialgeography (Rolnik 1989; Ventura 1994; Oliveira 2007), as in othermajor Brazilian cities (e.g., Vargas and Alves 2010), studies haveshown that homicide rates in more privileged areas are systemati-cally less than homicide rates in poor and peripheral areas. Accordingto researchers:

There is a considerable juxtaposition between the socioeconomic map and thevulnerability to homicide map for each city, in such a way that one’s residentialarea can be considered one of the central risk factors. The distribution oflethal violence on the territory, as in society, is far from being random. In sum,it is reasonable to conclude that lethal victimization affects especially theunderprivileged populations, who cannot protect themselves against it. (Canoand Ribeiro 2007: 72)7

Figure 1. A police officer walks past dead bodies in the aftermath of the 2007 Alemaooperation. Photo Credit: Severino Silva, Reuters=O Dia, June 27, 2007.


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Police lethality’s unequal distribution on Rio’s social geographyresults from, as well as intensifies, historical and contemporary socialinequalities, including vulnerability to violence and homicide.

One aspect of the gamut of spatialized social inequalities that isworth investigating is how racial belonging intersects with vulner-ability to violence in general and police lethality in particular. Datafrom the 2010 Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE)census indicate that in Rio de Janeiro’s ten poorer neighborhoods, 63percent of their inhabitants classified themselves as either black(preto) or mixed=brown (pardo). This breakdown is significant for,in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, blacks and browns comprise46 percent of its total population. Blacks and browns, thus, are over-represented in urban areas defined by economic deprivation. Thesenumbers suggest a three-way correlation between race, social class(or income, an admittedly incomplete index of class), and territory:in given social geographies, while a higher proportion of blacks isassociated to higher levels of poverty, a higher proportion of whitesis associated to higher economic power. Thus, for example, in one ofthe most well-known favelas in Rio, Mangueira, where per capitaincome is less than R$ 500 per month, 28 percent of its populationdeclared itself black (negra, excluding browns=pardos), in contrastto the city’s 10 percent self-declared black population (excludingbrowns=pardos). In Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas area, on the other hand,average per capita income is R$ 6,160, and blacks (excluding browns=pardos) are 1.5 percent of the population.

Figure 2 provides an illustration of related spatial patterns in Rio.While the census data analysis establishes a three-way connectionbetween race, social class, and territory, the previous analysis ofpolice lethality, ‘‘Resistance Acts,’’ and homicide rates made a casefor a connection between violence, social class, and territory. A syn-thesis of these two analyses is that areas where proportionallyhigher levels of violence occur—violence perpetrated by the stateor otherwise—are both economically disadvantaged and disproportio-nately black. Thus, the areas where there is a greater concentrationof white youths, as shown in Figure 2, are also the areas where thereis greater economic security and less vulnerability to violence andpolice lethality. For example, while in 2010 there was only oneviolent death of a youth in Lagoa, in the southern part of Rio wherewhite youths are at least more than 70 percent of all youths, inthe Mare region there were 80 youths killed.8 The Mare region isin Rio’s northern zone where white youths are 50 percent or lessof all youths.

Young, black, male, resident of peripheral and economicallydeprived areas: this is the profile of those who are the most


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frequently victims of homicide, including police homicide (Leandro2010: 1328). Recent studies contextualize this claim as it applies tothe local, state, and national levels. Between 2002–2010, Brazil’shomicides for whites fell 25.5 percent; for blacks (blacks andbrowns), homicides increased 29.8 percent. Over the same period,the relation between rates of white homicide and rates of blackhomicide, what is called the National Index of Black Victimization,has shown a steady increase: in 2002 it was 65.4 percent (that is,proportionally 65.4 percent more blacks died than whites), 90.8 in2006, and 132.3 in 2010. States renowned sociologist Julio JacoboWaiselfisz (2012: 14), whose study formulated the National Indexof Black Victimization: ‘‘Of great concern is not only the high victimi-zation rate for blacks found in 2010. Even more worrisome is howthe problem is intensifying over time. Current levels of black victimi-zation are already intolerable, and if nothing is done immediatelyand drastically, black victimization in the country can reach levelsthat humanity finds inadmissible.’’

Black victimization is a measure of how social dynamics impactspecific bodies and communities disproportionately. Black personsare vulnerable to lethality in ways that are foreign to non-blacks;black experiences related to death are thus incommensurable rela-tive to the experiences of non-blacks, especially the white. If wetake the insight Cano and Ribeiro (2007) draw about victimizationbeing correlated to one’s inability to protect oneself, then blacks’vulnerability to death is a measure of blacks’ (a) blocked access

Figure 2. Proportion of White youth by census areas, city of Rio de Janeiro, based on the2000 IBGE census. In Ottoni (2008: 7). The categories (Classes de variacao), from top(lighter) to bottom (darker) are, respectively, up to 50%; more than 50% up to 70%; more than70% up to 96%.


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to the material resources necessary to guarantee one’s safety(chief among them are the resources necessary to inhabit saferneighborhoods) and (b) diminished symbolic and political value.Lethal violence tolerated or perpetrated by the state indicates thisdiminished value from the perspective of those actors who embodyinstitutions that represent dominant narratives about the preferentialvictims of homicide. Thus, patterns of black victimization persist—andindeed increase nationally—because the symbolic and political priceof black death is ultimately irrelevant to the state and its dominantconstituents.

‘‘Homicide by legal intervention,’’ that is, homicides committed byindividuals working for the state, especially the police, is thusa measure that stands in inverse relation to the symbolic and politicalprice of black death from the perspective of the state. Notwithstandingthe documented underreporting patterns regarding such homicides,between 2001–2007, nationwide blacks responded for 61.7 percent oftheir total, 64.5 percent for 2007 (Paixao 2010: 259). Such dispropor-tionate high rates of black homicide by the state suggest a hightolerance for black death, which in turn allows for the propositionthat the symbolic and political value the state gives to black lifeis negligible. Would the state be as irresponsive if its apparatusdisproportionately killed whites?

This set of findings and questions, however, allows for no simpleanalysis. Consider the complexity of the current political momentfrom the perspective of blacks. On the one hand, nationally, blacksare overrepresented in rates of violent death, preventable death bydisease, blocked access to health care, and other indicators suggestinglong-standing patters of social exclusion (Paixao 2010: chaps. 2, 4). Onthe other hand, however, contextualized within current redistributivemacroeconomic and social policies in Brazil, black victimizationrates coexist with very graspable and unprecedented economic andsocial gains brought about by the Lula and Dilma Rousseff federaladministrations. Inflation control, minimum wage increase, andpublic policies, such as the Bolsa Famılia (Family Stipend) wereeffective in transferring income to impoverished families. Given thatblacks–who in Brazil, per official census and the Black movement,include blacks and browns—are disproportionately representedamong the poor, is it only logical that they were the main bene-ficiaries of such redistributive policies that focused on the mostdisadvantaged (Paixao 2010)?

In sum, nationally, while blacks are overrepresented in homicides,they are also the segment that most benefitted from the last twoWorkers’ Party federal administration’s redistributive policies.Indeed, according to the government’s data and analysis, blacks are


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now almost 80 percent of new members of Brazilian middle class(Lemos and Martello 2012).

When we readjust our focus to the state and city and Rio deJaneiro, these contradictions gain added complexity. Shortly afteracute conflict between armed groups and the police peaked in2007, public safety data, especially violent deaths, began to showimprovements. Between 2002–2006, in the state of Rio, 1857 minorswere reportedly murdered, the great majority of whom were black(Filho 2011). In 2007, the rate of mortality by homicide for blackmen was 130 percent higher than the rate for white men (Paixao2010: 255, 256). This was a time when the model of social controlwas based on ostensive and repressive violence (Misse 2011), includ-ing, as we have seen above, the routinization of unaccounted policelethality.

Beginning in 2008, this repressive model of public security isreplaced by an approach more dependent on community policingand, per official language, the state’s ‘‘reclaiming of territory’’ fromdrug dealing organizations. This new approach uses a number of pre-viously attempted community police features such as establishingposts in the embattled areas, and emphasizing conflict resolutionrather than control and surveillance. Yet, one of its main noveltiesis the unprecedented media and federal, state, and local governmentsupport. When, in 2008, the Santa Marta favela, in Rio’s south zone,became the first area to house an UPP, the symbol and most visibleaspect of the new public security policy, an accompanying powerfuland unparalleled consensus began to emerge.

The dawn of the UPP established a clear contrast to both previouspublic security approaches and current non-UPP police practices.While the average ratio of inhabitants per police officer in the stateof Rio de Janeiro is 405, in UPP communities it is 101. UPP officertraining includes human rights and sociology. Exemplifying thisnew profile, former UPP commander, Colonel Robson Rodrigues daSilva, holds a Master’s degree in Anthropology. As of February2013, there were 31 communities with UPPs; the goal is to have40 by the time of the 2014 World Cup. What have the UPPsaccomplished?

Data from the Instituto de Seguranca Publica (Public SecurityInstitute) comparing indices of crime for the first semester of 2010to the first semester of 2011 indicate marked improvements followingUPPs implementation. In Santa Marta, homicides fell 100 percent,while car theft fell 44 percent; in Cidade de Deus, a west-side impo-verished area where the second UPP was installed in February2009, homicides fell 82 percent, car theft fell 84 percent. Positiveresults were verified in other UPP neighborhoods, culminating in


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the lower number of homicides registered in the state since 1991 fora period of 11 months, at 3650, representing a 7.2 percent reductionfrom the previous year (ISP-RJ 2013).

The emerging consensus appears forcefully in mass opinionsurveys. Rio de Janeiro’s principal newspaper, O Globo, interviewed600 residents of favelas with UPP, finding that 93 percent consideredtheir community safe or very safe. In non-UPP favelas, 70 percent of600 people interviewed were favorable or very favorable of installinga UPP in their neighborhood; 48 percent of those considered theircommunities unsafe (O Globo 2010).

This apparent broad support is important to consider, not becauseit provides a self-evident account of what is actually going on at theneighborhood level, especially in recently occupied favelas (we willsee below that UPP community members are far more ambivalentabout pacification than the survey numbers suggest), but ratherbecause it is a fundamental aspect of this new security paradigmand the political climate from which it emerges. It is precisely thisseemingly powerful consensus—cross-class, multiracial, pan religious,based on a multi-party accord on the local, state, and national levels—that defines and gives specificity to this new security paradigm.9

The context, then, is one of marked contradictions. Whereascurrently blacks experience unprecedented economic gains, at Rio’slocal level, in communities close to tourist, financial, transportation,and sports areas, favela residents witness dramatic reduction inviolent deaths (see Figure 3). Yet, blacks are also disproportionatelyvictimized by state neglect (in the spheres of education and health,for example) and, in spite of the recent improvements, bodily violence,including a persistence of police abuse. Indeed, a seldom-mentionedfact is that, since the implementation of UPPs, in those communitiesbodily injury (lesoes corporais dolosas), as a host of other crimes, hasincreased (Cano 2012, 45). Due to the absence of the strict authori-tarian rules of sociability and the paralegal system that drug dealersimposed on residents, or to the greater reporting of such offenses thatis now enabled by an alleged greater trust in the new police—ora combination of each—what emerges from this is that UPP areasremain steeped in social vulnerabilities that include violence anduncertainty.

To fully grasp the contradictions to which I am pointing, it isnecessary to split the hairs, as it were, of the current public securityimprovements in Rio. It must be noted that, in the first 13 communitieswhere UPPs were implemented, between 2008–2011 monthly deathsduring police operations went from 5.7 to 0.12 per 100,000 inhabitants(Cano 2012: 32, 33). This is the equivalent of a net decrease of 60 victimsof violent death per 100,000 inhabitants per year. An explanation


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for this improvement is that, with pacification, there is a cessation ofopen hostilities between drug dealers and the police.

Yet, qualitative research, as well as recently well-publicized casesof police misconduct and murder of UPP favela residents,10 revealthat, in spite of the new paradigm’s emphasis on an improved, com-munitarian and human-rights-oriented policing approach, historicalforms of police disrespect and abuse (e.g., Holloway 1993) commonagainst the poor and the black, remain widespread. Ethnographicstudies (Rocha 2012; Sluis 2011) as well as extensive interviews withUPP officers and community residents (Cano 2012) show that,although the UPP orientation enjoys broad support from the MilitaryPolice high brass, the state and city governments, it is seen as a lesserkind of police work by the rank-and-file. For them, the UPP projectlacks legitimacy (Cano 2012: 138). Lower rank officers claim thatwork conditions in UPP communities are not what they imaginedwhen they entered the police force: the police posts are often make-shift accommodations, constructed from shipment containers, whoseventilation and bathrooms are rudimentary, when not altogetherabsent. Police officers complain that the new UPP uniform, one thatis designed to differentiate it from the Military Police and accentuatea civilian, rather than a combat ethos, is not conductive for work

Figure 3. Favelas (in red) with Pacifying Police Units, UPPs. Source: O Globo. http://oglobo.globo.com/infograficos/upps-favelas-rio/ (accessed March 16, 2013).


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in neighborhoods that are notoriously hilly and often muddy. Asimportant, UPP officers claim that the extra monthly salary theyget is neither paid on time nor compensates for the fact thatUPP communities are commonly located farther away from theirhomes, in peripheric neighborhoods, than the Military Police head-quarters.

Still, frustration among UPP officers goes much deeper than prac-tical concerns. Most new police officers are attracted to the professionbecause they share a view of the police that is repressive, proactive,that shoots at and kills bandits, and whose main function is to represscrime. Prospective police officers are guided by their own heightenedrighteous morality and an expectation of bellicose adventure.11 TheUPP model, on the other hand, stresses a different, more democratic,and less ostensive form of policing. States a discontented officer: ‘‘Inthe streets, things are different than here in this UPP community.Anything that you do here, they will pull out their cell phones andfilm you. For example . . . In the streets, if you stop a car, and thinkit is suspect, you take your gun out because you don’t know whoyou are dealing with. . . . Here it’s different because if you do that,someone will record you, and next thing you know, it’s on TV. Why?Because of this politics of appeasement (apaziguamento)’’ (Cano2012:141).

Much work remains to be done about this new public securitymodel. The transition from drug cartel regime to UPPs is certainlya good opportunity for a truly participatory type of public securityparadigm, one that moves beyond the violence and authoritarian-ism of both drug dealers and the widespread police corruption.Yet—and this is certainly another critical shortcoming of thenew security paradigm—no local community input was ever takeninto account in the elaboration of these otherwise well-intentionedpolicies.

The current seeming broad consensus about UPPs, therefore, ismade possible not only because of the optimism arising out of effectiveredistributive policies and public security improvements. Just asimportant, and perhaps more telling, the consensus requires thesilencing of long-term anti-black state and societal dispositions, andhow such dispositions play themselves out in the current newpublic security paradigm. Such is the work of Brazilian anti-blackhegemony: it operates in a frequency that, while not immediatelydetectable, is nevertheless effective in naturalizing social hierarchiesas they are manifested in modalities of urban space, gender, black-ness. This phenomenon, which is ultimately about permanence,becomes all the more interesting in a context marked by a newparadigm of social management that emphasizes change.


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In what follows, I focus on the news coverage of the police–militaryoperations preceding the UPP installation in Vila Cruzeiro andAlemao. As windows into socially shared representations—and therobust emerging consensus—about disadvantaged neighborhoods untilthen dominated by drug commerce armed factions, news coverageallows further insights into the contradictory pre-mega sports eventsmoment in Rio. Specifically, hegemonic mass news media rendition ofthe 2010 operations revealed core socially shared principles on whichthe new public security paradigm rested. The Globo conglomerate,that includes print, radio, Internet, and TV news, as well as presspublishing, film, and telenovelas, among others, holds a near-monopolyin Brazil. Worldwide, Globo TV’s revenue is second only to the ABCTelevision Network. Competing channels often mirror their coverageon Globo’s approach. Globo offers a hegemonic perspective thatinterprets and shapes the social world according to its own interests.The maintenance of the city’s racial hierarchies, expressed throughand reproduced as economic, spatial, and alleged moral marginality ofblack communities, figure prominently in Globo’s interests. Oftendepicted as objects of control and fear (rather than subjects of politicalagency, for example), blacks and their historical territories are oftencast as the opposite of the virtuous, cosmopolitan, and democraticpolis.12

While UPPs were said by officials and supporting constituents topromote integration, peace, and democracy in communities until thendominated by authoritarian drug cartels, what emerges from theoperations’ coverage is a set of narratives that emphasize persistentnegative representations of historically black communities and theirdwellers. Although there was, predictably, concentrated focus on druggangs and the violence they generated and disseminated to the rest ofthe city, there was also a telling conflation of the danger produced bythe gangs and the alleged danger produced by and in favelas. Gangsand favelas became interchangeable parts of a feared universe ofmalevolence. Such conflation, I suggest, helps us understand thechallenges, and perhaps the ultimate limitation of the new securityparadigm. Inasmuch as favelas represent the other, the source ofevil, and territories that resist the rule of law, they are less likelyto be accepted as legitimate members of the state.

Vila Cruzeiro

On Wednesday, November 25, 2010, federal and local military policesearched homes and secured the perimeter of Vila Cruzeiro, a favelaon the northern part of Rio de Janeiro long considered a stronghold


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for drug gangs. In their headquarters 20 kilometers away, anestimated 800 military troops were on standby, ready to back them up.

Intense confrontations between police forces and armed gangmembers preceded the operation in Vila Cruzeiro. Since Sunday,November 21, there had been 23 deaths, 47 incarcerations, and 112people detained for investigation (Soares 2010).13 On Tuesday,November 24, all military police officers, including those workingbehind desks, in hospitals, mechanics and cooks, were ordered tojoin the street patrols. According to the Fecha Quartel (Close theBarracks) order, all administrative activities were suspended (O Dia,November 24, 2010: 4). Rio state’s security secretary, Jose MarianoBeltrame, affirmed that the police were going to get tougher on crim-inals. To emphasize his resolve, as well as to stress the need for theconcerted police efforts, he suggested that the city’s two main factions,the Comando Vermelho, and Terceiro Comando, were joining forces.Still, even with the reinforcements, the attacks on civilians and policecontinued: burned cars, buses, and shootings were widely reported inthe newspapers and television programs (Braga and Mendes 2010).

Early on Wednesday, the military police General Commander,Mario Sergio Duarte, ordered that all officers remain on duty, whilethose troops at home were told to go back to their posts. That sameafternoon, when Special Operations officers (BOPE, Batalhao deOperacoes Especiais) entered Vila Cruzeiro, they were immediatelyfired at. The many small stores along the Nossa Senhora da PenhaAvenue proceeded to immediately shut down, as did all the other com-mercial venues nearby. Perhaps sensing that the police and militarybuildup were threatening their territories in unprecedented ways,the local gangs did not measure efforts in their attempts to repealthe state operation. Even the caveirao (‘‘the big coffin’’), the all-blackmilitary-modified armored vehicle BOPE had been using in the lastfew years, became a target. The object of both fear and scorn—all wellexpressed in a number of popular rap songs—the caveirao wasattacked as two homemade bombs were thrown under it. In anapparent victory for the local rebels, the armored assault vehiclehad to turn around so that the fire that quickly began to consumeit could be extinguished. It finally stopped in front of the landmarkNossa Senhora da Penha church, at a safe distance from the intensegunfire. Yet this temporary setback would not deter the larger,and final, massive operation, materialized a few hours later, whena number of military vehicles and personnel engaged the conflictand effectively put an end to it (New York Times, November 25, 2010).

The local midday newscast RJ TV, one of TV Globo’s most watchedprograms, hosted by Ana Paula Araujo, opened its Wednesday editionwith a recapitulation of the last days’ events. In quick succession,


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clips of burning buses, gun battles between the police and allegeddrug dealers, as well as footage of officers handling a number ofassault rifles, guns, drugs, grenades, and money, allegedly confis-cated from the criminals, were shown as Araujo’s grave voice andfacial expression described the events (RJ TV November 25, 2010).

As it had become routine during Globo’s coverage of the city’s mainevents, particularly those associated with favelas, Araujo follows herintroduction with a live call to the Globocoptero, the TV station’shelicopter. Hovering over Vila Cruzeiro, reporter Tatiana Nascimentoprovides a quick account of real time, on-the-ground developments.The camera shows several two-passenger motorcycles making theirway to and stopping at a high point in the neighborhood, andhurriedly dropping off what Nascimento describes as members ofthe drug trade organization. ‘‘We made some impressive footage.A lot of armed bandits arriving at this place; some of them fired. . . .A truly scary scene [uma imagem verdadeiramente assustadora].We just received the information that an 81-year-old man has beenshot here in Vila Cruzeiro. . . .’’ While her voice is firmer and calmerthan that of her colleague in the studio, her facial expression is insynchronicity with Araujo’s, suggesting concern, and traces of fear(RJ TV November 25, 2010).

The Globocoptero—as a provider of information, as well as a vesselthat enables the capture and dissemination of images without havingto establish physical closeness to those on whom it focuses—isa powerful technology and symbol of the city’s fractured geographiesof privilege, race, and violence. Most Rio favelas are characterized bytheir hilly topography, the highest points of which, where the streetsbecome not only steep but quite narrow, are difficult to access by caror any larger ground vehicle.14

In spite of the obvious advantages those in the helicopter, as well asTV Globo’s viewers, had over the alleged criminals—while the formerobserved and analyzed, the latter, even if unwillingly, became theflying lens’ object—the voice and facial inflections with which theGlobocoptero images were described betrayed a sense of empoweredbewilderment. Empowered because the aerial perspective provideda panoptical (thus protected) view of the neighborhood. Unlike policehelicopters, TV Globo’s aircraft hovered at an altitude beyond thereach of ground fire. Yet there was some bewilderment. It wasa consequence, first, of being able to closely watch, with strikingdefinition, the comings and goings of those who allegedly had beenterrorizing the city. This ocular proximity, while laced with thedesires to know and control, produced the contradictory effect ofan apparent and unwanted physical closeness. From the perspectiveof the better off, the dweller of the non-favela residential areas,


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Brazilian social and racial relations are such that, unless the powerlines are clearly marked—power lines that define who watches, whotouches, who controls, and who pays—they generate anxiety. Brazi-lian cordiality (Holanda 1948; Turra and Venturi 1995) and its affect-ive dimensions (Freyre 1973; Ribeiro 1995) are thus deeply implicatedin how Vila Cruzeiro is portrayed from above. Well expressed in thereporters’ voice and facial inflections, this anxiety suggested thatpolice action was a necessary instrument for the reestablishment oflegible, clearly delimited social boundaries. Both reporters are sociallywhite women apparently in their 30s: their expressions of concerneffectively resonate in view of the allegedly dangerous classes of thefavelas—overwhelmingly male and socially non-white (and thereforeblack) in the case of the gang members. While Brazilian dominantcultural ideology allows for occasions when the black body is an objectof consumption and desire (Soares 2012), it also configures the maleblack body as the landscape of aggression, abjection, and the producerof violence (Alves 2012; Rocha 2012; Santos 2012).

Back in the studio, Araujo mentions that Rodrigo Pimentel, ‘‘specialcommentator on security, a former officer in the special operationsBOPE,’’ noticed that the alleged gang members were using verypowerful weapons. Pimentel’s voice describes a scene in which, whilemost suspected bandits are dispersing away from the spot where theywere previously seen concentrated, a man armed with an assault rifleapparently takes position, waiting for advancing police officers andarmy troops. The bandits, Pimentel explains in a concerned, hurried,almost stumbling voice, have a plan to oppose, at least slow down, thepolice operation. Pimentel’s militarily trained eye quickly interpretedthe movement along the narrow street he saw broadcast via Globo’shelicopter camera: ‘‘. . . this suspect (elemento) is helping withcontaining the police’s advance; . . . this gang member is waiting forthe police’s entry [into the neighborhood].’’ Pimentel, now shownon the screen, delivers a short statement that reveals much of TVGlobo’s—and we can surmise, the broader public—expectationsabout the so-called ‘‘suspect elements.’’ ‘‘Even with all this policeapparatus,’’ continues Pimentel, ‘‘you see the will to resist.’’ Araujoquickly echoes the statement, repeating it verbatim, for emphasis.15

Resistance, in Pimentel’s explanation, is not only a blatantlyunlawful act; it is also a challenge to the foundational imperativeof favela control. The reporters’ primordial response to the gangmembers’ actions reveals a socially shared recognition that such actsof defiance ultimately threatened the basic elements structuringprivilege and belonging: insurgent agency, symbolized forcefully inthe heavy weaponry utilized by the young men determined to resistthe police operation, openly challenged spatial separation, control,


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and predictability, all based on the necessary monopoly of violence.The employment of both the local police and army indicated themagnitude of the threat as well as the urgency with which the basesof Rio’s structured unequal sociability (Oliveira 2007) had to bereestablished.

The gang members’ audacity notwithstanding, Pimentel’s expertcommentaries reassured the viewers that military supremacy at VilaCruzeiro was inevitable. ‘‘The bandits have nowhere to go.’’ A fewdays earlier, the Jacarezinho favela, the second largest in the metro-politan region, where the same gang faction, Comando Vermelho,dominated the drug trade, had been, once again, forcefully occupiedby the police. In the process, gang members were either incarcerated,killed, or they were seen fleeing. As Pimentel presciently noted, forthe ever-challenged members of Comando Vermelho, in Vila Cruzeiroas in other areas in the greater Rio they dominated, the neighbor-hoods of the Complexo do Alemao were the only remaining optionsfor escape and refuge (RJ TV News, November 25, 2010).

While focused on the supposed drug dealers, TV Globo’s narrativesare also about the non-others, ‘‘we.’’ Pimentel, as well as the newsreporters more generally, mobilize always-already known tropes (ofdanger, vulnerability, crime) that, if on the one hand make descrip-tive claims about Vila Cruzeiro, on the other, and as important,albeit implicitly, establish bases on which the non-favela, respect-able, stable society stands. These narratives about the othersand non-others are part of a constellation of shared understandingsconstantly mobilized and replenished. References, even if oblique,to specific geographies, social constructions of race—and especiallyblackness—and, by default, the virtuous community, inform thesymbolic efficacy these narratives attain. Thus, for example, at theheight of police lethality in the state of Rio, Governor Serigo Cabral’sstatement (Folha de S.Paulo 2007b) on abortion can be understood,not as aberrant, but rather as the expression of the underlyinglogic and symbology informing the city’s dominant view on its socialgeographies:

I am in favor of women interrupting an undesired pregnancy. . . . You look atthe number of children born in Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas, Tijuca, Meier andin Copacabana, it’s a Swedish standard. Now, you look at Rocinha [a favelain the southern part of Rio]. It is Zambia, Gabon standards. That is a criminalassembly line, an industry of criminals.

At 3 pm on November 25, 2010, as the reporters were recapping livesome of the day’s events, an aerial view of the favela’s highest pointcaptured what seemed like a mass exodus of drug dealers, from VilaCruzeiro to the Complexo do Alemao. On foot, motorcycles, cars, and


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trucks, the fleeing men used the narrow winding dirt road connectingboth neighborhoods. A few shots were fired at the group from a policehelicopter and snipers, hitting two men. According to the news report,there were at least one hundred men making their way to the Alemaocomplex.16 Retaken by the forces of the state, Vila Cruzeiro and itsadjoining neighborhoods were now part of the legal city; the Alemaoneighborhoods were next.

Complexo do Alema‹ o

At 7:59 am on Sunday, November 28, 2010, an estimated 2,600police officers, marines, and army personnel moved into the impover-ished working class area known as the Alemao favela complex.Helicopters, military combat vehicles, and a well-planned and swiftoperation guaranteed that, a mere one hour and twenty minuteslater, the flags of Brazil and Rio de Janeiro state were raisedon Alemao’s highest hill, the Areal.17 The geographic symbologywas evident to all parties involved in the operation: the armed men(and a few women) of the state and of the drug gangs; the attentive,embedded-with-the-police news media; and the broader public. Drugdealers’ control over the favelas’ highest points marked not only theabsence of the state. It also signaled the dominance of a paramilitarybureaucratic organization whose material resources and monopoly ofthe use of violence exerted totalitarian power over the local political,social, and cultural dynamics. From the perspective of law enforce-ment, Rio favela’s high points have been the hardest to reach andseize.18

The tactical script had been rehearsed in the Vila Cruzeiro andindeed other earlier operations. Coordinated local police forces,including the specialized BOPE team, as well as the marines anddivisions of the Brazilian navy and military, swiftly establisheda perimeter around the community and proceeded to scan it, mostlyon foot, from its center moving outwards. Lauded as a historicmoment by TV Globo news reporters, high military and police officers,and specialized commentators, the Alemao action did not involveas spectacular images as those produced during the more directconfrontation in Vila Cruzeiro.19

Jubilant, TV Globo’s reporters and analysts repeatedly stated,throughout the day, that Alemao’s successful occupation would propelRio’s metropolitan region into a new era. In the widely popular,nationally broadcast Fantastico—the 8–10 pm Sunday-night programthat is a mix of entertainment, more in-depth reporting, and newsrecap—Araujo and Pimentel were asked to comment on the event’ssignificance. Pimentel—as his colleague Araujo, more formal and


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donning much heavier makeup than their local news programsrequired—concurred that a paradigm change concerning publicsafety in Rio was under way. He stated:

This is the HQ, the bunker of crime in Rio. This is where attacks against otherfavelas, invasions of rival territories originate. Occupation [by the police] meansimmediate reduction in homicides and car theft, which are mostly the result oftensions between criminal factions. There will be a feeling of peace, not only inthe Leopoldina region [that includes Vila Cruzeiro and Alemao] but in the entirecity. (Fantastico, November 28, 2010)

A Parted City, Divided Opinions

By way of conclusion, let me focus on the conflicting meanings recentpolice operations have attained among distinct social groups in Rio. Asindicated earlier, there is a seemingly robust popular consensusabout the pacifying operations and the UPPs that follow. The analysisof Globo’s coverage of the pacifying operations revealed some of thehegemonic, socially shared sentiments and principles supporting (andreproduced by) this consensus. These sentiments and principles includethe primordial fear, and abjection, felt among the white-identified andself-declared worthy citizens, of the black body and the communitiesharboring and (re)producing this body; the need for demarcatingunambiguous boundaries between the favelas and non-favela areas,between ‘‘them’’ and ‘‘us’’; and the support for state interventionsthat reestablish, on the one hand, the hegemony of subjects entitledto political and violent agency (the state, the army, and the police),and the subordination (or objectification) of the abject black subject—not only the gang member, but indeed the favela as a whole.

Of course, these sentiments and principles become murky as they arepackaged in, and become intertwined with, the official narrativesemphasizing democracy, citizenship, and peace. A heuristic propositionwe can draw is that, in this context, democracy and human rights arenot antithetical to—and indeed seem to depend on, precisely—themaintenance of such antiblack sentiments and principles.

The data I focus on next, based on the reputable Getulio VargasFoundation’s 2300 interviews conducted between 2009–2011, in threedifferent Rio social and geographical zones, provide interpretive para-meters from which we draw further provisory conclusions about thecurrent political moment. The first geographical zone is the Complexodo Alemao, while the other two are ‘‘asphalt,’’ non-favela and thusrelatively better-off areas.20 Because the interviews were conductedbefore and after the 2010 Alemao police operations, they allow us toengage in how the state’s actions were perceived by specificallylocated persons in different points in time.


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Figure 4 illustrates that the most dramatic increase in the positiveperception of the police occurs in the Alemao area: before the UPP,less than a third of its population found the police respectful; afterthe UPP, 49 percent of its population found the police respectful. Thissuggests the new policing paradigm, of which the UPPs are its mostrecognizable part, has indeed produced positive results. As telling,however, is that, even after the installation of the UPP, less than halfof Alemao’s population find the police respectful—a number evenmore significant when compared to the 68 and 73 percent of personsin zones A and B, respectively, who do so in 2011.

Figure 4. Do the police treat well neighborhood dwellers? Source: FGV (2011: 12).

Figure 5. How do you evaluate the police operation at Alemao? Grades from the highest,10, to the lowest, 0. Source: FGV (2011: 34).


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Figure 5 illustrates residents’ evaluations of the police operation atAlemao. While the majority of residents at Alemao (53 percent) givethe operation excellent marks, it is interesting to note that residentsof neighborhoods of the ‘‘asphalt’’ give the operation high marksat even greater proportions (58 percent in Zone B and 63 percent inZone A). As revealing is the higher proportion of residents of Alemao(27 percent) who give low marks to the police operation—a proportionthat is more than double the proportion of those who gave low marksin the Zone A (13 percent) and Zone B (11 percent).

Figure 6, also reflecting residents’ opinions following Alemao’stakeover, reveals far greater knowledge of the UPPs among residentsof Zones A and B than among Alemao residents. Those who claimed toknow ‘‘a lot’’ (conhece muito) or ‘‘a little’’ (conhece pouco) about UPPsat Zone B, for example, totaled 59 percent, whereas they were only 23percent at Alemao. On the other hand, those who claimed they knewabout UPPs ‘‘only by word of mouth’’ (so de ouvir falar) or who ‘‘hadnever heard of it’’ (nunca ouvi falar) were 41 percent at Zone B and78 percent at Alemao.

Taken together, these figures, and the previous analyses, allow thefollowing provisory conclusions.

First, as historical, demographic, and symbolically black spaces(e.g., R. Santos 2012), since the implementation of UPPs, areaslike Alemao have witnessed marked improvements in public safety,especially a substantial fall in lethal violence. Coupled with signi-ficant gains in earnings and unprecedented access to credit forconsumer goods and housing, disadvantaged persons, and especiallyblack disadvantaged persons (Paixao 2010), are experiencing undis-putable improvements in their economic and social conditions.

Second, however, as the national analyses of lethal violence andits normatization by the state indicate (Leandro 2010; Misse 2011),

Figure 6. How much do you know about the UPPs? (%). From top to bottom, each responsetranslates as: A lot; Not much; Only heard of it; Never heard of it. Source: FGV (2011: 37).


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black bodies and black geographies are, relative to other racialgroups, still and increasingly vulnerable to and impacted by violenceand death (e.g., Waiselfisz 2012). This partially explains the contin-ued tensions between the police and economically disadvantagedneighborhoods in Rio—tensions that are well illustrated in theongoing mutual suspicion between UPP officers and favela residents,even after the obvious improvements UPPs have enabled (Figures 4and 5). Recent ethnographic works in UPP communities showa continued pattern of aggressive policing, one that tends to targetdarker-skinned youths (e.g., Sluis 2011: 20).21 Moreover, it has beenargued that, while pacification diminishes violence in UPP neighbor-hoods and lowers citywide violence rates, violence has augmented inareas without UPPs, especially in the metropolitan region’s westzones (Jones and Rodgers 2011: 991), and recently in the adjoiningcity of Niteroi, located east, immediately across the GuanabaraBay. In sum, although the improvements in lethal violence in UPPcommunities are indisputable, two important factors need to beconsidered: (1) long-term and national trends of black victimizationand (2) the continued war and anti-black mentality that mark theshared symbolic universe of police officers, especially those occupyinglower ranks.

Central to understanding current and future sources of conflictin UPP communities is that many rank-and-file UPP officers feellike they perform a second-class function when compared to that ofregular police officers—as many interviews show bluntly, theseofficers resent that they have to mediate quotidian conflicts andengage in dialogue with residents rather than hunt down criminals.This sentiment reveals the persistence of a war mentality that is,precisely, at the root of the historical and continuing patterns ofpolice abuse and killings that disproportionately victimize youngblack males. Many UPP officers are not at ease in their new rolesas community mediators; it is foreign to them, and indeed a sourceof moral dilemma, that they are instructed to serve rather thanrepress the communities where they work. They still harbor negativeviews about these predominantly black areas and the people thatinhabit them, and they resent their new roles.

The above two factors explain the persistent skepticism, andincreased opposition, to the new security paradigm that is slowlygaining voice in favelas and alternative news media. When favelaresidents express distrust of UPPs, they in fact draw from localexperience, transgenerational knowledge, and national awareness.

Third, as part of a neoliberal—or postneoliberal, as Amar (2013)suggests—logic of social management, UPPs transform yet intensifyRio’s geographies and experiences of inequality. Geographer James


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Freeman (2012: 106) states: ‘‘Although officials sometimes deny theconnection, UPPs seem to be located to provide security for thegames. UPPs occupy favelas in the wealthy South Zone neighbor-hoods most likely to be frequented by tourists, around the centralbusiness district, near Olympic venues and along paths strategic forthe games. Typical of neoliberal governance, public security policyhas been crafted by and for particular private interests.’’ Pacifiedareas become new opportunities for business and speculation. Whilesome dwellers are able to improve their economic conditions by tap-ping into these new resources (by opening new businesses, renting,and selling), many others experience these intensified market activi-ties as added economic pressure. It is well known that UPP neighbor-hoods often go through marked real estate value increase. In DonaMarta, for example, houses valued at 8,000 Reais in 2007 were soldat about 30,000 Reais two years later (O Globo 2009; Cardone2012). Speculation and higher rentals have generated additionalsources of income for owners (who are now increasingly not of thefavelas), leading to the dislocation of those not able to keep up withthe higher prices or willing to sell their property.22

Fourth: emerging forcefully out of Figures 5 and 6, there is a morerobust identification with the state and its militarized public securityinitiatives among inhabitants of socially privileged geographies thanamong Alemao residents. And even though the figures also suggestdivided opinions in all three social areas, it is safe to affirm thatthe overall weaker support for and knowledge of the police operationsin Alemao suggest an estranged relationship of that population withthe state and its police apparatus. Figure 4 synthesizes this estrange-ment while Figure 5, in particular, gestures toward the deputizationof the middle and upper classes who evaluate positively the policeoperations even though they have no immediate experience ofthem. These figures are excellent representations of how the currentanti-black racial hegemony in Brazil impacts public policy and theunequally located experiences and impressions of it.

The fifth provisory conclusion is that, in spite of the UPPs allegedhumanitarian and civil rights orientations, the black presence inRio—not to mention Brazil—remains embattled, uncertain, problem-atic. The state and its hegemonic constituents, including mass newsmedia, elected officials, and social actors of varied affiliations aroundclass, politics, religion, and culture, in many ways continue to norma-tize black suffering. This normatization surfaced quite compellinglyduring the police–military takeovers of black territories. As areasthat have historically served as metaphors for blackness, crime,illicit sex, drug commerce, and other non-normative practices, at timescelebrated but more often avoided, especially since the 1980s, favelas


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and their inhabitants constitute, in the dominant imaginary, theanti-state. To take back favelas is, in many ways, to domesticateand control blackness, both practically and symbolically; it is toreestablish normative morality while crushing deemed illegitimateopposition and political agency; it is to appropriate black land andhuman resources while rendering the rest of the polis safe, modern,and democratic. And because anti-black dispositions orienting policymaking as well as social management are unlikely to be acknowl-edged as such anytime soon, we can speculate that this queer mixtureof democracy and black death will continue to define the Brazilianpolis for the foreseeable future.

In a more pragmatic vein—for those to whom the Brazilian stateand society redemption is not only a necessity but a possibility—this focused conversation on black vulnerability may help identifypoints of calibration in current public policy as it may aid in themore difficult analysis of anti-black structural and long-standingpatterns defining Brazilian society dynamics. Brazilian Ministerof Racial Equality Luiza Bairros, in a recent public statement,expressed well these challenges. Responding a question about herthoughts on the ongoing campaigns against the genocide of blackyouth in Brazil and the supporting data (Waiselfisz 2012), Bairrosstated the following: ‘‘The state will never recognize and fightagainst genocide. Genocide makes sense from the perspective ofthose who experience it; it does not make sense from the perspec-tive of who perpetrates it.’’23 While UPPs are celebrated, blackgenocide goes on.

Notes

1. Anti-black, here, is not to be equated with the high number of black persons in the police’s ranks.2. For useful accounts of past and present public security approaches, see, for example, Amar (2013),

Soares (2000, 2006), and Cano (2012).3. Sylvia Leandro (2010) and Michel Misse (2011) exemplify and engage a growing body of analyses

devoted to police lethality, in particular.4. Because article 23 of the Brazilian Penal Code establishes that ‘‘there is no crime when [state]

agents act I) according to necessity; II) in self-defense; and III) in the strict fulfillment of the legal dutyor in the sanctioned exercise of the law,’’ the Public Ministry almost always archives police homicides andtherefore deems them juridically acceptable (Leandro 2010: 1325, 1328).

5. Currently, there are 41 such areas (ISP, RJ).6. Suburban municipalities include Sao Goncalo, Duque de Caxias, Nova Iguacu, and Belford

Roxo; areas in northern and western parts of Rio’s city limits include Madureira, Pavuna, Bras de Pina,Complexo do Alemao, Olaria, Penha, Jardim America, Vigario Geral, Mare, and Ramos.

7. My translation.8. Attention must be given to historical black areas located in otherwise affluent geographies

(Carril 2006), and how, in them, economic and physical vulnerability tend to follow patternsthat are much closer to that of other disproportionately black neighborhoods. The favela communitiesof the southern part of Rio are cases in point.

9. For an analysis of the religious, political, race, and class aliances that are pertinent for the currentRio political contexto, see Amar (2013), especially chapter 4.


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10. Amarildo de Souza, resident of the largest favela in Rio, Rocinha, was killed by UPP officers in theUPP post. He was last seen alive on the night of July 14, 2013. See G1 (electronic news service by Globo),October 28, 2013. http://g1.globo.com/rio-de-janeiro/noticia/2013/10/pms-dizem-que-foram-ordenadas-ocultar-provas-de-tortura-amarildo.html (accessed November 18, 2013).

11. The cross-class box office success that recent Brazilian films such as Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite)and its sequels have enjoyed can be taken as an indication of this ‘‘us against them’’ mentality—which,in the movie, in sociologically apt detail, criminalizes both favelas and corrupt police officers.

12. On news media and hegemony, see, for example, Schiller (1991), Davis (1992), Bagdikian (1987),and Hall (1980).

13. Two police officers were shot, and 14 civilians had been injured in the crossfire. A list of thematerials the police apprehended during the confrontations provides a sense of the urban battles’ natureand intensity: 29 guns and pistols; 10 rifles; two shotguns, a machine gun, five grenades, and twohome-made bombs. In possession of arrested suspects were a Molotov cocktail, two explosive artifacts,and nine liters of gasoline, among other items. Reacting against the state repression, as well as express-ing their willingness to engage the broader public attention, the alleged bandits set fire to 37 vehicles.Unlike in relatively common events of previous years, when mostly buses were set ablaze as a protestagainst police intervention in territory the drug gangs deemed their own, this time the arsons were notonly seemingly coordinated; they included passenger cars and trucks, and were widespread throughoutthe greater Rio (Soares 2010).

14. Motorcycles are the quickest means of transportation in neighborhoods such as Vila Cruzeiro,where they are often utilized as taxis, freight vehicles, as well as for everyday commute. It is commonto see 125 s and 250 s, mostly Hondas and Yamahas, circulating through Rio favelas, many of whichas the ever efficient (and often a little frightening, if you are not used to them) moto-taxis.

15. ‘‘Mesmo com todo esse aparato policial, Ana Paula, voce verifica a disposicao da resistencia . . .Elesestao ali para atirar nos policiais.’’ RJ TV news. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I29GkS0FImE(accessed February 6, 2011).

16. TV Globo Live reporting on November 25 2010. Globohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtCKaH5SpZo&feature=related (accessed February 12, 2011).

17. As described in the evening variety TV program Fantastico. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsd0TWLWzR4&feature=related (accessed May 12, 2011).

18. Even though this geographic advantage, since at least the 1980s, has been used by drug dealers asit allowed them to scrutinize and, when necessary, attack agents of the state or enemy factions, it servedsimilar functions for the clandestine and armed left during the 1960s and 1970s, and earlier, until theturn of the 20th century, for those previously enslaved, criminalized, and otherwise unable to securehabitation in less precarious land (Moreira 2006).

19. Globo news, November 28, 2010. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGQnoNinyn4&feature=fvwrel(accessed May 11, 2011). Glaucio Soares, a sociologist interviewed during the program, stated that ‘‘thepopulation, for the first time, wants to cooperate.’’ This seeming popular support, which the sociologistsurmised based on data collected on the frequency of calls to a crime hotline, was the main reason for theheightened hope that, this time, state control over such embattled areas would be forceful and permanent.

20. Zone A are neighborhoods in the northern and western part of the city, except Barra da Tijuca;Zone B are neighborhoods of the southern part of the city, including Barra da Tijuca and Santa Teresa(FGV 2011: 4).

21. As I conclude this article, independent media reported the unjustified death of a young manin Jacarezinho by UPP officers. A popular protest against the occupying police ensued. https:==www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RslNfiReGGU (accessed April 8, 2013).

22. Such was the case in Chapeu Mangueira, where persons from the adjoining Leme andCopacabana ‘‘asphalt’’ neighborhoods were buying houses and transforming them into youth hostels,whose prices were comparable to their counterparts on the seaside southern zone.

23. Talk by the author at the University of Texas at Austin on February 21, 2013.

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About theAuthor

Joao H. Costa Vargas is Associate Professor of African and AfricanDiaspora Studies at UT Austin and the author of Never Meantto Survive: Genocide and Utopias in Black Diaspora Communities(Rowman and Littlefield, 2010).


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Documents

Taking Back the Land: Police Operations and Sport Megaevents in Rio de Janeiro